Vulnerability moment: As a Chief of Staff, I floundered.
When I was hired by the Interim CEO, things were so unsettled that I had a hard time putting out the dumpster fires long enough to be able to pull the valuables out of the trash. When she left, the next CEO had a clear vision of what she wanted me to do, but didn’t communicate it clearly, so we spent a good deal of time unaligned. The leadership team I was working with was in near-constant transition. I knew I had the skills and competencies to do a good job with this role, but I was constantly starting with a blank slate, addressing the problem of the day, and fighting an uphill battle. It was exhausting, to say the least. I worked 16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week and felt like I was always behind.
This summer, I had the opportunity to be trained in the 6 Levers organizational operating system. 6 Levers is based on the idea that many of the challenges organizations face fall into predictable patterns, and those patterns align to 6 ideas (or levers): identity, focus, rhythm, leadership, cohesion, and momentum. As I engaged in learning about this operating system, it brought me right back to the Chief of Staff role.
Among the common strategic organizational leadership challenges that I and others in this role have faced:
- Our leadership team meetings are a waste of time. How can we make our meetings more efficient?
- We never have time for strategic topics – we always get caught up in someone’s current issue. How can we avoid going down the rabbit hole and not making it through our LT agenda?
- Our organizational goals feel so disconnected from reality. How can we align our short term goals with our long term vision?
- Everyone feels so overwhelmed – why do we try to do everything at once?
- It’s hard to know how we should approach certain problems – what do we believe at this organization, anyway?
The more I thought about it, the more I saw 6 Levers as a systemic and structural support for the Chief of Staff role. Each lever serves both as a way to assess organizational health, as well as a figurative “lever” to adjust in order to improve the functioning of the organization.
This experience has underscored a belief I have always held – that structures and systems play a critical role in supporting organizational effectiveness. This approach sometimes gets criticized – I remember trying to implement systems in different roles I held and meeting resistance because it “was a technical solution for an adaptive problem” or because the structure felt prescriptive, and the organization valued diversity of perspective. And yes, absolutely, one can err too far on the side of rigidity and structure and end up devaluing the people at the table. But ultimately, at the heart of organizations are systems AND people. And you absolutely need both to be a highly functioning organization.
An operating system is a scaffold upon which employees can build. Structures, done well, are the reason people can bring their unique perspectives to the conversation – they allow people to come together for a common purpose.
At the ❤️ of organizations are systems AND people.
In retrospect, if only I had a cohesive framework like 6 Levers upon which to anchor my efforts as Chief of Staff, I think I would have been more successful. I wouldn’t have been starting from a blank page with each and every initiative, and my work and the work of the team would have felt more systematic and coherent.
What do you think? People, systems, or people AND systems? Share your thoughts below.
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