I enjoy organisational charts.
They help me understand how things are structured strategically. Who reports to who, how people are connected and who is responsible for what is fascinating to me.
Sometimes the chart is made up of job titles. Sometimes the name of the person is next to the job title. Very rarely there will be a few words included to give a brief explanation of what that person does.
What happens when we view organisations like this is that if something is happening with a member of the team, how seriously we take that depends on where they sit in the chart and how many staff they manage.
So, if one staff member is struggling with workload, lockdowns, or any number of things, if they have many people reporting to them then this is a serious issue, but if they are a job title at the bottom of the chart then it’s not as big of a deal.
Here’s the problem…
No organisation functions like this. Well, no healthy organisation.
Employees don’t live and work in a vacuum. They communicate and engage with staff from other departments to do their job well. The standard organisational chart does not help create a full picture of the people and their influence.
An organisation works more like a web. Everything and everyone is connected. If one person is struggling emotionally then it will pull and shift the entire organisation, no matter the size. The opposite is also true, if one person is killing it across all areas of their life then that will pull and shift the entire organisation. But we can’t rely on the ‘rockstars’ to make an organisation great. John Mark Comer would say that “a system is only as healthy as its least emotionally healthy person”.
How we manage and support any staff member influences the entire culture, from CEO to volunteer. Being generous in supporting emotional health and wellbeing for an individual will have a disproportionate positive impact on the whole web.
The Generosity Guy 