January 2026:

The great resignation, quiet quitting, stress, burnout, turnover, and many other issues resulting from poor employee experiences are all very real, especially at lower levels, and are negatively affecting organizational performance. To resolve these self-inflicted wounds, we must first understand and then correct for the many hidden root cause problems leading to these visible symptoms. This will require seismic shifts in how we think about the organizational system if we want employees to thrive and our organizations to survive.

Understanding the People Problem: “System influences may well be the strongest influence on human behavior” (Kokkelenberg and Miller 2022).

The single most destructive mistake most organizations are currently making regarding their people is how they structure them. The ubiquitous org chart visually represents two critical dynamics that negatively influence employee experience: specialization (i.e., functions or departments) and hierarchy (i.e., multileveled command and control). Research by Argyris (1980), Obolensky (2014), Pregmark and Beer (2025), and Town et al. (2024) show that this centuries-old approach to structuring people leads to several debilitating outcomes, including:

• Siloed thinking and action. Each departmental manager advocates for their own interests, processes, technologies, and unique ways of managing, leading to organizational islands with defensive borders.

• Process complacency. Siloed managers and employees focus only on their tasks and are ignorant of, and apathetic to, overall value-creating processes, resulting in inadequate process execution and outcomes.

• Process ownership. Siloed organizations rely on cross-functional processes that require multiple groups to work collaboratively, making ownership and responsibility of those processes difficult to determine.

• Decision-making. Hierarchical, top-down decisions occur slowly and are frequently uninformed by frontline context, which demotivates all levels below, destroys trust and engagement, and paralyzes action.

• Miscommunication. Islands and hierarchical levels can motivate both manipulation and distortion of important and urgent information, tainting the resulting understandings, decisions, and outcomes.

• Organizational silence: To maintain control, save face, or ensure a win, leaders can dismiss or cover up information if they deem it threatening, which deafens organizational learning and corrective actions.

• Suboptimization. Siloed managers pursue optimization strategies that make logical sense locally but are myopic regarding overall value creation, thus suboptimizing overall organizational operations.

• Value creation. Hierarchy attracts employee attention and loyalty away from value creation, requiring additional time, effort, and cost to reintegrate and coordinate the efforts of siloed teams.

What does all this really mean?  It means that the structure of most organizations is a significant, and currently hidden, root cause problem. Although most are not consciously aware of this problem, many have attempted to mitigate its effects. Cross-functional teams, matrix structures, servant leadership, team building, efficiency studies, quality circles, continuous process improvement, and many other efforts are all, in fact, attempts to overcome the misalignment of people and process (Kokkelenberg and Miller 2022). The only effective way to address the real root cause people problem is to simplify the structure and create closer and stronger process relationships.                                    

Recommendations: Anyone can advocate for addressing the people problem, regardless of their area of responsibility or organizational level. Recall that structures based on specialization and hierarchy actually detract from value creation, so the ideal objective is a unified environment based primarily on processes.

• Process orientation. Process orientation offers a much more simplified, employee-centric structure that aligns with process execution, creates closer and stronger process relationships, and attracts employee attention back to value creation and customers. Done well, process orientation will unify structure and process into a holistic, systems-based model; greatly reduce or eliminate the negative effects of specialization and hierarchy; and drive improved operational and customer-facing outcomes. This involves major change and requires executive management support to complete. This is an advanced topic and will be explained further in future writings.

Alternatives to Process Orientation: If process orientation is not an option, consider the following:

• Understand why the organization exists, what its ultimate purpose is, and how its customers define  value in terms of the desired products, services, and most important, experiences and outcomes.

• Identify the overall end-to-end process flow to achieve these outputs and outcomes. See the whole organization and the relationships across all teams. A physical product example would flow from raw materials, through the production process, to finished goods, and finally happy customers.

• Define an operational vision of each team’s role in terms of how they will productively contribute, directly or indirectly, to the end-to-end value creation flow to drive customer outputs and outcomes.

• Share this vision with all teams and ask them to enhance and improve it. Work with them until they see themselves as part of the larger objectives so they can commit to being a part of it. Have each team use the vision to define their own performance measures.

• With each team on board, share this vision with executive leadership for implementation. Advocating for a strong focus on value creation and customer outcomes should logically resonate with owners, CEOs, and boards.

• To build momentum, constantly look and advocate for opportunities to improve the overall system of value creation and customer outcomes, not just a specific team. See beyond local borders when problem-solving and solutioning.

It is only by moving forward together (the whole) that organizations will thrive and survive in our complex world.

Stay tuned for MORe insights and recommendations.