5 Signs of a Dysfunctional Attitude in Your Organization

The Baldrige National Quality Program covers all functional components of a business. An effective organization will exhibit strong interacting processes across the various functional units. Many organization however lack such strong interactions among its functional groups. How to know if yours is one of them? Five common symptoms are:

1. Hiding mistakes and keeping them internal to the functional unit.
2. Selfishness and attempting to get all the resources we need for our unit, regardless of the needs of other units.
3. Making sure we spend all the budget before the fiscal year is over, to avoid reduction in next year's allotment.
4. Focusing on own unit's work and not supportive of initiatives outside the unit.
5. Ignoring the external customer unless we are in a sales or marketing role.

Organizations which structure internal operations based on end-to-end processes have been able to offer their customers a more comprehensive and integrated value proposition. Moreover the organizations are more streamlined and efficient. A leading example is IBM's Enterprise Process Framework (EPF) 1, 2. IBM transformed its operations across multiple end-to-end levels, each level represents one enterprise process area, for example product ordering, IT services or HR services.

A process optimized organization is a mid-stage organization in between a business unit optimized organization and an enterprise optimized organization. Optimized business units are silos of work centers and processing units, process optimized are definitely a step above where waste is reduced, processing is automated end-to-end and economies of scale can be achieved. If your organization is exhibiting any of the five signs above, then know that you are still way far from a process optimized organization.

Read more here:
- Streamlining Business Processes, IBM
- The Business Shrink The Dysfunctional Workplace
- Top Ten Reasons Teams Become Dysfunctional