Lets talk about organizational structure

When I was invited to join a department in one of our subsidiaries in the early 2000s, I did hear that I was entering a dragon’s lair. I shrugged it off and thought that I had faced tougher challenges in my life and I was not called an Iron lady for nothing! (not ironing lady,ok?)

True enough, I was delighted to find so many deficiencies in this new workplace because I prided myself to be a problem-fixer of all sorts! And the situation was like one of my case studies in college!

Let me share with you one of the scenarios in that department! It had around 16 personnel headed by a manager and assisted by two senior executives. The organization structure was as follows:



Aaahhh…seemingly so simple! But it all started to unravel when I suddenly realized that none of my subordinates were reporting to me! Sometimes some documents came my way requiring my review and most days it didn’t! Most of the times I was asked to handle some urgent requirements (there were many ) as I was known to be the ‘get things done ’ gal and since my English writing was good, I was also asked to prepare a lot of board papers and memos. There was also a lot of rush orders due to some stock-outs of critical chemicals, packaging materials and the likes that required my intervention ( we’ll talk more on how to andle such problemsin my upcoming blogs). Upon enquiry, I was told to just handle contracts as I was new to the department! Ok, so people needed help and I felt honored to be turned to in times of difficulties but hey, there was something wrong there!

I found out the bulk of my job was actually the job responsibilities of the Senior Exec Inventory. If I was doing his job, then, what was he doing?

The answer is “NOTHING!” He shuffled around not even bothering to look busy but humbly making return trips to the manager’s room for a daily verbal abuse every morning! Since he was so incompetent, the manager had to redistribute the job to almost everyone else in the department, including me!

One of the recipients of the additional workload was a purchasing senior clerk who started out as an office boy. His task was to record some daily deliveries of chemicals to the company. Never being trained in accounting, it was only expected that things began to go very wrong in this area after a few years of his doing this task. This Purchasing supervisor was also ordering and receiving the products and he reported directly to the manager, bypassing his executive and his senior executive. So basically nobody knew what or how he did his job.

When things started to go wrong, suddenly I was asked to report and explain the discrepancies in the quantity received! Whoaaa…..too much already!! I thought. How could I explain about somebody s work who did not report to me? I was indignant, after all, I had a master’s degree in accounting and the first thing was sooooo BASIC so much so I did point out that there was a grievous lack of check and balances when ordering and receiving was done by the same person!

I immediately realized that :
1. The people in the position boxes were doing things differently than what they were supposed to do.
2. Everyone reported to the manager.
3. People were doing tasks outside their training, qualification and know-how.
4. The performance rating was done on rotation basis, i.e, the manager will rotate the person who would get good rating year by year without referring to their actual performance results!

Ok got to go, will write more on the effects of the invisble org chart!