Although it is physically possible for an orchestra to play without a director, each musician is uniquely qualified and an expert on their instrument. However, without the director, there is a greater risk that different musicians or sections could fall out of tempo. The director helps keep the individual parts synchronized so they come together as a whole.

Like the musical director, organizational leadership helps keep the various sections within an organization, such as human resources, finance, operations, information technology, and others, working in tempo with each other toward a common goal.

The Importance of Organizational Awareness

For leaders at every level, the importance of organizational awareness and understanding cannot be overstated for two primary reasons. First, understanding how your organization runs is a little like learning the rules of a game. Anyone can play a game, but it’s not until you learn the rules that you can begin to master the game. Second, and equally important, when you understand how efficient and effective organizational systems work, you’re in a better position to make the systems better: more efficient and more effective.

Every Organization is Unique

We’ve all heard the expression, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” In this case, “What comes first, the structure, roles and responsibilities, or systems and processes?” This is an important idea because typically a requirement drives a resource. For example, an organization needs people; people need support, so most organizations have a Human Resources Department. However, because every organization is as different as are the people that work there, every human resources department will be resourced and function differently. Take this idea one step further: as the years go by, organizations will change, as will their people, systems, and processes. That slow but never-ending change can, in most cases, create friction in an organization. Things won’t run as efficiently or as effectively as they should.

It’s also important to appreciate the interconnected nature of an organization. Similar to the orchestra metaphor, it’s impossible to change one department, system, process, role, or responsibility without having an effect on another department, system, process, role, or responsibility.

Power, influence, and decision-making.

A wise man once told me, “Eric, I know I’m not a smart man, so I surround myself with smart people and listen to their advice.” I think most of us can relate to this idea. There are some things we are comfortable doing or deciding on our own, and there are other things where we rely on people to help us. The “smart people” are the people the decision-maker trusts for their expertise, judgment, and perspective.

There are two sides to this idea. The first is the leader or decision-making side. This is critical for any leader to get right. It’s not only part of being a good leader, but also part of being a good decision-maker. The person with the authority to make a decision isn’t necessarily the only person influencing that decision.

The second is the influence side. If you ever find yourself in a situation where influencing the outcome of a decision is important, you need to understand who the decision-maker’s “smart people” are—the people they trust and rely on to make an informed decision. There is an art and science to this leadership element, and getting it right takes practice. But you can’t get better without practice.

The Organization on Paper Is Only the Beginning

Anyone who has worked in a large organization knows that every organization has a formal structure. It includes leaders, departments, teams, positions, reporting relationships, roles, responsibilities, policies, systems, and processes. In larger organizations, much of this appears in organizational charts, job descriptions, policies, standard operating procedures, and other formal documents. These matter, but they tell only part of the story; there is also the informal side of the organization.

The organizational chart can tell you where information is supposed to flow. The people inside the organization can tell you where it actually flows. The formal organization establishes structure and authority. The informal organization develops through relationships, experience, expertise, trust, reputation, culture, and necessity. Leaders who understand only the formal organization may know who is supposed to make something happen but not who can. That distinction becomes increasingly important as organizations grow larger and more complex.

Experience helps people know which problems require formal escalation and which can be solved with a five-minute conversation. The risk or challenges arise when leaders either don’t know that they exist or don’t know how to access them. In either case, a leader’s influence is limited when they aren’t able to utilize these two dimensions of an organization.

Organizational awareness therefore means not only noticing what gets done, but equally important, how it gets done. A workaround can be evidence of ingenuity. Repeated workarounds can be evidence that something underneath them deserves attention.

Learn to See the Whole Organization

A useful tool for understanding an organization is the acronym DOTMLPF-P (pronounced “Dot-MiL-P-F-P”), which stands for doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, education, personnel, facilities, and policy. Admittedly, this acronym doesn’t cover every element of an organization, but it does provide a solid starting point for a thoughtful review of an organization and its components.

The word Doctrine, in the context of this application, refers to an organization’s collective documents that steer and shape its culture and performance; think employee handbook. Organization, is the holistic organization and its subordinate elements, with a focus on the structure itself; the organizational chart, for example. Training has two aspects: individual and organizational. Individual training focuses on each person and whether they are trained to perform the tasks they have been assigned. Organizational training refers to the ability of the entire organization to work together. Materiel (a word unique to the U.S. Military) is everything in the organization except personnel and real estate. A materiel assessment focuses on whether the organization is appropriately equipped; does every employee have the tools they need to do their job? Leadership is an assessment of each leader’s training and education, and how well they are prepared to lead. Personnel is an assessment of the people’s availability, training, and education. Too often, requirements change without an assessment of whether the organization has the correct number of people in the proper positions to handle the shift in requirements. Facilities are an assessment of the real estate requirements. Like personnel, requirements often change without a formal assessment of the real estate requirements. Policy is an assessment of the documentation used within an organization to guide systems and processes. This is just one way to think about an organization holistically; DOTMLPF-P isn’t the point. Thinking systematically is.

If an organization is struggling, the easiest explanation is often the most visible one: We need more people. We need better technology. We need to reorganize. We need a new policy. Sometimes that’s correct. But organizations are interconnected systems. A staffing problem can actually be a process problem. A technology problem can create a training problem. A structural change can create new information and decision-making problems. A responsibility problem can produce what looks like a performance problem.

Another acronym worth keeping in your kit bag is B2C2WG, which stands for Boards, Bureaus, Centers, Cells, and Working Groups. This acronym can be used to think about information flow within an organization. Frequently, B2C2WGs comprise a cross-section of an entire organization or its external partners. A War Room is a relatively well-known term for an operations cell. Every use of a war room is different, but in simple terms, a war room is a select group of people who take in and process information to make a quick, well-informed decision.

The more senior the leader becomes, the more dangerous it becomes to diagnose one piece without looking at the others.

Organizational Awareness Comes Before Organizational Improvement

There is a reason Organizational Awareness sits at the beginning of the RuReady mastery-level leadership elements. Before improving an organization, you have to understand the organization you’re actually trying to improve, not simply the organization described by its documents.

That means understanding its formal structure and its informal networks. It means knowing how information moves, how decisions get made, where authority resides, where influence resides, what people are actually doing, and where work has drifted away from the original design.

It also means being willing to discover that the organization may not work the way you thought it did.

An organizational chart can tell you how an organization was designed. Organizational awareness helps you understand how the organization actually works. And the distance between those two may be one of the most useful things a leader can learn.

RuReady Framework Connection

This article supports LK08 Organizational Awareness, a Mastery-level Knowledge element within the Leadership Domain of the RuReady Adult Readiness Framework. Organizational Awareness means understanding both the formal structure of an organization and the informal networks, culture, unwritten rules, relationships, and power dynamics that influence how work actually gets done.

This is the first article in the Organizational Awareness series. The next articles explore Organizational Structure and Organizational Roles and Responsibilities in greater detail.

Organizational Awareness connects closely with LS10 Systems Thinking, because organizational elements interact rather than operate independently, and LK09 Performance, Accountability and Resource Systems, where the focus shifts toward resources, performance, measurement, and accountability.

Explore the complete series:
Skill (US03.01): Time and Task Management Workflow
Skill (US03.02): Time and Task Management Workflow: The What
Skill (US03.03): Time and Task Management Workflow: The Self
Skill (US03.04): Time and Task Management Workflow: The When
Skill (US03.05): Time and Task Management Workflow: Only Do What Only You Can Do

If you enjoyed this article, explore the broader RuReady Adult Readiness Framework:

Preface: A Field Manual for Adult Life
Chapter 1: Why Do We Do What We Do?
Chapter 2: An Exploration of the RuReady Framework
Chapter 3: Life Skills for the Personal Domain
Chapter 4: Career Skills for the Professional Domain
Chapter 5: Leadership Skills for Every Level

Before moving on, feel free to use the checklist below to assess your readiness level.