Russian Doll
Imagine an organisation as a Russian doll.
The outer doll is the one everyone recognises. Structures. Policies. Job descriptions. Budgets. Performance targets. Reporting lines. This is the formal organisation.
Open it and there is another organisation inside. Not a smaller version of the first, but one built from trust, hope, pride, frustration, resentment and memory.
Open that and there are more layers. Teams. Departments. Professional groups. Each with its own emotional history.
The problem is that only one of these organisations appears on the organisation chart.
The other is where people decide whether the first one succeeds.
Every organisation contains two organisations. There is the formal organisation that leaders can see and control. Then there is the organisation inside the organisation. Less obvious. Much harder to measure. But every bit as influential.
The formal organisation decides what should happen. The organisation inside the organisation decides what actually happens.
One writes the strategy. The other decides whether people believe it.
One launches change. The other decides whether people commit to it.
HR spends most of its time working with the formal organisation. Recruitment. Performance management. Job evaluation. Restructuring. Policies. Reward. These are all essential. They are the machinery of the organisation.
So when behaviour becomes a problem, the search usually begins with the individual. Did we recruit the wrong person? Is this manager not up to the job? Does someone need managing more firmly? Should we start a capability process?
The question is almost always, "Who is the problem?"
Sometimes that is exactly the right question.
Often it isn't.
Individual managers often recognise what is really going on. They know when a team has lost confidence. They can sense when another restructure has drained enthusiasm rather than created it. They hear the cynical comments after yet another announcement from senior leaders.
What they see is local.
HR has something more valuable. It has an overview. It can spot the same pattern repeating itself across departments and services. What looks like a difficult manager in one team and poor engagement in another may have the same underlying cause.
The organisation inside the organisation.
This is where accumulated disappointment lives.
Promises that were never delivered.
Consultations that changed nothing.
Leaders who arrived with great fanfare and left before the difficult decisions had taken effect.
Restructures presented as opportunities but experienced as losses.
None of this appears on the organisation chart. Yet all of it shapes how people respond to the next initiative.
Take a simple example.
Two departments merge.
The formal organisation changes overnight. New reporting lines. New job titles. New objectives.
The organisations inside those organisations do not merge so neatly.
One team feels it has been taken over. The other believes it is carrying weaker colleagues. Old rivalries survive. Trust does not automatically transfer. Neither does pride nor identity.
On paper there is one department.
In reality there are still two organisations trying to occupy the same space.
HR is then asked to deal with conflict, poor communication and resistance to change as though they are interpersonal problems. Often they are predictable organisational problems.
The same pattern appears elsewhere.
Recruitment can bring talented people into the organisation. Retention depends on whether hope survives the first year.
Performance management can identify underperformance. It cannot create trust.
An EDI strategy can improve representation. On its own it cannot create belonging.
The formal organisation introduces the initiative.
The organisation inside the organisation determines the response.
This is where HR can become even more influential. Not by abandoning the formal organisation. It will always matter. But by paying equal attention to the organisation inside the organisation.
That means asking a different question.
Not, "Who is the problem?"
But, "What emotions has this organisation created?"
Because frustration, distrust and resentment are rarely confined to one individual. They spread quietly through teams and departments until they become the organisation's normal way of working.
When organisations fail to deliver, the explanation is usually sought in individuals. Replace the manager. Tighten performance management. Recruit better people. Sometimes those actions are necessary.
But sometimes the organisation has accumulated so much disappointment and distrust that changing a handful of people changes very little.
HR cannot repair that by fixing individuals alone.
It has to help repair the organisation inside the organisation as well.
blairmcpherson.co.uk
