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Coordination Isn't Heroics · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:04
  Edwin, last episode we talked about structure versus talent.
• 0:08
  Today I want to zoom in on a line from the piece that stopped me: coordination
• 0:13
  cannot rely on heroics.
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  That line should be on a poster in every ops team's office,
• 0:18
  Claire.
• 0:19
  So many companies survive on two or three people who happen to be excellent at
• 0:23
  bridging gaps the org chart never closed.
• 0:27
  It works, right up until one of them leaves or burns out, and then you find out the
• 0:31
  coordination was never real.
• 0:34
  It was just borrowed time.
• 0:35
  So what does coordination look like when it's actually built into the structure,
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  instead of running on somebody's goodwill?
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  Three mechanisms, and none of them are complicated.
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  Shared KPIs across teams that depend on each other, so nobody can hit their number
• 0:49
  while quietly breaking someone else's.
• 0:52
  Standardized handoff checklists, so "done" means the same thing on both sides of a
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  transfer.
• 0:58
  And decision forums with a named decision owner, not a meeting where everyone's
• 1:02
  invited and no one's accountable for the call.
• 1:05
  The handoff piece is so underrated.
• 1:07
  I've seen teams each individually look busy, each hit their local target,
• 1:10
  and the customer still has a terrible experience because nobody owned the seam
• 1:14
  between them.
• 1:15
  That's local optimization, and it's one of the most expensive failure patterns in
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  organizational design, because every dashboard looks green while the actual outcome
• 1:24
  is bleeding out.
• 1:25
  And this connects to something else in the piece, designing for growth,
• 1:28
  not today's firefight.
• 1:30
  Which I think a lot of leaders skip because they're too busy putting out today's
• 1:33
  fire to think about it.
• 1:34
  Understandable, but expensive.
• 1:36
  If you're not building repeatable team templates, clean role definitions,
• 1:41
  and onboarding that ramps people quickly now, every bit of growth you get later
• 1:45
  multiplies the chaos instead of the output.
• 1:48
  And there's one test I'd add.
• 1:50
  Do your decision rights bottleneck at a single leader?
• 1:54
  Because if every meaningful call still runs through one person's calendar,
• 1:58
  you haven't built a structure.
• 2:00
  You've built a queue.
• 2:01
  McKinsey's Organizational Health Index work actually frames this really well.
• 2:05
  They treat alignment, execution, and renewal as the three things that predict
• 2:10
  long-term performance, and renewal is basically this, whether the organization can
• 2:15
  keep adapting without falling apart every time it grows.
• 2:18
  Renewal is the piece people forget.
• 2:20
  They design for the company they are today, and by the time they're twice the size,
• 2:25
  the structure that used to work is the thing holding them back.
• 2:28
  Okay, so let's say a leader is listening to this and thinking,
• 2:31
  that sounds like us.
• 2:32
  How do they know for sure their current structure is actually failing,
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  versus just going through a hard quarter?
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  There are four warning signs, and they're honestly easy to spot once you know to
• 2:42
  look.
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  First, decisions take longer than the problem's half-life, meaning by the time you
• 2:47
  decide, the decision doesn't matter anymore.
• 2:50
  Second, people escalate constantly because peers can't resolve things between
• 2:55
  themselves.
• 2:56
  Third, accountability is unclear enough that performance conversations turn personal
• 3:01
  instead of structural, because there's no clean line back to who owned what.
• 3:06
  And fourth, teams are hitting their targets locally while the company misses its
• 3:10
  outcomes globally.
• 3:11
  That fourth one is the one that gets leadership teams arguing,
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  because everyone can point to their own scoreboard and say,
• 3:17
  well, I hit mine.
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  Which is exactly why you need behavioral and structural data,
• 3:22
  not just individual scoreboards, to see where the real friction is.
• 3:26
  Otherwise you're relitigating the same argument every quarter with no way to settle
• 3:30
  it.
• 3:30
  And that's exactly the kind of clarity OAD's built for.
• 3:33
  If any of those four warning signs sounded familiar, OAD has a free Top Performer
• 3:38
  Profile that shows you the actual behavioral data behind your team,
• 3:42
  not just the local scoreboards, in about seven minutes, results in twenty-four
• 3:46
  hours, no credit card.
• 3:48
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
• 3:50
  See the whole board before you move another piece on it.
• 3:53
  Perfect place to leave it.
• 3:54
  Thanks, Edwin.
• 3:55
  Always, Claire.