The overmanaged organization

Based on your responses, your organization is an overmanaged organizational type.

Organizations with strong execution “DNA” tend to share similar characteristics. By fostering these traits, you can improve your organizational performance. Here are a few key improvement areas customized for you:

Quickly translating key strategic and operational decisions into action
Relaying competitive information quickly and effectively to headquarters
Making good on commitments to others
Maintaining disciplined efforts where you can win
Ensuring consistent messages from top leaders
Successfully adapting to market changes
Creating clarity around roles and responsibilities
Correlating career advancement and compensation with performance
Promoting a distinctive culture that creates a competitive advantage
Encouraging leaders to "walk the talk"
Sending consistent messages to the market
Giving employees metrics to evaluate business impact
Having the right number of organization layers
Giving field employees insight into the bottom-line impact of daily choices
Consistently rewarding innovation
Pursuing and rewarding collaboration across organizational lines
Prioritizing capabilities when evaluating opportunities
Maintaining good information flow across the organization
Acting decisively
Limiting overlapping roles
Establishing influence based on reputation, credibility and relationships
Motivating people with values and pride

The overmanaged organization: “We’re from corporate, and we’re here to help”

Multiple layers of management create "analysis paralysis" in a frequently bureaucratic and highly political environment.

Burdened with multiple layers of management, the overmanaged organization is a case study in “analysis paralysis.” When it does move, it moves slowly and reactively, often pursuing opportunities later or less vigorously than its competitors. More consumed with the trees than the forest, managers spend their time checking subordinates’ work rather than scanning the horizon for new opportunities or threats. Frequently bureaucratic and highly political, this organization frustrates self-starters and results-oriented individuals.

Influence in an overmanaged organization is mostly dependent on title and role and collaboration across organizational lines is not a common occurrence. Senior people don’t “walk the talk” and rarely deliver consistent messages. People in the overmanaged organization are motivated more by incentives and rewards versus value and pride in their company.

If you work outside of headquarters in an Overmanaged organization, you’ve almost certainly had your decisions reversed by someone in Corporate who knows less about customer needs than you do. Perhaps customers approached you about a new program they saw advertised, and that was the first you’d heard of it. If you’re staff, you spend an inordinate amount of time anticipating questions that never come up and running analyses that go straight to the shredder. There’s a lot of wasted effort and stagnant information in the Overmanaged organization. Ritual promotions up the extended corporate ladder ensure that mediocrity prevails over merit.

The coherence index specifically measures the coherence or consistency of your organization's strategy. Most overmanaged organizations score lower in this area. Coherent companies have a clear set of capabilities that are in line with their strategy and that they use over and over again in their portfolio. Please visit the coherence profiler to learn more about the strengths of coherence.

Related tools

Organization effectiveness simulator

Have you ever wondered how your organization rates in terms of getting things done? Test drive your theories real-time by using our Organization Effectiveness Simulator.

find out more >