People love to draw attention to their cause and I am not exempt from this.  The recent calls for new C-level positions like Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Customer Officer or even a Chief Social Media Officer are well-intended but misguided.

The calls for these positions is because the functionally dispersed organizations we have built make it virtually impossible to get anything done without its own resource-devouring department.  I understand it is hard to get attention for your cause, but let’s address the problem not build new bureaucracies between old and new functions for customers and employees to navigate.  Imminent are power struggles between departments on who should wield more control.

In the days before technology and accounting . . . operations was important, but the new-found disciplines found power in having a CFO and a CIO.  Now we have executives in these positions that don’t understand the work making decisions about the work in too many organizations. 

The functional design has long proven inefficient.  Instead of addressing the design and making the work important and designing the work from customer demand . . . we add new functions.  Every worker in these functionally-designed beasts understands only a piece of the whole system and customers get worse service as no one can put the pieces together.  The result is worse service and higher costs.

A better leadership strategy would be wise to redesign our systems to accommodate what matters to customers and not a new way to make it harder to get service.  Spare the customer the “Oh . . . quality we have a department for that” response . . . or “let’s run the idea by the innovation team.”  I find it unfathomable to figure out what might happen with a Chief Customer Officer.

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to get significant  business cost reductions.  We can start by saying no to more silly and unnecessary add-ons.  Fix the pig, not the lipstick.

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Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.