TBH, they were not bad people.
An unhealthy organisation is an orchestra where the conductor conducts whatever song they felt like while the members must figure out which song the conductor is thinking of and perform with whatever score that was available to them.
Everyone executes their role diligently but the performance, as you can imagine, sounds like a beach thrown into a blender. This is what a disjointed hierarchy reflects and it significantly impacts an organisation's vitals. A structure that projects its people in every direction loses productivity, rewards classism, brews collisions, and bleeds talent.
We often hear the phrase, people do not quit their jobs, they quit their managers. And I get that. I have had my fair share of working with mid to executive level manager, who were not capable of building on the strength of their team and maintaining a professional working environment. But, I can also recognise that they were not bad people. They did not wake up everyday asking 'what can I torch down today'. If I met them outside of a direct-reporting relationship, I could have been introduced to a completely different person.
So, what is turning regular, stable adults into anxiety-driven, temperamental toddlers in the workplace? It is the structure that develops a survival equation and erodes the humans inside it. People wear necessary principles and behaviours to avoid punishments and let it become their uniform. And for those who actively questions it, verifies it, they become targets.
A newly hired team lead identified a communication gap that impacted productivity and collaboration across departments. They surveyed all the team members and shared their pain points and potential solutions with the managers. Instead of acknowledging the operational issue, the team lead "needed to be put back in place" because they were accusing management of not doing their jobs. The team lead kept to the sidelines as the department fractures and bleeds.
Organisation performance reviews and employee satisfaction surveys are routine maintenance at this point but measuring engagement scores, turnover rates, productivity metrics can only give you the frame of the photo. To reveal the photo, and what existing assessments are missing, is revealing the context from where the organisation believes it's going and whether its survival equation actually takes them there.
You can identify organisations with low directional integrity when operations do not match with the stated mission. What the organisation realistically needs to perform cannot be fulfilled because multiple realities clash within it. Leading everyone to move in a singular direction, contribute to a singular outcome, cultivates high directional integrity.
The distance between where you think you are going and where you are actually headed — that is what nobody is currently measuring.
That's what EcologyMap does.