Affiliation.
March 8th, 2010
Here is a great question to use in understanding an organizational role. It is a illuminating for market pricing a job; for OD diagnosis; or for talent management questions.
Who does the person in this role affiliate with within the organization?
Let’s take for example you are focused on the “Chief Engineer” of a technology company. When you ask where the Chief affiliates you are asking, is this person the member of the top executive group who has responsibility for engineering (top down management – flowing management into Engineering); or is the Chief the senior most engineer who then liaisons with the executive function (leads the group from within; an “engineer’s engineer”, a technical leader).
Affiliation tells you a lot about the person in the role; how to pay them’ what support that team may need to balance the affilitation choice; and how others at the level of the Chief may percieve them and their department.
Market Pricing: Assume from above that the person affiliates with the Engineering group. Market pricing might then be best seen as classic “Chief Engineer” with an internal reference to a gap between the person and the tier below. However, if the affiliation is as an executive, the balance of market pricing might be on what executives as a whole are being paid.
Organizational Effectiveness: Is the engineering group linked directly to competitive customer activity, or is the group more of an infrastructure support. I don’t know that the answer does or does not make one or the other affiliation ideal. However, it does seem to me that affiliation with the engineering group would be more typical in an infrastructure group. In the even that engineering is directly creating customer value, there would need to be another strong executive outside of engineering able to play the watershed role to pull together all of the customers’ interests.
Recruiting: When thinking about making a placement on a team, exploring the history of affiliation for the person, and thinking about what affiliation the current situation calls for, can make for the difference between a good and a great selection. A candidate whose passionate affiliation runs downstream is less likely to want to be promoted out of the group. Is that what you need in your internal labor market?
Executive Direction: Executives love to use the “my team” phrase. What is the difference in focus for managers below an executive if she explicitly tells them that they should be affiliating with the group they manage, as oppose to the affiliation being “I am on Sally Smith’s team.” I think that it comes down to the “who says I’m sorry.”
Every team has bad days and makes mistakes. Because we live in an imperfect world, “bad things happen to good departments”. We all have to say “sorry, we did not get that done”, from time to time. When an executive allows a subordinate manager to primarily affiliate with being on that executive team, I think it makes it easier for the subordinate manager to “take the I’m sorry” from the folks doing the work below. When the subordinate manager affiliates with the team, it is the subordinate givingthe I’m sorry to the manager. This is important not because it is about accountability. That can be pressed in either scenario. It is important because it sets the subordinate manager, and the executive up for a different view of risk. When I think that I an accountable for all risk – planned and unplanned; reasonable and unreasonable – I act differently than if I think that I have pushed that done a level and I am only accountable for risk that is reasonably known.
So, this is not a silver bullet question – it does not answer all of a companies questions or instantly make you the smartest HR wonk in the room. However, I think that it is a useful lens to look through to understand roles a bit better. Understanding how the risk is being allocated in your organization, on a de facto real life basis, makes you a better market player.
Make sense or is this a bad case of too much time on my hands?




