Most organizations place a heavy emphasis on the corporate hierarchy, and they strive to get the "boxes" in the right place on the org chart. What they fail to realize, though, is that in the majority of organizations, work does not get done through the vertical hierarchy. Rather, it gets done through the horizontal "interarchy"-the process through which people interact, communicate, coordinate, and manage across departmental lines. Therefore, if your sole focus is on getting the org structure right, you're missing a major piece of the puzzle. True organizational effectiveness occurs when you focus on how people interact to get work done.

Unfortunately, most employees are not encouraged to work across department lines. Those who do cross over usually take the first step on their own out of necessity rather than because it's the organization's cultural norm. For example, a study from the Department of Defense Office of Personnel Management found that 54 percent of employees think it's acceptable to work across organizational lines. That means 46 percent of employees-a huge number-believe it's not acceptable. When a large segment of your employee base is working within departmental silos, solving cross organizational problems is both difficult and expensive.

Working across organizational lines does not mean that the customer service staff performs sales duties or that R&D personnel process invoices. It simply means that everyone understands how work gets done and they collaborate to answer the question: "What's the best we can possibly do?" When everyone knows the process and works together to make sure the work gets done, then the organization thrives.

Why don't more companies focus on the interarchy and encourage cross-organizational communication? Following are the three major reasons why inter-archy communication breakdowns occur and stall employee performance.

1. The work has the wrong requestor, wrong performer, or no accountability.
All work crosses organizational boundaries, yet most people are not adept at having conversations across department lines. For example, an employee may say, "It takes me six hours a week to do this report for Mary and I'm not even sure how she uses it." Then, when you talk to Mary about the report, she says, "I don't know why he does that report each week. I just delete it when I receive it." This is a classic example of the wrong person requesting the work, the wrong person performing the work, and zero accountability between parties.

Consider the holistic set of issues discovered and sort out what people issues need to be resolved first, what other organizational steps it would take to make significant improvements, and what technology will really fix. You'll find that implementing technology comes much later in the process and should not be a first step to resolving challenges. That's because any technology you implement should be shaped to support the people in the work you're asking them to do. Creating new technological solutions based on past things the company did (i.e.: "How we've always done it") is simply paving the cow path-it's paving over a meandering, ineffective, wasteful process that causes people to fight and be miserable. Additionally, you'll often find that when you clear up the people issues, the technology issues go away because people are finally able to work effectively. Ultimately, any technology you implement should not be a bandage; rather, it needs to have the processes, functionality, and systems to best support people in the work they do.

Every interaction is a promise between two people. When that promise is strong and kept, people know why they're doing something and how it fits into the big picture. As a result, employee satisfaction is higher because when you engage people, they understand their jobs more and strive to do better. Therefore, take the time to have a logical conversation about how the work is done, not who's higher on the hierarchy.

2. There's a failure to negotiate conditions of satisfaction and agree on priorities.
In order for a request to be effective, it has to be clear, complete, and sincere. In many companies, a leader makes a request and the employees say "okay" even when they don't fully understand the request. They may not know key details, such as budget or when something is due, or the request may be simply unachievable. Yet, because of the organization's culture, they're discouraged or unable to negotiate the request. This is a telltale sign that the hierarchy is working against getting work done.

For instance, a boss may say, "My team lets me down all the time." But then you learn that no one on the team ever says "no" to the boss or attempts to negotiate the request. The boss can tell the team to ship a product around the world so it's delivered in three hours-something completely impossible-and since no one can say "no" to the outlandish request, the team doesn't deliver and the leader is disappointed. Any culture that discourages questioning and promotes blind obedience is setting up the entire organization to fail because it's working against the interarchy.

3. There's a lack of cross organizational coordination and communication.
Many organizations lack standards or cultural norms for cross organizational coordination and communication. As a result, communication is either ineffective or doesn't happen at all.

For example, a leader may give a broad mandate, such as, "We need to increase profits by 20%." When people aren't communicating across organizational lines, each department may take a different approach to boosting profits that ultimately undermines the overall goal. After all, what's most important in one silo is going to be different from another silo. And what's most important for the work to get done to meet the goal is yet another scenario. In response to the leader's request, R&D's approach may be to rein in costs by not investing in technologies needed to develop new products, while the sales department's approach may be to up-sell clients by promising the new things they think R&D should be developing. All the while, the marketing department implements new fees to generate revenue yet fails to tell the customer service department about the fees. Then when phone calls come in from confused customers about the fees, no one knows how to handle it and customer service ends up refunding the fees. In the end, the company actually loses money because they failed to coordinate change across the organization to respond to the leader's mandate.

When people work in vacuums of limited information, mishaps are bound to occur. The more that people wear "blinders to the inter-archy" and are unable to see the complete picture of what's occurring organizationally, the more the company struggles to get work done. Clear and complete communication organization-wide is key.

Making Work Work
Recognizing these three breakdowns within your organization is just the first step; however, until you see why work isn't getting done, you can't make an effort to change it. With this new realization, you can now look beyond the hierarchy and see that it's the inter-archy that really drives your business. That's when you'll transform how you see the organization and how you make decisions. Ultimately, understanding your organization's inter-archy-the underlying, cross-organizational web of human interactions that represents how work really gets done-will enable you to maximize organizational performance and empower everyone to work together for a common goal.