Designing Healthy Organizations - Justin Roff-Marsh - The Impactful Leadership Show - Episode # 046

Today’s guest has dedicated more than 27 years to developing a scientific approach to the design and management of sales processes. Justin Roff-Marsh is the Founder of Ballistix and the author of ​​The Machine. Justin details why entrepreneurs should not hire entrepreneurs, how to fix cultural issues by fixing an organization’s design, and why salespeople should not be managing accounts and other non-sales activities. 

 

Takeaways:

• When entrepreneurs hire employees that are also entrepreneurial it causes two huge problems. The first problem is the creation of an unpleasant work environment for your team. The second is this can make your company an incubator for future competitors.
• An organization’s culture is not something that can be directly managed and controlled. Culture is something that emerges from the very fabric of an organization as a consequence of the design of that organization.
• Rather than directly tampering with the culture of an organization, when a cultural problem is identified, it should be recognized as a symptom of poor organizational design. To fix these issues, focus on the organization’s design and not culture change.
• To fix its design, recognize what an organization is meant to do. Small organizations are meant to grow and larger organizations are meant to spin off free cash flow. If an organization is doing either of these, it becomes a healthy organization with a healthy culture.
• A very common mistake is the failure to recognize a requirement for line management. This stems from a failure to recognize that the role of a line manager should be to enable an individual contributor to focus on their work, undistracted by everything around them. 
• As companies scale, they need to build out their management from the bottom up, instead of from the top down. Start with hiring line managers. You need to clearly specify the roles of your managers, without this line managers become less effective.
• The goal of line managers is not to make sure everyone is busy all the time. The line manager is responsible for choking the release of work to maximize throughput, rather than efficiency. This allows individual contributors to be more responsive during sprints.

 

Quote of the Show:

• “Smart managers should be clamoring to get their organization to the size where they can add line management.” - Justin Roff-Marsh

 

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinroffmarsh/ 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinroffmarsh 
• Ballistix Website: https://ballistix.com/ 
• Sales Process Engineering Blog: https://salesprocessengineering.net/ 
• Personal Website: https://justinroffmarsh.com/ 
• The Machine: https://a.co/d/iWK3Lfl 

 

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The Impactful Leadership Show is sponsored by the DC Chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Learn more at https://www.eodcnetwork.org/home 

 

The Impactful Leadership Show is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/