The 3 Organisational Dysfunctions Holding Your Team Back

When more leadership training is not the answer 

Leaders make easy targets when things go wrong. And yes, weak leadership can be a genuine root cause of organisational problems. But in my experience, most organisations suffer from system problems first, and leadership problems second. 

In many cases, it is not a lack of capability that is slowing people down. It is the structure they are working within. 

Imagine a top-flight tennis player gliding across the court: returning shot after shot, clean, powerful and composed. Now tie their feet together. Not so smooth. 

The capability is still there. The potential is unchanged. But it is massively inhibited by the constraints the player now finds themselves in. 

Attempting to fix slow decision making, poor culture or weak productivity through training alone, without addressing the structural environment, will rarely make a meaningful dent. There is little point practising your backhand if your feet are still tied together. 

The Three Dysfunctions That Slow the Work Down

There are three kinds of organisational dysfunction that I see businesses wrestling with regularly. They block collaboration, hinder communication, make it nearly impossible to respond to customer needs at pace, and have a significant impact on profitability. The aim here is not just to help you recognise them, but to begin solving them. 

Dysfunction 1: Hierarchy 

Once labelled as outdated and destined to disappear, hierarchical structures are still very much with us. The more layers of leadership an organisation has, the harder it becomes to communicate with clarity across them. But even organisations that appear flat on an org chart can still function like hierarchies if decision-making authority is not genuinely delegated and distributed. 

The principle worth holding onto is this: good ideas can come from anywhere. But if the leaders at the top are too far removed to hear them, agile and creative responses to threats and opportunities are effectively off the table. 

I worked with one organisation where the seasons changed faster outside than decisions moved through the building. Business improvement plans waited weeks for a slot on the Executive Committee’s agenda. When approved, it was rarely for action, more often for further planning. Feedback trickled down. Suggestions came back. Every management layer had an opinion. 

What started as a sharp initiative became weighed down by committee thinking. The creative insight was diluted to blandness, and the moment for action had passed. When the initiative finally launched and failed, nobody seemed surprised. “Oh, this is just the way things are done here.” 

As the saying goes, a horse designed by committee is a camel. A horse designed through unnecessary hierarchy is the slowest, strangest-looking camel of all. 

How to break down hierarchy 

Start with a question worth asking: who is responsible for organisational design and effectiveness in your business? And perhaps more usefully, who is responsible for the fact that it has not been prioritised? 

A common fear is that flattening structure means losing leadership. But leadership and management are not the same thing. Management layers will be reduced, but if the process is handled well, individual leadership should increase substantially, as trust, accountability and empowerment are distributed more widely. 

This may be a contrarian view, but the quickest way to limit the downsides of hierarchy is not to start with a full organisational redesign. Within a pre-existing structure, that timeline can stretch into the far distance. Instead, begin in two places: 

1. Increasingly democratise decision making. People who have relied on permission from above for a long time may find this shift uncomfortable at first. Set clear expectations, and build parameters around which decisions can be made, by whom, and how. 

2. Publicly recognise and reward personal ownership and accountability. This builds informal leadership, lightens the load of management, and begins to remove you and your senior team as the bottleneck. 
   

Structured experiments in these two areas will quickly show you where your natural leaders already exist, and where your culture is most ready to shift. That is valuable data to inform any wider organisational design work later on. 

Dysfunction 2: Silos 

I have not taken a design brief for a leadership program in the past decade that did not include an urgent request to “break down silos”. I understand why. Silos are insidious, and at their worst they do not just slow the work down, they make it close to meaningless. 

Isolated divisions work in parallel, striving to achieve their own objectives, which sometimes compete directly with each other. They do their own work without looking up to communicate with adjacent teams – all of them disconnected from strategy, and none of them close enough to the customer. It is a reliable recipe for poor outcomes. 

Perverse targets and incentives often make the internal competition worse. A manager once told me, matter-of-factly, “We literally cannot hit our budget unless that division misses theirs. One of us has to lose for the other to win.” I asked her to repeat it. It was extraordinary. 

It reminded me of a story my father told after visiting a car engine production line, years before automation. He watched the first worker fit his part to the engine block. The next worker fitted his part, slightly out of alignment. The third pressed his component on by force. By the end of the line, the final worker was hammering in bolts with a mallet. The engine was only good for scrap. 

It would have been comical, if it were not so costly. The results in modern organisations may be less visible, but the impacts can be just as real. 

How to break down silos 

Silos can become deeply entrenched over time, and some teams will even defend them. Before looking at structural solutions, start with behaviour. Look closely at your division leaders: 

• Are they talking and collaborating with each other regularly? 

• Do they understand each other’s pressures, priorities and objectives? 

• Are they working together to achieve the organisation’s shared goals? 
  

If the answer to any of these is no, that is your starting point. When it comes to silos, it is often a case of monkey see, monkey do. The behaviour of divisional leaders sets the tone for everyone below them. Address the top, and you create the conditions for the rest to follow. 

Dysfunction 3: Hi-Los 

If hierarchies make you uneasy and silos make you weary, spare a thought for the people living inside both at once. Hi-Los are organisations that combine hierarchical structures with siloed teams, and they are more common than most leaders would like to admit. 

It is difficult enough when the left hand does not talk to the right. When the head is not communicating with the feet either, meaningful progress becomes genuinely hard to sustain. These organisations can feel, from the inside, as though they are too far gone to change. 

That is not always true, but it does require a more deliberate approach. A case could be made for addressing either the hierarchy or the silos first, and the right answer will depend on the specific organisation. In most cases, more listening and structured diagnostics are required before priorities can be set clearly. When that process is done well, the highest-leverage opportunities tend to surface quickly. 

The challenge is that leaders inside these organisations are often too close to the people and the issues to undertake this process objectively. An external perspective, brought in with care and skill, can make a significant difference to the speed and quality of what follows. 

When Leadership Development Delivers Outsized Returns 

This article began with the argument that leadership and teams cannot reach their potential when they are trapped inside dysfunctional structures. Before investing in development, it is worth understanding which situation your leaders are currently in. 

There are broadly four possibilities: 

1. Leaders can see the challenges and are working proactively to dismantle them, not work around them, which is a different thing entirely. 

2. Leaders can see the issues but do not know how to fix them. 

3. Leaders cannot see the issues, but would be capable of addressing them if they could. (This is rarer than it sounds. Most people who know what good looks like can also diagnose what is missing.) 

4. Leaders cannot see the issues and do not know how to fix them. 
   

If you are in category one, carry on. You are already doing the work. 

If you are in categories two or three, targeted advisory support and development would be a sound investment. The cost of remaining in the status quo, in time, energy and performance, almost always outweighs the cost of addressing it. 

If you are in category four, you are not alone. It takes honest leadership to acknowledge that gap, and sometimes it takes someone from outside the system to hold up the mirror clearly enough for it to be seen. 

Remember the tennis player? Having your feet tied by a pre-existing structure is not the leadership failure. The failure is walking back out onto the court, noticing the constraint, and choosing to do nothing about it. 

A healthy system is what allows leaders and teams to do their best work. And it takes genuine leadership to begin the process of building one.