The passive-aggressive organization

Based on your responses, your organization is a passive-aggressive organizational type.

Organizations with strong execution “DNA” tend to share similar characteristics. By fostering these traits, you can improve your organizational performance. Here are a few key improvement areas customized for you:

Quickly translating key strategic and operational decisions into action
Relaying competitive information quickly and effectively to headquarters
Making good on commitments to others
Maintaining disciplined efforts where you can win
Ensuring consistent messages from top leaders
Successfully adapting to market changes
Creating clarity around roles and responsibilities
Correlating career advancement and compensation with performance
Promoting a distinctive culture that creates a competitive advantage
Encouraging leaders to "walk the talk"
Sending consistent messages to the market
Giving employees metrics to evaluate business impact
Having the right number of organization layers
Giving field employees insight into the bottom-line impact of daily choices
Consistently rewarding innovation
Pursuing and rewarding collaboration across organizational lines
Prioritizing capabilities when evaluating opportunities
Maintaining good information flow across the organization
Acting decisively
Limiting overlapping roles
Establishing influence based on reputation, credibility and relationships
Motivating people with values and pride

The passive-aggressive organization: “Everyone agrees, but nothing changes”

Congenial and seemingly conflict-free, this organization builds consensus easily, but struggles to implement agreed-upon plans.

So congenial as to seem conflict-free, this is the seething, smiley-face organization. Building consensus to make major changes is not a problem; implementing these changes, however, is next to impossible. Entrenched, underground resistance from field operations routinely defeats corporate initiatives. Lacking the authority, information, and incentives needed to undertake meaningful change, line employees tend to ignore mandates from headquarters, assuming “this too shall pass.” Confronted with an apathetic organization, senior management laments the futility of “nailing jell-o to the wall.”

Participants in the passive-aggressive organization can rarely count on the commitments made by colleagues. As expected, senior leaders don’t do as they say and fail to deliver consistent messages to the organization.

Passive-Aggressive organizations tend to strive for the mean. Mediocrity is not only quietly accepted, it’s often promoted. Decision-making authority is murky at best, and, once made, decisions are often second-guessed. The herd mentality runs rampant, trampling innovation and ownership, and information is locked down, inaccessible to those who most need it. Ironically, this profile is the most common among the seven we’ve identified and fits many Fortune 500 companies. Having secured a large and defensible market position, they are now fiddling while Rome slowly burns.

The coherence index specifically measures the coherence or consistency of your organization's strategy. Most passive-aggressive organizations earn a low score in this area. Coherent companies have a clear set of capabilities that are in line with their strategy and that they use over and over again in their portfolio. Please visit the coherence profiler to learn more about the strengths of coherence.

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