Every department in most organizations has at least a revolving door position. Those are the position that already filled by several people in a relatively short time and for some reason, the hiring manager is still looking for the right person to fill the position. In some weird and magical way most of the people that filled this position were hired because they were good in the previous work, and to make this phenomenon more strange, they all find a new company where they are doing great. Yet, the hiring manager still strongly believes that they weren’t a fit.
There are many specific explanations for the revolving door positions, but there is one cause – It’s a defect in the system of people interlinks, policies and other management tools that department or company are running on. Every people and a group of people is interlinked by lines of interactions, impacts, and flows of data and materials to other people and groups. Interlinks are influenced by several managerial tools such as policies and organizational structure. These elements create the system I mentioned earlier.
The system in defining expectations for individuals filling roles, but on the other hand, it also creates limitations for people that filling roles. One of the main characteristics of the interlinks system is that it is an open system and a highly dynamic system. An open system is a system subject to changes in the external environment. The same as boiling water in an open pot. Dynamic systems are systems that change frequently for many reasons. Dynamic systems created in an organization, mainly because of the level of autonomy that each person in an organization has.
Open and dynamic systems change all the time and as a result, the connections, expectations, and limitations on any role in organization change all the time. At some point in time, the conditions created for a certain role become unproductive to the role ability to be successful. When such a change happened, it doesn’t really matter who is filling the position, he will fail until someone will adjust the system that we discussed earlier to enable the role success.
Regretfully, most of the people operate under a mental model that to fix a problem one needs to break it into pieces and try to fix piece by piece. Therefore, the focus is on people, and the common fix is replacing a person with someone that is a better fit. While this solution might apply if the problem is simple and fixed after one intervention, it is definitely not the case if it’s a complex problem and there were already several unsuccessful attempts to fix the problem.
Some problems require different problem-solving approaches, and this is one of them. To resolve the revolving door position, one needs to understand the network of interactions and impacts, the flow of information, and the managerial tools. Focusing on this system shows how the entire network that influences a role is working. The depiction of this network will reveal what holds positions from being successful and what adjustments we can implement to change the current situation.
Galaxies spend time and effort to develop a framework that enables anyone in organizations to get the picture of interactions, impacts, flows and managerial tools. You can learn our framework and resolve problems in your organization that required a holistic view, or you can ask us to do the work for you.