Functions and Peripherals
In an organization, there are business functions and there are peripherals. While both are established based primarily on expertise, only the former is considered legitimate in the sense that they carry real political power in the organization.
Functions are must-haves, while peripherals are often nice-to-haves. In other words, functions are the organizational building blocks that the organization can’t operate without.
If a function is something an organization can’t operate without, then the people in charge of it carry organizational power – in a stereotypical organization, that’s means political power.
The marketing chief in a consumer product company carries a lot of power and can influence or even dictate how their products are marketed. The head of HR in a large, staffing-intense organization has huge influence on its operational wellbeing. In both examples, the organization wouldn’t be able to operate properly if they fired those heads and their teams and would never hire again to fill up the gap.
With great power also comes great responsibility. When you know exactly what you’re responsible for, it’s a lot easier to do what you’re hired to do. Compare that to the alternative case where you are hired but are not sure what your responsibility is. Your responsibility provides a lot of cues about where you are and what you have in the organizational power structure.
Four Statuses of Expertise-Based Hiring
Organizational power and responsibility are the two defining characteristics of a legitimate function.
Accordingly, when you (or with a team of people led by you) are hired into an organization based on the expertise you have, there are four statuses you can be in:
- Decoration: You have no power and you are give poorly defined responsibility or even no responsibility. Chances are, you’re hired just so that the executive can pay a lip service by saying they have the capability your expertise is meant for.
- Scapegoat: You have no power and yet you are given well-defined responsibility. Chances are, you’re hired just so that others can blame you when anything goes wrong. You’re especially useful when the executives or middle management already see bad things coming.
- Illegitimate function: You have power but your responsibility is not well-defined. Chances are, you’re hired to do things that the organization’s leadership haven’t understood or figured out themselves – maybe they don’t even know why they hired you.
- Legitimate function: You have power and your responsibility is well-defined. Chances are, leadership know exactly why they hired you and what you’re hired to do. All you need to do is to do what you do best.
| You Have No Power | You Have Power | |
|---|---|---|
| You Are Given Poorly Defined Responsibility | Decoration | Illegitimate Function |
| You Are Given Well Defined Responsibility | Scapegoat | Legitimate Function |
The Functional Legitimacy Test
There’s a simple question you can ask to test if you and/or your team – hired as a function providing expertise – is legitimate, as well as if it’s even a proper organizational function:
Could the organization still operate if all people hired specifically for the expertise were fired?
The Functional Legitimacy Test
The answer is almost always no for marketing to a consumer product company and almost always yes for HR to a large organization.
That test extends to all types of expertise organizations hire for, regardless of their sizes.
The answer is probably yes for HR to a 10-employee startup. In fact, HR might not be a legitimate function even for a mid-size organization, because sometimes relatively smaller organizations actually can get by even without a properly established HR function – they’d still be able to operate properly even if they get rid of it. For those organizations, they sure as hell still do HR, just not as a separate, clearly bounded organizational function. The same can be said for marketing.
To put it another way, the Functional Legitimacy Test asks: can an organization operate without separating your expertise out as a standalone unit? If the answer is yes, then you and your team is unlikely to be a legitimate function to the organization; if no, then you likely are.
Design Leadership and Legitimacy
Let’s apply the test to design teams and design leadership:
Could the organization still operate if all designers and design leadership were fired?
The Functional Legitimacy Test For the Design Expertise
To a lot of organizations, the answer is yes.
And that’s probably why design and/or design leadership is often not a legitimate function that carries real political power in organizations.
More often than not, design teams and design leadership are illegitimate function at best and scapegoat or even decoration at worst.
Expertise and Power
An organization having an illegitimate function, scapegoat or even decoration for your expertise doesn’t mean the organization doesn’t make use of the expertise. It simply means they do it without establishing a legitimate function with its clear boundaries and power structure.
More often than not, organizations want the expertise but don’t want the power structure that comes with it.
For a reason.
Organizational power and responsibility are coupled.
Expertise is a form of power only to the extent it’s given legitimacy.
Bureaucracy is a form of power only to the extent it’s given authority.
An organization operates under a governance structure.
An expertise-based governance is fundamentally incompatible with a bureaucracy-based one. That incompatibility lies not in the conflict of interest, but in that of power.
An organization almost always starts with an expertise-based governance structure. As an organization grows in size, it gradually shifts towards a bureaucracy-based one. The clash of power is almost inevitable, as many reports of startup stories attest.
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NOTE: This post is partly inspired by Peter Merholz’s LinkedIn post.
Noah Fang 