Patrick Mosher embedded a shaman role into a Fortune 500 support organization by disguising it as a process specialist. The role receives impossible problems, diagnoses them through ritual-like investigation, and prescribes high-impact fixes. The first person in it, Steve, became so trusted he spawned a medicine society of three other specialists who meet monthly to solve the hardest cases.
Chapters
I love to help executives launch new organizations. New organizations represent bold moves by their executives. They change the way people work and live, and best of all, they create new job opportunities. I've been a student of structuring organizations since my PhD program in organization behavior 35 years ago. And then up until that point, I never gave it a second thought that organization structures were proactively designed. While being a student of this concept over decades, I'm constantly in observation mode. I'm a geek when it comes to watching how organizations generate value. I go to restaurants and note who takes my order, who cooks the meal, who brings out my food, who do I pay, how seamless are the handoffs. The geekdom of how work is organized extended to my to my time participating in Native American ceremonies in South Dakota on the reservation. 23 years, every summer for 3 weeks. It didn't take long before I started noticing key roles in how decisions were made. Aboriginal ways provide tremendous insight about how our decision-making processes work. One particular role is prominent in the Native American culture and is quite absent in our Western-designed organizations. You see, scouts were like marketing, finding the best hunting grounds. Hunters were like sales, bringing in sustenance. Bowmakers were like IT departments, making essential tools. Cooks were like operations, converting raw goods into finished consumable products. And chiefs were like, well, the C-suite, providing guidance to the people. But where was the medicine man, the shaman? Once I noticed the absence of the shaman in organizations, I was eager to see how to implement that role in the corporate world. And the opportunity strikes. A client asked for help designing their new 500-person customer support organization. Design, hire, onboard, and fully operational in 7 months. Yikes. I worked directly with the newly appointed VP of customer support, and I drafted about 40 one-page job descriptions to cover all the core jobs in the organization. And that was it. My chance. One job left. How do I incorporate an organization medicine man? Well, First, I have to expertly disguise that job title. I came up with process specialist. Now, I'm not qualified to talk about what a medicine person does. I'll leave that to those who claim that role. My observation, though, is that you go to a medicine man or a woman with the most gnarly problems to solve. You've tried everything and nothing has worked. And by the time you approach the medicine person, they kind of already know your problem. There's a ritual or ceremony to come up with a solution just to solve your specific problem, and then you must execute the prescriptive tasks provided. These tasks usually are incredibly difficult to complete. In fact, I'll call it a quest. Well, I gave the stack of 40 job descriptions to the VP of Customer Support on Friday night for light reading over the weekend. And on Monday, he called me into his office. "This is great. Thank you. I have a question, though, about one job. What is this process specialist?" Well, I described that job in more detail and sold the idea. "Hmm, I've got just the guy for this job, Steve." While we launched that summer, I met Steve briefly in our leadership launch sessions, but that was it. A year later, the VP of customer support asked me to do a one-year checkup on the organization to make sure everything was running as designed. And during my two-day review, Steve was eager to catch up and got a slot on my agenda. Thank you so much for designing my job. I was an assistant operations manager for years and knew I would never get promoted to run a facility. My people skills aren't very good. The process specialist job is perfect. I get to sit in my office, pore over data, identify problems, and solve them. And people get a little nervous when I approach because Well, they know I know the operations, and I scare them a little bit. And you know what? I love the role so much, I shared it with other operations facilities in the company, and we have 3 more process specialists. We get together once a month and talk about the problems we face and how to do our jobs more effectively. And I love trading stories and tips with them. "Thank you for giving me a job of a lifetime." Even now, it brings tears to my eyes to remember that conversation with Steve. This is exactly why I loved my consulting job—days like that. And in giving Steve a job of a lifetime, I also met a personal goal. I successfully created the role of the medicine person in corporate America. And as a, and as a huge bonus, they created a medicine society sharing stories and tips. So who is the medicine person for you, your project, your team, your organization? Who's the one you go to with any problem? Who sends you on a quest to resolve the stickiest of problems? Who generates the most innovative and bold solutions? Who keeps you aligned with your vision? Who is the keeper of your organization wisdom? Yes, there is great value in learning from our Aboriginal ancestors.
