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Explain how your organizational design and culture could be implemented at your workplace or organization.
Explain how your design will improve the culture for women in leadership, break down barriers, and address challenges.
Identify potential benefits to the company, staff, and leadership.
The proposed design is a Hybrid-Matrix Structure supported by a Culture of Psychological Safety and Transparent Meritocracy.
This design balances the flexibility of a matrix structure (where employees report to both a functional manager and a project manager) with the clarity of a traditional hierarchy for career progression.
Structure:
Functional (Vertical) Reporting: Departments (e.g., Marketing, Engineering, HR) maintain a clear vertical structure for skill development, training, and equitable pay band management.
Project (Horizontal) Reporting: Employees are assigned to diverse, cross-functional project teams.
Key Design Features for Women in Leadership:
Reduces "Glass Ceiling" Bias: The matrix allows women to gain high-visibility P&L (profit and loss) experience as project leads early in their careers, which is a common prerequisite for C-suite roles often missing from women's career paths (who are disproportionately placed in support roles).
Diverse Sponsorship: Reporting to multiple managers (functional and project) inherently creates multiple sponsors, mitigating the reliance on a single, potentially biased, promotion decision.
The culture focuses on transparency in processes and objective merit in rewards to dismantle systemic bias.
Transparency & Equity: Salaries and pay bands are made fully transparent to all employees. Promotion criteria are explicitly documented and tied directly to project/P&L success metrics (from the matrix structure) rather than subjective "potential."
Psychological Safety: Leaders are trained to promote an environment where mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities, and employees feel safe to voice concerns, challenge norms, and negotiate aggressively for their own value without fear of social backlash.
| Phase | Action Step | Cultural/Design Goal Addressed |
| I. Foundation | Conduct a Pay Equity Audit and Publish Pay Bands. | Establishes a transparent baseline and immediately addresses the gender wage gap. |
| II. Re-Structuring | Pilot the Hybrid-Matrix on a few Key Projects. | Shifts the focus from functional support to high-visibility, cross-functional leadership experience. |
| III. Training | Implement Anti-Bias Training for All Leaders, focusing on Evaluation. | Ensures promotion decisions and project assignments are tied to the objective metrics defined by the new design. |
| IV. Culture Change | Establish a "No Backlash" Policy for Negotiation. | Leaders must publicly praise employees who successfully negotiate, signaling that self-advocacy is a valued behavior. |
The proposed design and culture directly target key challenges women face:
Challenge: "Second Generation" Bias and Backlash in Negotiation
Barrier Broken: Fear of negative social consequences for self-advocacy.
Design Solution: The Culture of Psychological Safety and explicit "No Backlash" Policy validates assertive negotiation. The public display of Transparent Pay Bands removes the ambiguity that often causes women to hesitate in initiating a negotiation.
Challenge: Lack of Access to High-Visibility, Strategic Roles
Barrier Broken: The tendency to assign women to "non-promotable tasks" (NPTs) or non-P&L support roles.
Design Solution: The Hybrid-Matrix Structure institutionalizes cross-functional assignments, making it difficult to exclude women from strategic projects. Project lead roles become the primary vehicle for promotion, forcing the leadership pipeline to become more diverse.
Challenge: Subjectivity and Bias in Performance Reviews
Barrier Broken: Promotion and evaluation based on subjective criteria (e.g., "cultural fit," "executive presence") that favor traditional male attributes.
Design Solution: Transparent Meritocracy ensures that performance is measured by concrete, measurable project outcomes (e.g., project completion on time/budget, P&L results), which are less susceptible to gender bias than subjective assessments.