HRO8 HRO Roles
BLUF: The complexity and risks involved in safety-critical work are managed with role systems. The work is divided among groups or separate organizations with clearly specified roles. Each is important to the mission of the organization. A role consists of defined behaviors and responsibilities required of people because of their function in the organization.
A good place to start developing a better understanding High Reliability Organizing (HRO) is seeing all organizations as collections of role systems (Katz & Kahn, 1978). Approaching organizations this way opens new insights beyond what is possible by thinking of organizations as people doing “stuff.” A role consists of defined behaviors and responsibilities required of people because of their function in the organization. Many organizations have operations manuals that explicitly define the duties of the roles of the organization. In the Navy, this is called the “SORM,” Standard Organization and Regulations Manual, and every unit has one.
* Katz, D. and Kahn, R. L. (1978). The social psychology of organizations (2nd edn). Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Groups of roles that function in an integrated way comprise a role system. Seeing organizations as clusters of roles was a powerful insight by Katz and Kahn (1978). It helps people think more carefully about the behaviors and responsibilities of the people in the organization and how they should work together to produce higher reliability. HRO depends on focusing on people and what they do to accomplish the mission of the organization.
Beyond descriptions of behaviors and responsibilities, a person’s role is also described by their authority for exercising their behaviors. Unless the people you work with accept your authority, you can’t get anything done. This is why you can’t order a fellow worker to do something if your roles are the same. As another example, one of the roles of a person chairing a meeting is to decide when to start. If you try to do this without being the meeting chairman and being recognized as having the authority to do so, people may a) look at you strangely (“who does she think she is?”) or b) ignore you. Roles and their definitions are important in organizations because they provide structure, consistency, and stability for things that are far more important than calling meetings to order. Drastic role changes due to environmental changes, such as a ship going into an extensive maintenance period or adopting a new sales management system, are a major challenge for HRO.
Roles are central to HRO. Getting consistently high performance from people requires high levels of predictability in operation and design. Clearly defined organizational roles are the basis of that predictability so people know who is charge of process A, what their responsibilities are, who to inform when a problem occurs, and who is responsible for taking action in response to problems.
Many organizational roles are necessary to support potentially hazardous and technically complex work: operations (sometimes called the “sharp end” of high reliability), support, regulation, auditing, deep maintenance, design, and training. Each organizational role is further divided into specific responsibilities for the people that do the actual work. There are other possible ways of dividing the work so this list is just an example. I explain each role in turn.
The operations group is responsible for the work and leading the people doing it that directly produce outputs valued by others. Examples are an air traffic controller giving instructions to safely land an aircraft, a pilot commanding an aircrew, or a doctor doing surgery with a team. In addition to operating equipment and communicating with others, operators can perform other roles that support what they do such as minor maintenance and cleaning.
Support roles can be performed by departments within the organization or by external organizations that share information, respond to requests for help, and provide liaison among other organizations. The role of support is common to all organizations. It might be performed by a single person in small organizations. In the U.S. Navy, support groups enforce standards and help ship crews focus on operations. In other activities like hospitals, support roles like purchasing, housekeeping, or admitting are parts of the organization that enable the “operators” delivering medical care to focus on their particular specialties related to patient care.
Regulators assess the design and performance standards of organizations doing safety critical work. Regulators may conduct audits, but organizations working toward high reliability don’t wait for the regulator to tell them what they need to fix. They do their own auditing.
Auditing, often done in groups with many experts, checks the performance of the organization against a standard. Auditing is not limited to financial transactions but includes all the work the organization’s leaders deem important. Auditing can be done internally or by people external to the organization.
My term for planning and performing complex repair or upgrades to technical systems is deep maintenance. Deep maintenance goes beyond the minor repairs and routine adjustments that the front-line operators do. Using car maintenance as an example, deep maintenance is replacing the engine or repairing the transmission. Front-line operator car maintenance is checking fluid levels and replacing windshield wipers.
Design is responsible for creating the configuration of, evaluating the performance of, writing the procedures for, and contracting for technical components and systems associated with a facility. The technical components could be hardware or policies and procedures.
Training imparts technical knowledge and skills approved by the designers to operators or maintenance personnel. The technical details of training have to be updated for new designs. The personnel in training roles modify the training depending on the results of audits or regulatory requirements.
That’s a lot of roles.
People working in the roles can have different levels of expertise and occupy different positions within the organizational hierarchy: beginner, expert, working level, middle-manager, and senior leader. The positions in the hierarchy are often based on technical competence, seniority, and experience. The span of responsibility and control people have is a function of their position in the hierarchy, their expertise, their experience (often correlated with expertise, but not always), and the subjective assessments others have for all three. Position in an organizational hierarchy is very closely connected with role authority.
In my next post, I will discuss why roles, authority, and position in the organizational hierarchy are important for High Reliability Organizing.
