We all like to think that our companies are functioning at a high level, but are there hidden inefficiencies lurking within your organization? There is a simple way to get an accurate response to that question.

The org chart is outdated, not because it’s old, but because it was never particularly useful to begin with. The insistence that some businesses had in relying upon it was based on an assumption of its usefulness, but it was always a flawed tool.

As an essential component of the 7 Question - 7 Promise Framework that I put together to help business owners, I advise employers to ask their employees the essential question “Do I have balance?” and I considered it essential for business owners to attain and maintain a “Yes” answer from their employees on that question. When I pose this question of balance, it is generally thought of in two ways: Balance as a way to help people negotiate the demands of work and life, and also making sure that team members have the most productive days they are capable of.

Dear Clients and Friends,

I wish I were not writing this, I am cognizant of the situations and extremes I may be writing to and I pray for the best as soon as possible. We are in this together, and I want to take some time to share some guidance I have seen work in past recessions.

In the pages of The Patient Organization, I laid out the 7 Question-7 Promise Framework, which allows everyone within your company to align themselves with your mission by deciding if they can answer “yes” to questions of belonging, belief, accountability, measurement, communication, development and balance. The ultimate benefit of this process is the creation of the type of workplace environment that can power an Organizational Operating System (OOS).

When it comes to questions about why human beings are present on Earth, a wide array of belief systems have been developed over several millennia by different individuals, groups, and cultures in an effort to produce satisfactory answers to those questions. Yet, when it comes to matters of business, arriving at an answer to the question of why your organization exists can be every bit as difficult to produce.

If you visit the website of the Executive Education department of several major universities and look at the class listings, there is a very good chance you’ll find an offering for courses promising to educate you in perfecting your “Executive Presence.” As I write, there is an Executive Presence course offered by the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, and it promises to educate “...business leaders at all levels who want to become more self-aware, improve their ability to establish genuine connections, and deepen their ability to communicate, influence and lead positive change.”

When you get right down to it, your company’s organizational chart is probably useless. Before you get defensive about it, you should know that it probably isn’t your fault, and that org charts are a fundamentally flawed device. Ideally, org charts are constructed to show the relationships between the roles within an organization, and therein lies their fatal flaw. Rather than showing the relationships between roles, org charts are truly only designed to show the preferred relationships between titles within an organization’s hierarchy.

Walt Brown is introduced by host Darrell James for Episode 23 of The Influential Recruiter.

The idea of developing your employees can lead you into tricky territory if you’re a business owner. On the one hand, there are reasons to not take formal steps to develop your employees that might make logical sense on a very superficial level. After all, you probably have employees on your staff that entered your workspace solely because you advertised very specific employment opportunities that they responded to.