Ep 19 - Three Pillars of Solid Organizational Design

Power Up Your Team Podcast

Your business has been growing steadily and your organization has evolved organically. Now you realize that too many people are waiting for your direction.

But how do you create an organizational structure that can be augmented and works well as your business is growing?

Welcome to episode 19 of Power Up Your Team podcast where I share threes pillars of a functioning organizational design. The show notes can be found at PowerUpYourTeam.com/19.

Depending on the situation, you may need to add new members to your leadership team or create additional departments with new responsibilities.

To set up your team for success, it’s not enough to just write another job description or tell the new leader what to do.

Here’s the truth: To build a successful organization you need to think about structure, process and people!

Let’s look at each pillar separately:

1. Structure:

This is the typical organizational chart where we see boxes and lines that describe who reports to whom. It also includes the job descriptions that outline scope of role, expectations, and decision authority.

Earlier in my career, I was in the quality manager role for a startup production facility that grew from inception to over 250 people in less than three years.

So, the work that was formerly done by one person – in this case the production manager – needed to be divided up as more and more different roles where created.

In the early stages, every new person meant a different department like quality management, purchasing, production planning, shipping and so forth. Each new employee had a completely different role compared to everyone else.

Soon, the production manager needed a to hire supervisors to oversee the growing amount of production associates.

Documenting each person’s responsibilities and reporting relationships on paper is the easy stuff.

What’s more important is to define how these different roles collaborate to get work done

2. Process and Collaboration

People’s roles cannot stand in isolation. People need to understand how they are expected to interact with each other. Providing documentation and training creates clarity on how the whole business system is supposed to function.

When we established the role of production supervisor (in the earlier example) we needed to decide and communicate how that role relates to the production manager and the associates on the shop floor.

For instance, when do personal or production issues need to be escalated? And to whom? Now put the quality department in the mix: Who can start up production after an issue was raised and addressed? Quality Manager or Production Supervisor?

We had quite a few - let me say - collisions and each time we learned new things that needed to be clarified. I think that’s part of growing pains of every organization. Learning by doing.

So each time you add a new role, keep a system mindset and a perspective of the organization as a whole to ensure the role fits in.

It’s very tempting to say “we have good people” and they will figure it out. But soon there are just too many issues related to work flows, processes and decision authority that boog your whole system down.

Read about the final and most important aspect of organizational design at www.powerupyourteam.com/19