The Importance of Evolving our Organizational Structure
At Cotalent we are passionate about enabling organizational structure and working with organizations to grow and evolve their “architecture” and roles. During a period like we are facing now, it’s common for organizations review their structure in functional silos or based on immediate need. We believe it’s critical to take a step back during this time of important transformation and have a review of a company’s structure in an integrated way and with a forward-looking mindset. Here are few examples of steps in order to ensure that your organization has the right level of structure, scale, and agility:
- Obtain perspective: about how work is evolving in other organizations to provide stimulus on how your organization could evolve. Identifying new roles that have been created, skills identified, and experiences they are seeking. Identify carefully if you are missing some important roles or expertise, especially if you grew quickly. For example, a smaller company might not need a treasurer type of role, but if the company reaches a certain threshold, then this type of role can become interesting.
- Adopt a forward-looking approach: Ensure that you are looking to the future needs of your business by meeting current and potential customers to assess their needs and ensure you have the right competencies or skills internally to meet them. If you don’t, then ensure you either have a recruitment plan ready and a plan to develop key internal resources to meet future needs (1 or 2 years down the road).
- Take a hard look at the “weight” of each function. Ensure that the number of resources and salaries of each function is consistent with your current and future needs. It’s fascinating how some functions grow based on the influence of some leaders or because of rapid growth and lack of time to assess the long-term impact of some new resources.
- Add flexibility: Our new context and the fact that things are unstable call for a new approach like a hive. Rely on key people and talent, but build some flexibility by also hiring some part-time, freelancers with unique skills or that can easily absorb excess work.
- Monitor your span of control (ratio of employees/ managers): Organizations are too complex and uncertain to apply some industry ratio. It’s best to compare yourself with what type of ratio worked well for you in the past, given your evolving size. Having too senior executives for small or mid-size type of organizations can sometimes burden a company and remove the focus on execution. Having an organization light in leadership roles can sometimes jeopardize the longer-term success has not enough focus is being put on longer-term strategy.
o Attention: Do not look at # of employees managed to integrate some leaders in your committees. Some roles are now so specific (i.e., data scientist, IT security….), that you shouldn’t use only resources managed or oversee to decide the level of strategic in a role.
- Identify duplication of roles and expertise and avoid too narrow roles: When culture and values like collaboration is not optimal, many healthy financially organizations have the tendency to let functions duplicate expertise like strategy, communication, marketing, IT support, Change Management, Project Management,…. Although it could be interesting to give functions / or regions some level of autonomy, if you are in a situation where you need to be efficient, the best might be to centralize expertise and gain some synergy (not necessarily by reducing the number of people, but more by increasing execution and reducing the need to continue to add new resources to meet the demand).
o We found that a good sign that you have too narrow roles or duplication is if 1) You cannot organize a meeting without involving a large number of people since all functions believe they have a role to play 2) A lot of organizational time is spent explaining what each team/ roles are doing and where each role starts and finishes and trying to understand “grey zone”.
- Retain the key talent needed for your future: When some quick changes in an industry are happening, it’s critical to quickly have the right talent stepping up and leading the changes. It’s likely that the talent needed to lead the way forward is not necessarily the same talent as before the changes. Making sure you have some flexibility in your budget and coaching time to support key talent adequately and encourage them is critical, as top performers are sometimes the ones that can be the more insecure during times of change.
During uncertain time, there’s a huge role for HR team to play what Ulrich was calling: Architect strategist. HR should always understand the strategy and long-term vision and associate the right talent to prepare the organization for the future…. If you are still in a growing company and don’t have an HR team, then it critical to identify who in the organization can play the role looking objectively across the business.
Bree and Justine
Co-founders and Associates