An effective organization design can make or break your ability to achieve your business strategy. This is particularly true in today’s ever-changing environment. As a result, Plus Delta has seen a growing need for our clients to redesign their organizations to better align them with their marketplaces.
As we look at the landscape of our clients, we see several trends emerging. Larger organizations focused on market demand and market opportunity are designing their strategies to give them better market share and increased growth post-recession. At the same time, many mid-sized companies are trying to build new business functions that they know are now needed to respond to emerging opportunities, but they often don’t know how to implement them on their own. And smaller high-growth organizations are moving from their original founder/single-owner structure to the next level and need to instill new layers of management and infrastructure to make that next step.
No matter what their size or reason, leaders want to achieve greater success and provide enhanced value to their customers and key stakeholders. So when it comes to creating a new organization design, the development of the organization’s strategy must start with these very customers and stakeholders.
- Is your current organization structure aligned with your stated business strategy? Is it focused on meeting your customers’ current needs?
- Do you have any process steps that no longer add value to the organization given your emerging business strategy?
- Are there redundancies or gaps in your current processes and/or procedures that may provide opportunities for improvement?
- Does your organization have the ability to innovate? Can you quickly and effectively adapt to changing market conditions?
These questions are just a few of the ones you might want to ask yourself as you assess your current organization design. If you determine a gap exists between your current organization structure and stated business strategy, or perhaps you realize that your business has evolved beyond some of the early process steps that were implemented with a smaller, less complex business model, you’ll want to establish a “Design Team” to conduct a more complete assessment and develop a draft of the future-state design. Members of this Design Team likely will also be responsible for driving the implementation process, so be sure to include two or three members of the senior leadership team as well as one or two of the most important mid-level managers who are well-experienced in the business. This team also needs an Executive Champion to sponsor the effort and keep the team – and organization – on track.
During the design process, keep an open mind and encourage everyone to suggest any “out of the box” thinking that might produce better business results. Also, the focus must be on the organization of the future, rather than that of the past. Past successes – and failures for that matter – don’t necessarily predict future ones, so stay focused on any market trends you may have identified. Then you can align your work processes, business systems, and individual people and skills to where the organization is going rather than where it has already been!
Remember, no one organization design works for every organization. The goal here is simply to align the structure with the related work processes and organizational cultures such that they support each other and help the organization achieve its intended results. Organizations need to be built to change, not built to remain the same, so design an effective organization today that will enable you to meet your customers’ needs tomorrow – and beyond!
