Evolving Your Structure as You Grow

By pure coincidence, over the past few weeks I have been working with a number of clients to develop their structure as they continue to grow as global businesses. In doing so a few patterns emerge as to how to approach this, which I thought I would share:

1. Start with the end in mind. Predict what you might be doing in 2-3 years time and create the structure that will do that. Then work from today forward, determining which roles are next to fulfil in that future structure. Doing it this way stops you being incrementalist about solving the current/next crisis. The role you are thinking about today may not be valid in your future based structure.
2. Org models are just that - models. Understand why a business typically goes from functional, to geographical or divisional, or why a matrix, agile or helix structure might work best - and what makes them work. Then adapt those principals to your design. Your business can be your design - just understand why your are doing it that way. Be inventive and merge the bits that you think work to create a design that works in your unique environment. Perhaps think in 3D instead of a traditional 2D hierarchy. In one case, doing this enabled me to think in a 'molecular model style' and visualise the inter-related parts.
3. Structure is just one piece of the puzzle. Structure needs to be designed to enable implementation of the strategy. It needs to enable the leadership, culture, talent and innovation desires of the business. It only shows they way we organise - we need to think of the leadership, communications, development, strategic priorities, accountability and support networks.
4. No-names initially required. It is best to do strategic structure planning with no-names being put against titles as potentially, some of the great capability that got your business to this point, might not be the people to take it to the next level, but they may have different future roles where they still add value. It removes the desires for positioning and posturing in initial conversations.
5. Fitted for but not with. If you know growth is on the cards, particularly from M&A, is you future structure set up to be able to easily plug and play in some way upon M&A so you don't suddenly have to re-invent the whole set-up.
6. Review it regularly. Review your structure and capability regularly. I remember when leading a large organisation going through growth we did this every four months. Reviewing strategic priorities, then talent and structure to support growth. We are making our best guess in a dynamic environment so need to be adaptive in our approach and evolve with the changing environment.