When you grow your business, you might get to a point where your organizational structure doesn’t work anymore. The wrong people in the wrong seats. I’ve solved these situations many times as a Fractional COO and consultant. Here’s a real-life field guide on how to restructure a team.
We’ll look into the following five 4 steps to restructure your team:
- Design a target org structure on a blank canvas
- Allocate your existing team
- Fill the gaps
- Get aligned, implement, train and monitor
Design a target org structure on a blank canvas
Your business will likely get to a point of inefficient org structure as you grow. You’ll require additional roles as you grow. On the other hand, you have to work around constraints of budget and availability of talent.
You patch up gaps in responsibilities, assign the talent you have to do this “one more thing”. Before you know it, requirements of your growing business outweigh your team’s ability to deliver.
The result: A disorganized business that can’t grow further.
The solution is to stop thinking about people, and start thinking about roles instead. This will free you from constraints of the status quo and allow you to think through what your business should look like.
Use a physical or digital whiteboard, and map your target org structure. What roles would you have if you could staff them with the perfect talent? Force yourself to ignore the team you currently have.
Set up your target organizational structure this way.
Then enrich it with job descriptions. You want to be as specific as possible as to what each role needs to accomplish.
Allocate your existing team
Next, you translate your target org structure into reality.
Write a (virtual or physical) sticky note for each of your team members. Take these sticky notes and pin them to the role they should have in the future.
You’ll find three scenarios:
Good fit
You will have a (hopefully large) portion of your team that has all the skills for a role in our target structure. Allocate them to that role.
Conditional fit
You will have other team members that have clear potential for a role, but will require development and training. Allocate them to that role, and make a note that training and development is required (more on that later)
No fit
Lastly you will also have team members that don’t fit any of the roles. Maybe the profile you hired them for isn’t needed anymore, or they were a poor hire to begin with. If you can, you should part ways with these team members.
I know scenarios where founders choose to keep these people around for various reasons. If you have to, at least be aware and honest with yourself that this is a deliberate addition to the org-structure you actually need.
One-to-one or one-to-many
You will have roles that are not full-time. It is fine to allocate multiple “part-time” roles to one person (one-to-many). As your business grows and workload per role increases, you can then move to a one-to-one allocation.
Keep track of one-to-many allocations by having a role description for each role, and not merge them into one role description for the person who’s on these roles. This is what a position description is for.
Fill the gaps
In most cases, you’ll end up with some blank spots in your target structure.
- Nobody in your team is a fit for this role today
- Nobody in your team has potential for this role or
- Even if you have people that are a (potential) fit, you want to assign them to another role.
In these cases, you need to fill the role externally: Decide consciously whether this role needs an in-house employee, fractional talent or can be outsourced.
Get alignment, Implement, train and monitor
Now you need to bring your new structure to life.
Get alignment
If you haven’t done that during allocation, you need to speak to your key players now. You need to align on the following questions:
- Do they feel capable for their new role
- Are they willing to switch to the new role
- Are they aligned with you on team composition in their teams or neighboring teams
- Do they expect any compensation adjustments for taking on a new role
Have these conversations one-to-one. After the key players are on board, communicate the new structure to the whole team.
Implement
When communicating, you need to be clear about the key components of that change. What’s the timing for the transition? Will everyone move into their new role at once (risky) or will you transition them sequentially (slower)? What does training for the new roles look like?
Each team member that changes their role will need to understand fully what’s expected of them. Either you or your middle manager needs to have a 1:1 session with them to go over their job description and answer any questions.
Another important aspect of restructuring your team is that your operating model will change. If in the past, role A and B have collaborated to produce a certain outcome, it might now be role A and C. These changes need to be reflected in your operating model and SOPs.
Train
When making the switch to the new structure, your team will need two types of training:
Firstly, you need to develop your team members that just had potential fit for the new role, meaning they still lack one or more essential skills. This is a development exercise. It takes time to complete, and your transition plan should reflect that.You can transition people into a new role while still being developed, or wait until you feel they’re ready. That’s a case-by-case decision.
Secondly, anybody, even the team members with perfect fit, will require training if they switch positions. Make a plan on who trains them and how the handover is structured.
Monitor
Like all operational changes, restructuring your team is a process, not a point in time.
As you implement, monitor what’s working and what isn’t.
After three months, do a thorough review of your restructuring:
- How are people performing on their new roles
- Did the restructuring bring the expected benefits with regards to efficiency or quality of output
Make adjustments, but be mindful not to not start tailoring roles around people again.
While all of this is hard and will require work, change is necessary from time to time. With the words of Charles Darwin:
“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
