While running Rise, one of the things I found challenging and fascinating is how the company’s organization structure would morph and become more complicated as the business scaled. Our Client Service Department ended up having 4 divisions; we launched a technology team; we even had to determine which department was in charge of philanthropic initiatives.
As your business evolves, you will face the challenges of new departments that will form new ongoing tasks, as well as identifying more efficient ways to get work done based on changes to your organizational structure. For this reason, it is imperative that you constantly manage and update your org structure so that you operate as efficiently and effectively as possible through the three steps below.
New Roles within the Company:
- Increased Complexity: As mentioned above, as your business grows, it will also increase in complexity. This oftentimes means that your business now has to do new things that it never had to perform before.
- New Role in the Company Example: Once you get to a certain size, you might want to start acquiring other companies. This means that you will need a corporate development group. If this is the case, you would have to determine where in the org chart are you going to add the corporate development team. Will this be part of the finance department and report into the CFO or have a completely different reporting structure?
Additional Responsibilities for a Specific Role:
- Roles not Well Defined: As you go on the journey of creating an effective org structure, you will notice certain responsibilities that were previously not clearly defined.
- Assigning New Roles: In my last company, I noticed that as we got larger, there were a lot of requests from employees and clients to get involved in philanthropic initiatives. There was not a clear owner of this initiative, and, eventually, we assigned it to the operations team.
Assign an Owner to Managing the Organizational Structure:
- Keeping the Org Structure Maintained: Given that there is a need to constantly keep the organizational structure maintained, someone in the organization needs to be in charge of keeping the org structure updated.
In order to scale your business, it is imperative that you have a solid organizational structure at every stage of your growth. This means that you need to know what to do as you need to hire people to do things that you have never done before, as well as add additional responsibilities to existing employees. You also want to ensure that you have a centralized leader that is responsible for maintaining your company org structure. By doing this, you will have the necessary infrastructure to grow at every stage of your business.