Caitlin Pontrella wrote an article about the ways in which non-profit org charts are hampering success.
One of the first topics she addresses is mismatch between job duties and titles. This can manifest in a multitude of ways from people having duties outside their title, people getting title promotions that don’t match duties, people having similar titles but vastly different work loads, and people having legacy titles that don’t match the current operating environment.
She had a number of suggestions such as separating reward from title if the person was deserving but there wasn’t a case to create a new position. She also advised being honest about career ceilings that exist within the organization and provide support for seeking paths elsewhere.
Among the other suggestions she made that I appreciated were:
Annually audit roles against strategy. If this role didnt exist today, would you create it? If the answer is no, or maybe, then it might be time to transition the position into something the business needs now.
Design growth paths that build depth, not breadth. When someone asks for growth, promote them into bigger responsibility within their domain, move them to a new function with clear boundaries, or invest in their development, … but only if the business needs it.
Another issue she addresses is hiring decisions in terms of who is being hired and why they are being hired, including counter offers. She offers some good tips for analyzing need and making some data informed decisions in that direction.
The third big topic she addresses is organization charts and decisions about who is reporting to whom. She covers employees answering to too many masters as well as too many employees reporting to too few managers who are unable to support them. She includes related issues with staff taking a lot of initiative to pursue new directions, but with the result that supervisory lines are blurred.
Two of the six suggestions she made in this area that caught my eye:
Map the critical path first. Before you design structure, understand the processes that create value and revenue, and design around those workflows.
[…]
Fix the real problem before the org chart. Before you reorganize, ask whether you have a structure problem or an execution problem. If teams aren’t communicating, build better systems. If there’s no trust, address it directly. If accountability is unclear, clarify it through goals and decision rights. Save reorgs for when the work itself has changed.
In some respects, I think she saved the best for last because a reorganization isn’t going to help much if the underlying issues aren’t addressed first.
Some of the biggest non-profits (universities) spend an inordinate amount of time playing with their org charts. They reorganize the executive suite every 2–5 years, and every time they do it they end up with more highly paid executives and fewer front-line staff to actually do the work. Consultants know that when they get hired, their job is to find a way to bloat executive compensation further, cutting everything else in the budget.