By Kayla Monroe

Picture a capable contractor building a house one room at a time, without any architectural drawings to work from. He has a clear sense of what each room needs to be and the skill to build it well, but there is no plan for how the rooms are supposed to connect to each other.

The kitchen gets built first, and it is a good kitchen. Then a living room off the back of it, and then a primary suite that the homeowners decide they want bigger than originally discussed. The contractor adjusts, builds another wall, opens up a doorway, and keeps moving.

Every room is well built. The crew is working hard, the materials are good, and the contractor is not the problem.

Somewhere around the fourth or fifth room, things start getting harder. A doorway ends up landing in the wrong place because nobody planned for what would be on the other side of it. The plumbing in the new bathroom does not line up with what is already in the wall. There is a load-bearing wall sitting exactly where the next addition needs to open up.

Everything in the house is functional. The work is just harder than it should be, and every new room creates more to work around.

Of course, this is not how houses actually get built. Everyone knows you do not build a house without an architectural design. Anyone walking into a project like that would stop the contractor before the second room and ask where the plans were.

Organizations rarely get that treatment. They get built room by room all the time.

Most growing organizations have been built this way.

Capable leaders responding to what is in front of them, adding what the business seems to need, and ending up with something that works but is harder to operate than it should be.

The layer underneath all of that is what nobody is looking at:

► How decisions actually get made in this organization.

► Where authority actually lives, as opposed to where the org chart says it lives.

► How work is supposed to move across functions.

► What the leadership team owns together, versus what each leader owns on their own.

That layer was set when the business was a different size, with different leaders, doing different work. It was not deliberately designed back then either, and everything that has been added since has been sitting on top of it.

The instinct when the friction starts showing up is to add more.

More process to tighten the handoffs. More meetings to keep everyone coordinated. Another senior leader to take some of the weight off the CEO. Better dashboards so leadership can actually see what is happening across the business.

Each of those additions feels like progress, and in isolation each one is reasonable. 

What they are actually doing is making the underlying design problem more expensive, because the friction does not go away when you add more on top of it. It moves into more meetings, more reinforcement, more places where the CEO has to step in to keep things moving.

The decisions still take longer than they used to. The leadership team is still re-litigating the same conversations they had a quarter ago.

You cannot infrastructure your way out of a design problem.

The work that changes this is not the kind of work that feels glamorous or that shows up easily on a slide.

It looks like sitting with the leadership team and getting honest about what the business actually requires now, where authority needs to live for decisions to move at the pace the business is asking for, and what the team is responsible for collectively versus where each leader is operating on their own.

When that work is done, the business operates without the CEO at the center of every move. The leadership team makes the calls it should be making, and the leader is finally able to lead from where they should have been leading all along.

This is the work the strongest leaders are doing in this stage of their business. Not adding more energy, not standing up another senior hire, not running another offsite. Looking at the layer underneath everything and designing it deliberately for the business as it is now, not the one it used to be.

The leaders who do this work are running organizations the rest of the market is still trying to figure out how to build.

Until next time,

Kayla

P.S. If you are noticing this in your own organization, the work of redesigning the architecture underneath is what a focused engagement on organizational structure and operating model is built to do. Contact Us if you want to talk through whether it fits what you are navigating.