There’s a lot that goes into deciding how to structure a leadership team.

Do we need a COO? Should Sales and Marketing sit under one leader or two? Is this executive still the right person for what the business needs next? Who should report directly to the CEO?

And then there are the situations that add another layer of complexity. A hands-on board. Private equity ownership. A founder who is still involved in the business.

These aren’t small decisions. And most leadership teams I’ve worked with put a lot of thought into them.

But I’ve come to realize there’s a point where the thinking often stops too soon.

We decide who sits where. We define what each leader is accountable for. We update the org chart.

And then we hand it over to a group of smart, experienced executives and expect them to figure out how it all works in practice.

Which, on the surface, seems pretty reasonable.

They’re executives. They should be able to work together. You don’t want to prescribe every decision or create so much structure that no one can move without checking a matrix.

But there’s a lot hiding inside “they’ll figure it out.”

Take something as common as adding a COO to a business where the CEO has historically been very involved in operations. The new org chart might be perfectly clear: the COO owns operations.

But what does that actually mean in practice?

Which decisions now belong to the COO? Where does the CEO still weigh in? What happens when they see something differently? What should other leaders take to the COO now that they used to take to the CEO?

And when someone goes to the CEO anyway, because that’s who they’ve always gone to, what happens then?

That’s the part I think we underestimate.

Changing who reports to whom is one decision. Changing how a group of leaders actually operates together is another.

And when you get that second part right, the difference shows up in how those leaders work together.

They aren't constantly running into each other or leaving conversations frustrated because someone stepped into a decision they thought was theirs. The COO doesn't have to hesitate on a significant call, second-guessing whether it was really theirs to make. The CEO doesn't have to choose between staying out of the way and jumping back in when something isn't going the way they would have handled it. 

They know where they have room to lead. And they know where they need each other.

The rest of the leadership team feels it too. They know where to go. Decisions don’t keep making their way up the organization simply because no one is quite sure who has the authority to make them. Leaders can spend more of their time moving the business forward and less of it navigating around each other.

And that clarity can keep moving down.

It’s hard for an executive to push authority down when they aren’t entirely sure where their own begins and ends. When leaders understand what they truly own, they’re in a much better position to decide what they need to hold, what they can delegate, and where the next level of leadership needs more room to step up.

The goal isn’t really to get the boxes right. It’s to create the conditions for a group of capable people to lead well together.

That’s what I think we miss when we reduce organizational design to an org chart.

And that takes a little more work.

Sometimes it means getting much clearer about decision authority. Sometimes it’s talking through where two roles intersect before those intersections become a source of friction. Sometimes it’s being explicit about what the CEO is actually letting go of, not just what the new executive is taking on.

And sometimes the harder part isn’t changing the formal structure at all.

It’s changing the behavior around it.

If you’ve been the person everyone comes to for ten years, people are probably going to keep coming to you. If you’re used to weighing in on a certain decision, you’re probably still going to have an opinion about it.

None of that shows up as anyone refusing to get on board. It shows up as old habits quietly reasserting themselves, and it's easy to read that as people being difficult.

But it doesn’t make anyone difficult.

It makes them human.

It does mean, though, that a new structure needs more than an announcement if you want people to actually operate differently inside it.

This is where some of the most important organizational design work happens.

Not in drawing more boxes.

In thinking ahead about what those boxes are going to ask of the people sitting in and around them.

What needs to be clearer? What behavior needs to change? Where is someone going to have to let go? Where does someone else need real room to step in?

Because when those things are worked through intentionally, you don’t need to manage your executives more closely.

You actually make it easier to trust them with more.

And for most CEOs I know, that’s the whole point of building a strong leadership team in the first place.

So maybe the question isn’t just, Do we have the right people in the right seats?

It’s:

Have we designed those seats so the people in them can actually lead?

Until next time,

Kayla

P.S. If you've recently changed your leadership structure, or you're about to, the org chart is usually the part that gets the attention. The harder, more valuable work is designing how those leaders actually operate together. That's work I do with CEOs at exactly this point. Reach out and we'll talk about what it looks like for you.