Are you ready for your next sales breakthrough?
Is your team? Do you know the pressure points and gaps in skills on your team? Do you have a clear idea of the best next role to hire for?
When you are experiencing rapid growth or heck even just steady growth over time, it can be easy to lose clarity of what the real issues are with your team. It’s easy to see the stuff “you don’t want to do anymore” and to recognize “we will need a bigger team”; it’s less easy to know what to hire for first and to see the stuff that people power through or always jump in last minute to fix.
It’s harder yet to see those issues when you have a “fixer” or two on the team. These people are an amazing asset to the team but can also unknowingly cover up operational issues that only get revealed under pressure or when you are trying to change systems. You want these superstars focused on the right things. Otherwise, right when you are having one of your biggest sales wins, you end up going through some of your biggest team breakdowns.
One of the first steps I recommend to get your People Plan aligned to your Strategic Plan, is to map out your functional organization chart. Your functional org chart creates a dynamic picture of how work is getting done with your team and lays a strong foundation for leading your people – so that you can stay ahead of those growing pains.
What is a Functional Organization Chart?
A Functional Organization Chart is a picture of how work is done in your company and the people who are doing it. Your most critical resources are your people. So the role(s) people play and how they interact are crucial to the success of any strategy.
This is not your traditional hierarchical org chart, which shows who reports to who. Rather, this is a picture of how and who is doing work across functions.
Mapping your organization structure will help you move beyond a simple start up structure where the CEO is managing all the functions and everyone knows everything. This type of organization will operate effectively only up to a certain size, beyond which it becomes too cumbersome and time consuming for one person to control alone. You become the bottleneck for everything because you are the only one making decisions and you are the only “connector” who connects the dots and moves projects forward.
A telling example is illustrated below. In a hierarchical depiction of your organization, you believe functions and tasks are aligned with your team members.
Hierarchical org chart for a typical service-based company
At a more magnified view, you can see the need for deeper functional alignment to ensure all activity is thoroughly accounted for and aligned.
What’s really happening!
While this illustration is just a simple example, it shows what is really happening! It starts to reveal how different people are showing up across the organization and where the CEO and leaders are doing work. Of course having working managers is completely normal and necessary. And as you grow and take on more, the nature of your work needs to evolve and there has to be more time for leading and strategic thinking and moving projects forward.
This map not only gives you insight into who’s doing what work, it also provides you a tool to have deeper conversations with your team on direct and indirect impacts of work.
Why Do I need it?
I use this Functional Org Chart exercise as a first step to dig deeper into getting clear on roles and responsibilities; to better delegate and increase accountability; to be confident about the best next person to hire; understand the communication needs of the team, and build bench strength.
Clear Roles & Responsibilities.
Create greater clarity and get shared agreement. This clarity drives accountability for work getting done across your team. Note this will also provide ground work for stronger job descriptions. Most of the job descriptions out there are very generic. It seems like everybody needs to be detail oriented, organized, yet flexible and innovative, performing well under stress, and so forth. The problem with generic job descriptions is that they give you mixed messages.
Know Team’s Strengths.
Recognize your teams individual strengths so you can best leverage their unique skills and strengths and set them up for success. Develop a plan for creating bench strength and succession plan. This work enables you to act quickly when something does change or goes wrong (whether its’s external and out of your control or internally caused)
Right Fit Hiring
Hire with more confidence when you have a clearer picture of your teams strengths matched to expectations of the work and better understanding of the gaps and pressure points as you scale or make changes in your business.
Effective Team Communications
With shared agreement of who’s doing what you reduce miscommunication. And having a picture of all types of work and who’s doing it makes introducing and on-boarding new team members or strategic partners simpler.
Creating a functional org chart gives you a clear picture of your role, your team’s role and how work is getting done. It’s fundamental to having those next level conversations (grounded in real tangible examples) that help you elevate your team and it is directly related to your ability to build capacity in yourself and others. Empower your team to do more and build a business that is full of leaders.
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