Last time we spoke about the 3 growing pains of any business: leadership, structure and culture.
Today’s focus is on structure.
I stumbled across an article on ant colonies and how they organise themselves, here is an excerpt.
“Each ant colony has very specific roles. Queens are the baby-making machines. Drones are the males. Every year, all of the drones and the newly hatched queens take off on a mating flight. Lastly, workers are non-reproducing female ants. They do almost all of the work in the colony. Generally, younger ants do work inside the nest. Older workers are the foragers. This is the most dangerous work, so it makes sense to assign those who are about to die anyway.”
I’m not sure I agree with the way the elderly are treated!! The article did however get me thinking….is there something we can learn from our ant friends? Imagine the efficiency gains from having clear and specific roles always assigned to the most appropriate resource.
A common growing pain for Business is a failure to adjust the structure and decision making as the Business gets bigger. Too often growing Businesses have their queen bees trying to both future-proof their colony as well as keeping the nest tidy. This ‘trampoline-effect’ of bouncing between strategic and operational issues will handbrake growth at some stage. The only way to scale is through a controlled spread of problem solving and decision making.
My experience is that task separation is usually very clear across functions but can get blurry between layers. For example, the separation between Sales and Operations is usually clear, but the separation between the Team Leader and the team members is not so clear. If there is a culture of upward delegation/rescuing this becomes blurry and accountability becomes difficult.
So what is the right structure for your next phase of growth and how do you stay in control whilst making less decisions?
The central design principal ought to be around protecting the balance between strategic capacity and operational control in Leadership roles. How do you do this? Start with defining how much strategic time is required in the Leadership roles right now and what functions/tasks need to move to other roles. The structure must be designed around both controlling Operations AND creating tomorrow’s vision. If the structure is designed around the former only, it will only ever be good at solving today’s problems.