The lens that systems-thinking provides is invaluable, especially if you are leading a firm or a team. With this perspective’s aid, you can evolve to become the caretaker of a complex system and work on making it more resilient and creative.
Defining the right structure for your company is one of the most important areas in which you can invest your time as an entrepreneur. It is a significant undertaking, especially if the company is already operating under an existing configuration. Nevertheless, your organizational structure will determine how everyone operates within your company. How well it fits the company’s tasks and internal dynamics as well as the external context that it inhabits can make a significant difference in the company’s performance of up 24% [i].
As entrepreneurs, we usually start selling a product or a service. When we begin to have more demand for that product or service, we then decide to build a team and a company. Usually, we start with a simple configuration. Very soon, if we are lucky, we have more work than we can manage so we need to hire more people.
There are several ways to organize a company; you may choose to organize by function, by business unit, which is common in larger organizations, or by using a flatter structure. Whatever model works best for your company, it’s important that the structure be intentionally designed and not just a haphazard arrangement of functions that have been organized just to get the work distributed. Every role and function in a company should be included, and nothing should be left out.
That an organization should be meticulously crafted might seem obvious to a professional who works in a well-ordered corporate structure. However, for a growing company, the complexity is immense as workloads increase. What should go where? Who should do what? These are the types of questions that a newer company is constantly confronting to make sure all the work is done well and efficiently. Often, these questions are asked when it’s too late, and a problem has arisen, such as an activity that should have been completed and wasn’t or something that wasn’t finished on time.
Building an organizational structure is one of the hardest things I’ve worked on as an entrepreneur. It requires many hours of work and design, and the efforts must be constantly adjusted as the context and the way the company operates changes. The organizational structure is the skeleton over which all company responsibilities are built. When it is clear what team is responsible for what and how each role fits into the grand scheme of the company, work is more efficient, and the probability that an important task will get lost is greatly diminished.
How a company is organized depends on its industry, but I’ve found some overarching concepts that I’ve applied to Celaque. These ideas have held ever since I implemented them and have only become more relevant with time.