The Organizational Structure That Will Revolutionize Your Business

Have you been feeling like you're out of your zone of genius lately, running around getting shit done, but not doing what you REALLY want to be doing with your business?

Quick question for you: what does each member of your team do? Think about that. What job titles, roles, and responsibilities does each member of your team have?

If you’re like most small businesses, even some larger corporations, your staff do a little bit of everything.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Those do-it-all type people come in handy when you need something done quickly.

But here’s where this model fails: regardless of how many skills a person might have and is able to balance well, not everyone is a good fit for each ROLE in an organization.

There are four main roles in each company:

1. Visionary - this is usually the founder or director of the organization, the person from whom all ideas flow.

2. Strategist - these people take those ideas, look forward into the future to determine viability and any potential pitfalls to be prepared for, and break everything down into action plans.

3. Managers - these people have two primary responsibilities: manage the people and manage the projects. They are responsible for taking the step-by-step plan and delegating it to team members, reporting progress back up the org chart, and making sure things are done according to timeline.

4. Doers - these folks make up the majority of your workplace. They’re the boots on the ground people, building your website, administering tech support, attending to customers, selling new clients, setting up business systems, writing and creating content.

In practice, those roles are structured like this:

The visionary dreams and innovates -> the strategist devised a plan -> the manager delegates and moves things along -> and the doer executes.

Making sense?

While some people may be able to successfully straddle two of these roles simultaneously, an organization won’t function optimally if each person is functioning in more than one role.

What happens when you don’t follow these guidelines? I’m glad you asked.

Here’s what tends to happen:

• Visionaries go right to delegating, without thinking through the strategy. People are being told exactly what to do, only, when they go to do it, none of it makes sense.

• Managers gets so busy DOING that they don’t effectively manage their employees. Projects fall behind. Minor (and major) details get missed. Behavioral issues go unaddressed, because who has time for a chat when there’s a deadline to make?

• You have doers managing people. They know what to look for, but they don’t know how to manage people. So they spend their time looking at the minutia, rather than focusing on the big picture.

• Strategists get so caught up in managing or doing that they can no longer see big picture. Now you’re headed down a track, full speed ahead, and you’re not even sure this is where you’re supposed to be going.

Have you seen that happening in your own business?

It’s a clusterfuck, to say the least.

Things are happening, but the needle isn’t moving.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: how am I supposed to keep doing everything I’m doing if I stop doing what I’m doing now?

First, understand that change happens from a place where you currently are not. That’s why it’s called “change”. And in order to change the results you’re getting, something is going to have to change, and it’s probably the way you do business.

Then you’ll want to walk through the following three steps:

1. Understand how it works.

Take some time to think about what each role looks like, encompasses, and how it functions with the other roles. (Don’t take too long, though! Knowledge without implementation is useless.

2. Analyze your people.

As you may have noticed already, not everyone is good at what they say they’re good at. While your team might have some ideas about where they fit into this model, it’s your responsibility as a leader to take a hard look at your team and identify what they are genuinely gifted and skilled at.

3. Communicate and implement.

Once you have an idea of what this would look like in your business, and you are clear on who would serve each role, connect with your team to communicate the changes and help them understand how you were all work together to function more efficiently using this model. It has nothing to do with their talents and abilities, nor is it meant to make anyone further down the line feel inferior. Each role is necessary and valuable, but structuring them this way creates a more streamlined approach to get things done.

How could you apply this model to your own business? What questions do you have about how this works in practical application? Share in the comments!