Structures suck!

"Guess our structures suck!?" Wasn't the first time an executive expressed his feelings about the organization structures ;) But why did it take him/her till the end of the year to tell me that? As this is something new?

My standard reply would be: it's your structure, deal with it! As if my babysitter would be responsible for the bad behavior of my kids?!... BTW they behave very well ;) But of course I didn't say that.

But let me be a good babysitter on your structures and tell you this: your structures suck only because you don't feel control over your operations, because you don't know who is doing what, and you started realizing you needed to micro manage your teams. But that you knew already? What is the solution Sir!?

Let your OD specialist help you. To start with: the visualization of your structures, and the analysis of span of control, layers in your organization. And than let him ask you three questions:

1. In how many steps a decision is made? Checker checks maker steps? What are the layers in your organization, how fat is the management layer and do your managers manage anything except the process? Do you have talented managers who you can trust and delegate and provide you sufficient reporting on progress and result?
2. What roles take accountability (note: hope only 1) and what roles are responsible to execute tasks? Who is doing what basically. Are we all too busy executing or are we all relaxing and observing how our monitors turn in sleeping mode? The span of control isn't the span or responsabilities.... remember that ;)

And here starts now an interesting discussion about structures that will lead us to many many more meetings and discussions about what is the role of the business, strategy and HR (or is OD not part of HR anymore?) on your structures that suck! :)