Startup CXO

Chapter 27Organizational Design and Operating Systems

Be intentional about your organizational design from the beginning, and evaluate it periodically to ensure that your design principles still align with your company values and stage of growth. Use the data you collect from exit interviews, turnover, employee surveys, and employee conversations to determine if the design and principles are still relevant.

Your initial design work will be with the CEO, and will also engage the leadership team. Your work on organizational design is not theoretical, or something that stands alone. Just the opposite! It goes hand‐in‐hand with culture and values conversations. Your organizational design will never be perfect and will always have tradeoffs to consider. There's a saying that you should “never let perfect be the enemy of good” and that's the case with organizational design. As long as your design aligns with your culture and values, it ought to serve its purpose, which is to help people be as productive and engaged as possible and to ensure that there is the right flow of communication between people and teams.

There are a few things to build in from the beginning, including practices around manager span of control, manager role, cross‐functional teams, and how you think about hierarchy. People have preconceived notions about all aspects of organizations, and having conversations with the leadership team to help them think about the implications of organizational design principles ...