HR
Organizational Structure
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Intro to Organizational Structure
Organizational Structure is the framework that defines how tasks are divided, coordinated, and controlled within an organization. It determines the roles, responsibilities, and relationships among different levels of management and employees.
How to Organise Your Leadership TeamDave provides a description, common metrics, and common dilemma for each of the standard functional departments at a company: Exec Team, Operations, Technology, Growth, Product, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Finance, & HR.
Types of Org Structures
There are several types of organizational structures, including functional, divisional, matrix, and flat. Each type has its own advantages and disadvantages depending on the organization's size, culture, and goals.
Functional versus Unit OrganizationsSteven explains two of the most common high-level organization structures: Functional: Each functional department covers all business units (e.g. there is one marketing department for all business units). Business Unit: Each business unit has their own functional teams (e.g. their own marketing team).
Org Structure Dynamics
Organizational structure dynamics refer to the changes that occur in the structure over time. These changes can be influenced by internal factors such as growth, mergers, and acquisitions, or external factors such as economic, social, and technological changes.
Designing an Organization that Can Optimize and InnovateAndy argues that the most common drawback of functional organizations is that they start to over-index on business growth, and aren't designed to provide new and innovative value to customers (as opposed to optimizing the existing value propositions). The solutions are to design product organizations around the needs of the user and to provide explicit guidance on how to balance effort between optimization and innovation by product group.
To Grow Faster, Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COOClaire provides steps for how to be intentional about growth when your organization becomes larger: 1. Document your company's "operating principles" 2. Re-evaluate your org structure and recurring Meetings as you grow 3. Learn the qualities of your top-performing team members, and reinforce them in your hiring process 4. Provide a simple long-term vision / "5 year plan" to all team members, so they understand where you're trying to get to 5. Quantitatively measure employee experience 6. Empower decentralized decision-making via the "see one, do one, teach one" methodology
Why I Did Not Go To JailBen shares a story on how separate his CFO and GC in his company's org chart saved him from going to jail. The broader implication is to be thoughtful about the relationship between reporting structure of departments and competing metrics. When one department reports in to another, the more likely it is that the metrics of the lower department will be subservient to the metrics of the higher department.
Org Structure Case Studies
Organizational structure case studies provide real-world examples of how different organizations have implemented and adapted their structures to achieve their goals. These case studies can provide insights into best practices and lessons learned for other organizations to consider.
