Org Chart Almighty

Adam Garside
Aug 25, 2017 · 3 min read

When I took my business management course in college I remember the instructor telling me that you can tell a lot about an organization by looking at the organizational chart. He also spent a good deal of time explaining what a powerful management tool the org chart is. He even recommended that we request an org chart from places we would be interviewing with for a job. I think I made that request a couple of times and did not get a favorable response so I stopped asking. Many years later I now think the org chart should not be treated as a tool. It is really only one reflection of an organization and as such, should not be given so much power.

My intent is to review some of the reasons it is dangerous to put so much faith in the org chart. It is my experience that making a lot of changes to the org chart regularly or having a very complex one signifies a few things.

This usually signifies that those who push for changes in reporting lines or team organization regularly have nothing else to go on. They know something needs to change but don’t know exactly what. If you are near the top, chances are you don’t understand what is going on ‘in the trenches’ nor do you know how to help in the battle so you’re high level org chart view is all you have to go on. So why not go with what you know, right? The problem is you still know very little and shouldn’t be meddling in things you don’t understand. The result of this meddling will always be unnecessary obstacles imposed on your teams and not the results you are crossing your fingers for.

Changing the org chart makes someone feel more like they have a handle on what’s going on. They are hoping that changing the management chain will result in them being more in the loop and on top of things. Unfortunately the knowledge you need will not flow uphill. In the off chance it does, someone, somewhere along the chain will squelch it, water it down, misinterpret it, or alter it to meet their own agenda. What little information may survive the chain will be so incomplete it will not be wise to take action on it. Relying on everything swimming upstream is to hope everything in nature becomes a spawning salmon. I would also be very leery of a grizzly bear swimming upstream pretending to be a salmon.

So what do you do instead of messing with the org chart? If your organization is small enough I suggest learning more about your business and the people making it happen and enable them instead of shuffling them. If your learning results in requiring everyone to read a book you have fallen in love with or watch the Ted talk you like, you haven’t learned enough. Keep going until you know enough to be making the decisions you should or know who in your organization does know enough. These approaches work in small organizations, but in larger ones they rarely do. It is not for the lack of trying either.

What I recommend in larger organizations is the decision making be moved down to the level where the most knowledge and experience with the issues lives. This is going to vary from organization to organization. I am stunned by how many organizations have executives making products decisions when they know the least about the product or industry their business is in. For some reason the many layers beneath them who would make better decisions are not allowed to. There are a whole other set of red flags going off there. More decision making power needs to moved to levels of the organization closely tied to the issues or challenges.

Changes in the organization have impact at all levels, but because org charts are so high level, they just don’t have enough information to be helpful in making worthwhile changes. Org changes made based on the structure alone are not worth making. If that is all you have to go on, go back to the drawing board and invest in figuring out where the challenges really are and addressing them where they are at or allow the people closest to them be the ones to address them.

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Adam Garside

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Asking Why? Leaving the Industrial Age behind. Learning to do my own art.