Part 2: Building Your 18-month Organization Chart Target
Right after you have worked on your 18-month staffing plan (See Part 1: Buying Time or Buying Skills?), your next focus is very likely to draw down your 18-month target organization chart to put your employee list into perspective.
The key benefits for you of such a work are to:
1/ Bring a “team management” perspective to your staffing plan.
Your “N-1 layer” includes the people who are probably going to lead and manage their own team in the future. Do they want to have a team management role? If so, are they experienced enough with team management? Overall, this work helps you visualize and anticipate possible trainings your staff may need to strengthen their management skills.
2/ Highlight team balancing.
While building your teams you’ll mainly work on two parameters:
- The flatness of your organization. A flat organization will ensure your top management stays close to the field enabling a good “Market Feedback Velocity”.
- The narrowness of your organization. A narrow organization will ensure none of your employees has too many direct reports. On average, managers have 7 or 8 direct reports to maximize efficiency and agility while ensuring a good work/life balance (ownership, serenity…). It surely depends on several parameters as in Sales or Operation departments, direct reports can go up to 10 or 12 if the organization is mature enough while CEOs tend not to have more than 8–9 direct reports.
3/ Communicate with employees and candidates. Employees and candidates will better visualize how the company is structured, what role they can play in it, what team they will join, who their teammates are going to be, who they are going to report to … It will also help you ensure the consistency of the job titles within the differents teams (Head of, VP, C-level …). Zooming in on this last point, job titles are not a detail and need to be thoughtfully handled as they have internal and external implications and are touchy to change in the future.
4/ Communicate with your external partners (investors, advisors …). This chart will help them visualize how the company is going to be structured 18 months from now. Thus, they will be in a position to challenge your staffing plan, bring you benchmarks from their other portfolio companies and support regarding your key hiring needs for the next 18 months.
5/ Anticipate office matters. Getting a mid-term view of where your staffing plan will land will also help you anticipate your office needs (a 30m² space for the 7-people Tech team, an 80m² for the 20-person space for Sales and Marketing teams, …)
(🎁 DOWNLOAD HERE YOUR ORGANIZATION CHART TEMPLATE 🎁).
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