Strategy execution failure due to organizational structure

That is one of the saddest stories in the world of strategic management since higher management has good control over it but many times they don't consider it a very serious issue!

Let's speak about problematic structures that make trouble for strategy execution:

1. Flexibility

Flexible structures are less hierarchical or we can call them flat structures. Front-line employees have the power of making a decision and senior managers are there not to control but to guide and support.

Executing strategy needs fast actions and reactions. If for a single decision (which might not be important that much), we should wait for the decision of higher management for days and weeks then surely, we will lose our competition and probably our reputation.

2. Traditional design

Sometimes we get trapped in keeping old functions without thinking about needs and roles.

For example, we insist on keeping separate departments in our organizational structure while we can make the structure more agile by merging them.

Nowadays in many companies, Public relations department and Employee relations department are merged and they creatively call it Communication Department. In this example, you will need only one head for both departments and the decision-making process and implementation of projects should be much easier.

3. Overloaded roles in your structure

This is an old story. Employers would like to give employees as many roles and responsibilities as possible.

Overloaded people are disengaged or will be disengaged very soon. On the other hand, leaving people with shallow responsibility and role demotivates them. We should be very careful to keep the balance. A good load of work can indeed keep people fresh and happy! (This should be discussed later in a separate article).

4. Creating roles without considering competencies

When we are designing our structure we should not forget that people are going to take the responsibilities and not robots and obviously, people are very different in capabilities, competencies, backgrounds and, etc.

5. Creating fixed roles for implementing projects

We implement projects to improve something inside or outside our organization and when the project is delivered either we don't need all members or at least we don't need many of them.

our experience, we have seen many huge organizational structures who forget to merge teams after the project delivery. Their management assigned them to other tasks until officially they turn to a formal organization with no clear role. Eventually, they do many things but nothing! `We can always create cross-functional teams including experts in different areas to work on a specific task and after delivery of the result, we can send them back to their departments.

Organizational structure has a high level of importance in strategy execution. Without an agile and efficient structure, we can't reach our destination.