In designing your organization, remember that the 5-Step Process is the path to success and that different people are good at different steps. Assign specific people to do each of these steps based on their natural inclinations. For example, the big-picture visionary should be responsible for goal setting, the taste tester should be assigned the job of identifying and not tolerating problems, the logical detective who doesn’t mind probing people should be the diagnoser, the imaginative designer should craft the plan to make the improvements, and the reliable taskmaster should make sure the plan gets executed. Of course, some people can do more than one of these things, generally people do two or three well. Virtually nobody can do them all well. A team should consist of people with all of these abilities and they should know who is responsible for which steps.
Don’t build the organization to fit the people. Managers will often take the people who work in their organization as a given and try to make the organization work well with them. That’s backward. Instead, they should imagine the best organization and then make sure the right people are chosen for it. Jobs should be created based on the work that needs to be done, not what people want to do or which people are available. You can always search outside to find the people who click best for a particular role. First come up with the best workflow design, then sketch it out on an organizational chart, visualize how the parts interact, and specify what qualities are required for each job. Only after all that is done should you choose the people to fill the slots.
Keep scale in mind. Your goals must be the right size to warrant the resources that you allocate to them. An organization might not be big enough to justify having both a sales and an analytics group, for example. Bridgewater successfully evolved from a one-cell organization, in which most people were involved in everything, to a multi-cellular organization because we retained our ability to focus efficiently as we grew. Temporarily sharing or rotating resources is fine and is not the same as a merging of responsibilities. On the other hand, the efficiency of an organization decreases as the number of people and/or its complexity increases, so keep things as simple as possible. And the larger the organization, the more important are information technology management and cross-departmental communication.
Organize departments and sub-departments around the most logical groupings based on “gravitational pull.” Some groups naturally gravitate toward one another. That gravitational pull might be based on common goals, shared abilities and skills, workflow, physical location, and so forth. Imposing your own structure without acknowledging these magnetic pulls will likely result in inefficiency.
Make departments as self-sufficient as possible so that they have control over the resources they need to achieve their goals. We do this because we don’t want to create a bureaucracy that forces departments to requisition resources from a pool that lacks the focus to do the job.
Ensure that the ratios of senior managers to junior managers and of junior managers to their reports are limited to preserve quality communication and mutual understanding. Generally, the ratio should not be more than 1:10, and preferably closer to 1:5. Of course, the appropriate ratio will vary depending on how many people your direct reports have reporting to them, the complexity of the jobs they’re doing, and a manager’s ability to handle several people or projects at once. The number of layers from top to bottom and the ratio of managers to their direct reports will limit the size of an effective organization.
Consider succession and training in your design. This is a subject I wish I had thought about much earlier in my career. To ensure that your organization continues to deliver results, you need to build a perpetual motion machine that can work well without you. This involves more than the mechanics of your own “stepping out,” but the selection and training and governance of the new leaders who “step up,” and most importantly, the preservation of the culture and its values. The best approach I’ve seen for doing this is what companies and organizations like GE, 3G, and the Chinese Politburo do, which is to build a pyramid-like “succession pipeline” in which the next generation of leaders is exposed to the thinking and decision-making of the current leaders so they can both learn and be tested.