Organizational design is too often reduced to reshuffling boxes on charts or adjusting titles. For executives and boards navigating transformation, this mindset can lead to mistakes that impact performance, culture, and accountability. ScottMadden takes a different approach—we start with the work. Our philosophy centers on aligning structure with strategic direction, ensuring the organization is built to deliver on what matters most.
Effective organizational design must recognize the work being done today while anticipating the work required for tomorrow. Because change is constant, the structure should clearly present functional hierarchy, roles, and reporting workflows while maintaining some degree of flexibility to adapt to emerging challenges.
Why Traditional Approaches Fall Short
With more than four decades of consulting experience, we have seen a pattern of missteps when companies consider transforming their organizations. Common pitfalls include:
- Focusing on past pain points or near-term issues
- Designing around individuals rather than required capabilities
- Replicating peer organizations without considering strategic fit
- Overloading leaders with too many direct reports
- Underestimating the complexity of change management
Each of these can result in fragmentation, inefficiency, and staff burnout. Without a disciplined, future-focused approach, even well-intentioned reorganizations risk falling short or creating new challenges altogether.
Shift the Focus with Core Questions
Instead of asking “Who reports to whom?” leaders should be asking:
- What are our strategic priorities over the next 5 to 10 years?
- Which capabilities or functions must we prioritize for growth, and what structure will best support them?
- Where are we seeing friction, duplication, or underperformance today?
- What governance model will reinforce the new design, and adapt as business drivers and company strategy evolve?
- How can we enhance collaboration across departments while maintaining independence and efficiency?
By framing the challenge around strategic goals and enterprise work, leaders can make more durable, scalable design decisions.
ScottMadden’s Structured, Proven Approach
ScottMadden employs a structured methodology to avoid the pitfalls of traditional organizational design. Our approach includes:
- Assessment of Existing Work Activities: A rigorous diagnostic, often using tools like our proprietary work activity assessment survey, to understand what type of work is being done and by whom and where fragmented accountabilities and inefficient, expensive, or misplaced work exists
- Design Principles Development: Co-created with leadership to define the objectives and boundaries for future-state design
- Future State Design: Tailored structures aligned with strategy and informed by benchmarking, role clarity, and appropriate managerial layers and spans of control
- Implementation Planning: A clear, actionable roadmap with transition steps, dependency mapping, and robust change enablement
- Strategic Reassessment: Facilitated discussions that help leadership look beyond implementation, embedding continuous improvement throughout the organization, and allowing for adaptable future organizational design
Designing Around Company Strategy and Executive Teams
A recent engagement with an electric generation and transmission company in the Mid-South illustrates ScottMadden’s approach. With a newly developed 10-year strategic plan and growing reports of staff burnout, company leadership turned to ScottMadden to reassess their enterprise structure. Using a combination of benchmarking, interviews, and a work activity assessment survey across the entire organization, ScottMadden identified duplication of effort, resource gaps, and overloaded spans of control. The team evaluated three structural options:
- Organize Around Strategy: Elevate strategic priorities through dedicated functions and senior roles with direct reporting lines to CEO
- Consolidate Services: Centralize shared functions to ease executive span of control
- Integrate Peer Structures: Adapt proven models from benchmarked peers while aligning with internal goals
The result was a detailed roadmap that aligned the organization around core functions and future priorities and was supported by a governance playbook and phased implementation plan.
As discussed in a ScottMadden article, “Aligning organizational structure with strategic direction is critical to enabling successful performance.” This principle underpins every engagement we lead.
Designing the Future and Managing the Change
Organizational design is a strategic lever, not a cosmetic fix. When aligned with long-term goals and built around the work itself, it lays the foundation for sustainable success.
Any transformative initiative, particularly an enterprise-wide reorganization, takes a lot of time and effort. Successfully executing these engagements requires deliberate and thoughtful communication, as well as effective change enablement. Reorganizations often spark anxiety around job security, skill relevance, and new responsibilities. ScottMadden prioritizes effective change enablement through structured tools and outreach mechanisms to address resistance, sustain momentum, and minimize risks.
ScottMadden follows a systematic and proactive approach to change enablement focused on both the organization and employees. Our iterative, four-phase process includes:
- Defining the Change – Understanding the impacts of the change, identifying key stakeholders, and determining change readiness
- Planning for the Change – Identifying key milestones for implementing the change and creating a change enablement plan
- Executing the Change – Implementing the change enablement plan, monitoring progress, and establishing feedback loops to understand and build the commitment of impacted employees
- Evaluating the Change – Reviewing performance, identifying lessons learned, and adjusting as necessary
Let’s Build What’s Next–Together
ScottMadden helps organizations design for both today and tomorrow. Contact us to explore how our structured, insight-driven approach can support your enterprise organizational design and transformation initiatives.
Jack Zaykowski also contributed to this article.
