How much of your organisation did you actually design?

Most leaders don't get to start with a blank sheet of paper when they are designing their team.

They're building the plane while flying it, with the hope that those decisions still make sense when you look at them at the end of the financial year.

That's when conversations get interesting for us with our clients because today's solution has a habit of becoming tomorrow's structure.

Promote your strongest specialist and you've gained a manager but potentially lost the person who was the best on the tools. Bring in a senior leader and what you need from the team beneath them may change completely.

One decision changes the conditions for the next. And our first question is, inevitably, who is looking at what they add up to?

The organisation you need keeps changing

A Transformation Director brought into a business at one stage is likely to deliver a specific programme of change. Twelve months later, that same person could be responsible for an entirely different challenge. Whether, it’s embedding change across a much larger organisation, leading teams they didn't have when they joined or making sure the business can keep transforming without everything depending on them.

The title hasn't changed. The job has. And that can creep up on a business.

We tend to notice growth in the most obvious ways - revenue, headcount, new markets, bigger teams. But it's harder to pinpoint the moment when a role has become a different job, or when the person who was exactly right a year ago is now being asked to do something fundamentally different. They may grow with it brilliantly. They may need support. The business may need experience it simply didn't need before.

The important thing is not to assume you already know which of those is true.

When one vacancy starts carrying the weight of the organisation

When someone leaves, most good businesses don't simply dust off the old job description. They look at what's changed and what else they could get from the role. That's sensible. 

The problem comes when one vacancy starts being asked to solve everything that's changed around it. The person who left was strong operationally, but the business could really use more strategic thinking. And while we're at it, could the new person bring experience of working across international markets?

Before long, you've designed a role around the gaps in the organisation rather than a job one person can realistically do.

And at that point, “searching harder” isn't going to solve the problem. 

This is one of the uncomfortable things about growth. You can make a series of good decisions about good people and still end up with an organisation that isn't quite right.

We've seen it all before. A role could shrink around a person’s strengths. That's just good strengths-based leadership. Reporting lines change to solve a particular problem. We could chalk that up to agility. Someone gets promoted and keeps responsibility for something they were never quite able to hand over and it gets re-framed as continuity.

At the time, these are often the safest decisions. But a year later, they can explain why a senior person is still far too involved in the detail, why ownership of something important sits in an odd part of the business, or why a role has become almost impossible to replace.

The questions get harder as the business grows

The people decisions a business makes early in its life are not the same ones it will face later. 

That can be a difficult conversation, particularly when it involves people who have been instrumental in getting the company where it is. This is where businesses can fall into two opposite traps.

One is assuming that loyalty and past performance automatically mean someone is ready for the next stage.

The other is assuming that growth automatically requires bringing in somebody who has done it before somewhere else.

Neither should be the default.

The more useful question is what the business needs next, and then whether that capability already exists somewhere inside it.

That changes the conversation considerably.

You start thinking about development and succession earlier. External hiring becomes a way of adding something the organisation genuinely doesn't have, rather than the automatic response whenever the next challenge appears.

And by the time you're thinking about the senior leadership team or the board, those earlier decisions have provided the pipeline you need.

So who is joining the dots?

Most businesses already understand the value of continuity in other important relationships. You want your accountant to understand the business, not just this year's numbers. Over time, that history becomes useful. They know what you've tried, why certain decisions were made and what was happening in the business at the time.

So it's interesting that companies often approach talent differently.

As businesses become more complex, the way they recruit can become more fragmented. Different partners come in for different functions or levels, and when the requirement becomes sufficiently senior, the conversation may start again with someone entirely new.

Any recruiter worth their salt, can get under the skin of a business.

What takes longer to understand is how the organisation became what it is.

From first role to board

When we talk about working with clients from first role to board, the range of roles is only part of the point. The more interesting part is what you learn along the way.

You see people who joined early in their careers become managers and leaders. You see where a business has successfully built capability itself and where bringing in outside experience has changed what's possible.

You understand the decisions that created the organisation as it exists today.

For more than two decades, Denholm has worked alongside businesses as their teams, structures and leadership needs have changed. That history gives us context when the next decision comes along, and allows us to look beyond the role to what the business actually needs.

If you're growing a team, rethinking its structure or considering what your leadership needs to look like next, talk to us before you draw the next box.

Explore our Talent Solutions, Executive Search or Contract, Interim & Fractional solutions. Or call us on 03303 359 818 or email connect@denholmassociates.com.