Organizational and Operating Model Design

How we partner with you

Organizational design can quickly become an exercise in boxes and lines. We start by listening. Inclusive input from the leadership team builds buy-in and surfaces what is really driving the problem. From there we develop the structure and the talent in parallel, iterating between the two until the design is both the right answer strategically and workable with the leaders available.

Our approach moves through five phases:

1. Organizational diagnostic. We run a PWR diagnostic across Priorities, Who and Relationships, including a 360 assessment of capabilities and change readiness. We identify organizational strengths and pain points, and map each challenge area to the right solution lever, whether that is structure, talent, decision rights or ways of working.
2. Strategic priorities and design principles. We build an organizational scorecard with the top five to seven outcomes the company needs to achieve over the next three to five years. That scorecard becomes the foundation for what the structure and the people must deliver, and it drives the three to five design principles every structure option is evaluated against. A complicated set of priorities usually ends in heartbreak, so we keep the list short.
3. Structure, decision rights and roles. Most structure decisions fall along a short list of simplifying axes, such as level of centralization, operating model, and go-to-market focus. We move quickly to two or three viable leadership structure options, define decision rights for the roughly ten decisions that genuinely drive the business, outline the leadership roles in each option, and pressure-test them by running water through the pipes.
4. Talent. We cascade the organizational scorecard into forward-looking role scorecards for priority leadership roles, then assess each leader’s ability to deliver against them. We put names in boxes, build a talent roadmap for the positions where the capability is not available today, and feed what we learn back into the structure so the design plays to the strengths of your best leaders.
5. Phased implementation. We roll out the changes with structured communication and change management, beginning with the phases your current talent can carry. Robust development and ongoing performance management follow, so later phases of the design can be executed once the organization and the leaders are ready.

What you can expect

We keep the model simple at the top so leaders can understand it, explain it and cascade it through the organization. And we spend more time making the model work through clear decision rights, ways of working and change adoption than drawing the structure itself.

Partnering with ghSMART, you can expect:

• A structure anchored in your strategy. Options are evaluated against your organizational scorecard and design principles, informed by our pattern recognition from hundreds of organizations — not someone else’s org chart.
• Decision rights that match accountability. The handful of decisions that drive the business are made by the right people, with clear ownership and accountability.
• The right leaders in the highest-value seats. Role scorecards make the standard explicit, assessment makes the gaps visible, and a talent roadmap defines how to address them.
• A leadership team that works as a system. We assess complementarity and gaps across the team, and develop the team so that the operating model works in practice.