For CHROs, organization design is not just a structural concern. It’s a strategic imperative — one that directly impacts a company’s ability to achieve its goals. In an era when agility and resilience are paramount, CHROs face the complex challenge of aligning organizational design with strategic priorities. This alignment not only enhances employee engagement and drives innovation but also optimizes operational efficiency. Through intentional organization design decisions, CHROs have the opportunity to transform their organizations, ensuring sustained success in a rapidly changing business landscape.
Limit disruption through strategic organization design
Over half of CHROs are concerned that they do not know the optimal future-state design for their organization. Intentional design focuses on protecting successful elements while implementing necessary changes, to ensure alignment with new goals and minimize disruption.
Foster resilient organizations that can adapt and thrive
Traditional, top-down approaches often rely on intuitive design — leader-led decisions based on gut feelings or past experiences — which can lead to misalignment with workflows and strategic goals. Intentional design focuses on how work happens or should happen in any future state. It creates well-aligned structures that support strategic objectives, enhance workflow efficiency and foster a culture of innovation and adaptability. Here’s how to approach organizational design with intention.
Understand workflows before redesigning the organization
Effective organization design requires more than just aligning with business strategy; it demands a deep understanding of how work happens within the organization. CHROs must avoid the pitfalls of intuitive design, which can overlook the complexities of workflows and team dynamics by focusing on formal structures and box-filling exercises. To achieve intentional organization design, CHROs should first set the strategy, then redesign workflows before resetting the structure. This intentional approach reduces role confusion, resistance to change and gaps between formal structures and informal networks.
Define the vision for a new organization design
Collaborate with stakeholders to define the purpose, vision and expectations of a redesign. Key questions include:
- What are the business unit’s primary sources of revenue and its major cost categories?
- What is the business unit’s competitive advantage (or disadvantage) compared with its competitors?
Prioritize and shortlist organization design goals
Once the vision and purpose are clear, assist business leaders in ranking the most significant goals of the redesign. For example, operational goals might include innovation or efficiency, while context-specific goals could focus on digital transformation and inclusion. Prioritizing these goals helps align redesign efforts and manage focus effectively, moving away from the intuitive approach of addressing too many goals at once.
Address conflicting priorities in organization design
After identifying the top goals, address potential conflicts and points of tension. One stakeholder’s priority might inadvertently undermine another’s. Intuitive design often overlooks these conflicts, leading to misaligned efforts — which often become apparent too late in the day. Mapping these priorities enables CHROs to guide leaders through navigating conflicting and compatible goals, ensuring a cohesive and intentional redesign strategy.
