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By Jeanne Bell, Co-Founder, JustOrg Design
Image: personal photo of public mural, San Miguel de Allende, MX
Blog No. 1 - March 2023
The work of designing a staff structure is perhaps the least visibilized aspect of organizational leadership. When I look back at my own eleven years as an executive director, I see just how much time, mental energy, and sometimes anguish my colleagues and I spent on staff structure. From the reimagining of teams and departments to be more inclusive and strategically relevant, to the steady stream of task forces and committees to tackle more temporal initiatives, to our experiment with Holacracy, this work never ended.
Through my own experience and that of my clients, I see now that creating and adapting structure is a constant for justice-committed leaders. In fact, I should more accurately title this blog, Why Staff Structuring Matters (A Lot).
Why are we adapting our structures so often? Isn’t that inefficient? There are at least two extraordinarily valid reasons:
- Traditional, corporate structures rarely produce the equity, transparency, accelerated leadership development, and meaningful innovation that justice-committed staff and leadership crave. We are compelled to experiment with variations or even stark alternatives to those traditional structures to produce more of what we value for and from our staff.
- In justice-committed organizations, strategies are ambitious, complex, and ever-evolving. As our understanding of the work in front of us changes, we are compelled to reconfigure ourselves to get the needed perspectives around the table, to ask the emergent questions, and to adapt our work accordingly.
If staff structuring is ongoing and central to the embodiment of our values and strategies, we need to unpack and visibilize it. For me, a critical part of that unpacking and visibilizing is to distinguish between the work of crafting individual roles and titles and that of designing for the organizational whole. They are both crucial and of course, interdependent. But I think our minds go to individual titles and job descriptions and related outcomes like “role clarity” and “decision-making authority” a lot in our sector. I think we do this to the neglect of what whole—what wholeness—those individuals need in which to thrive.
When we are structuring for the whole, I think the key phrase is collective experience. Organizational structuring is how we ensure that people are having the experiences they require to thrive as a successful collective pursuing the organization's intended contributions to social change.
Below are four experiences I think we need to be structuring for all the time.
The collective experience of interpreting strategy
Understanding and advancing complex justice strategies can only be done through frequent, rigorous conversations in multi-disciplinary spaces. One-on-one supervision is not enough. Functional departmental meetings are not enough. The structure has to provide consistent, well-facilitated spaces for people at all levels to get proximate to the big ideas inside justice strategies so that they can iterate together and then more fully express those strategies in their individual roles and teams.
The collective experience of making decisions
Lots of decisions do not need to be made collectively, but some, if they are to be embodied organization-wide, very much do. Discerning which are which is a leadership capacity we exercise all day long in justice-committed organizations. But, we don’t talk enough about collective decision-making as an organizational structuring issue. Key decisions that advance our approach to executing complex justice strategies need a place to go. A place where the right cross-section of people are around the table and trust is high or, at least, on the rise. As leaders we need to ask ourselves, What are the types of recurring, high-impact decisions that need to be made collectively and how do we set that table so that important decisions are made at a good pace and in explicit alignment with organizational values and strategies?
The collective experience of growing our leadership
Growing as a leader, no matter our age or tenure, requires access to strategic conversations and relationships with diverse, compelling people across the organization and its networks. When we deny these access points to people, we thwart their development and undermine their potential contribution to the organization. How do we lift the accountability for this development off the lone shoulders of the individual and build recurring settings and formats that ensure these conversations and relationships can flourish? Again, this is a structuring issue. Our organizational design needs built-in opportunities for people to foster relationships and influence one another’s hearts and minds across teams and functions. We want leaders at all levels to frequently say, “I am so intrigued by what I learned today.”
The collective experience of celebrating our progress
Celebrating our collective progress is profound; it’s a political act amidst so much backlash to our liberatory agenda; it’s what I call an edifying joy. The joy part is perhaps obvious: it is joyous to name our accomplishments and celebrate one another's contributions to them. And by edifying, I mean that naming progress consistently builds our collective understanding of what we believe progress on our organizational strategies actually entails. In my experience, we don’t structure to this need of the whole enough. Where is the recurring space that focuses everyone’s attention on organizational progress? What story-telling and other data sets can we bring to that space? How do we frame our progress in strategy terms so that we are deepening our collective intelligence about how specifically this organization creates change?
A structure that serves the whole—that serves organizational wholeness—is not an inevitable byproduct of hiring talented people into well-defined roles. When those people get to your organization, what structures can they count on to engage them deeply and regularly in the collective work of pursuing your organizational purpose? It’s a first-level leadership question. And a question we can’t stop answering as our people and strategies continuously evolve.
Questions for discussion with colleagues:
- To what extent does our current staff structure enable frequent and rigorous discussions of strategy?
- To what extent does our current staff structure enable relationship-building and intellectual influence across teams and functions?
- To what extent does our current staff structure enable collective decision-making when it’s called for?
- To what extent does our current staff structure enable celebration of our collective progress towards our organizational purpose?
Related reading that inspires us:
Strategy Is A Conversation, Not A Deliverable
by Andrew Blum, Forbes
Structuring for Sensemaking: The Power of Small Segments
by Cyndi Suarez, Nonprofit Quarterly
Managing the 21st Century Organization
by Valdis Krebs
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