Getting Organizational Design Right

Most leaders think their organizational problems are structural — that if they just rearrange the boxes on the org chart, everything will flow better.
 But as organizational design consultant and executive coach Susannah Robinson explains, that’s rarely the real issue.

In this episode of Relationships at Work, host Russel Lolacher and Susannah break down what organizational design actually means — and how it connects directly to leadership behavior, culture, and employee experience.

Together, they explore:

• Why most “structure problems” are really leadership and communication problems
• How to align your strategy, values, and design so your people can actually succeed
• The difference between managing intent vs. managing impact as a leader
• How ego and fear of change block healthy redesigns
• What real accountability and trust look like when teams restructure

Whether you’re leading a department, a small business, or an entire organization, this conversation will help you see organizational design as a relationship practice — not a chart exercise.

🎙️ Featuring: Susannah Robinson, Executive Coach, Organizational Design Consultant, President of Partnership for Talent, and author of Beyond the Boxes and Lines: Transforming Business Results Through Organizational Design.

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Transcript

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Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Susannah Robinson and here is why she is awesome. She's an executive coach, organizational design consultant and member of Forbes Coaches Council. She's a president of Partnership for Talent, a consulting firm specializing in providing high impact strategic HR services. Also an adjunct professor for Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies.

She teaches, well, she teaches organizational de design and their human resources master's program and, and... there's a lot of ands here. And she's a bestselling author with her book, Beyond The Boxes And Lines, Are You Ready For The Next Step? Transforming Business Results Through Organizational Design.

Hello Susannah.

Susannah Robinson: Hello, how are you? Thank you so much for having me.

Russel Lolacher: Delightful. I'm very good. Cup of coffee number two. But I'm doing fantastic. Hence why my energy level and I know why I'm talking so damn fast.

Susannah Robinson: Well, I'm one behind you but I'll keep up.

Russel Lolacher: So. Appreciate that immensely. Um, organizational design, uh, super curious how this impacts us, our teams, the whole gamut of it. But before we get there, the first question I ask all of my guests, Susannah, which is, what is your best or worst employee experience?

Susannah Robinson: You know, it's funny, when we had set up this, uh, conversation, you had said, you know, I'm gonna ask you this question, so spend some time thinking about this. And I had, and then I threw it all out the other day because I had an amazing conversation with a woman who 15 years ago, which makes me older than I wanna be, um, was on one of my talent teams and she was a learning and development business partner.

And every time she went to a meeting, um, after she left the, the business folks called me and said, well, is any of this really gonna work in real life? And I finally said, look, at some point she wanted to be the head of HR. And I said, at some point you're gonna need to go back and get a generalist type of experience because this is gonna be super important for your leadership skills.

And she did. And she called me the other day and she is now the SVP and head of HR for a 200 person company. Her first foray into being the one in charge, and I was super proud of her because she actually listened to the coaching. She went and, and really curated her own career. Um, and it made me, she said, you know, if, if you hadn't told me that, I'd never would've gone and done the things that I needed to do to get to where I am.

So for me, I was super proud of her.

Russel Lolacher: I, I, I have to jump into a bit of the language you used there, which is she actually listened to me, which is...

Susannah Robinson: Is right.

Russel Lolacher: But, but it does underscore a few things. One, that we are responsible for our own development, leadership, but it has to also be in collaboration. Leaders just can't throw people to the deep end and go figure out your own career. They also have to be ones that understand what the bigger picture's asking for.

Susannah Robinson: Exactly, and I think that, you know what, I also tell people this, look, feedback is simply feedback, right? Is you have two choices. You can let it lie there or you can take it up and do something with it. There are consequences for all choices, but you always have a choice and it gets to be your choice. And then I'm there to stand next to you and hold your hand and help you do it till you're brave enough to do it for yourself.

Russel Lolacher: What you've done there is something that sort of, there's something that really pisses me off when it comes to leadership and their employees, which is we always have this thing of leaders doing those performance reviews and going, what's your five year plan? And people are like, I don't, I don't know what my five year plan.

My push is, why doesn't the employee turn that around and go, what's your five-year plan for me? Because as a leader, we should have those bigger ideas, bigger concepts, bigger connections within the industry we work in. And you'd give a perfect example and be like, you're doing great, but if you really wanna exceed in what we do, you have to think bigger.

And I don't think enough leaders do that.

Susannah Robinson: And I knew she had to leave to do it, which I think is another big thing for leaders is I don't wanna sacrifice the work that you do and what you contribute to my team to help you get better. I knew she had to leave my organization to do it, even leave our company to do it. But it was the right thing for her long term, and ultimately it was the right thing for our team because she was not gonna be able to max out where she wanted to go in if I just kept her there because I wanted the work she did.

Russel Lolacher: But let's be fair, you also took the extra step of not just knowing that she had to leave, but empowering her and communicating her to do it. How many leaders know people have to leave, but they won't say anything because they're like, I don't wanna have to hire again. That's a whole process. I don't wanna have to jump through all those hoops.

Susannah Robinson: I always tell people, if your next right step is not with me, come, come see me. Make me your first stop because I'm gonna help you be successful. I'm gonna make sure you've got the right resume. I'm gonna make sure you're positioned well. I'm gonna network the heck out of you because if your next right step is somewhere else, let me be your biggest advocate. So...

Russel Lolacher: And that goes to the DNA of the uh, this, this show because it's about the relationship. And if you don't have a relationship with your staff that involves everything you've just said, then they're a cog in a wheel to you. They are a means to an end. They are not somebody that you are, I don't know, leading.

The funny thing about leadership, they have to lead.

Susannah Robinson: I want you to be successful, that you really love and wanna see be successful.

Russel Lolacher: So let's design an organization that has this all figured Susannah. Let's, let's dig into this. So you teach it, you write about it, you live and breathe it. But let's define it because that's something I don't think enough people do with a lot of concepts we do in the workplace. So in your mind, how would you define organizational design?

Susannah Robinson: I define organizational design as being the process combination of organizational structure, job design, and employee practices that are aligned with the visions, strategy, and objectives of the organization.

Russel Lolacher: Oh, good corporate speak nicely done.

Susannah Robinson: It is. It's really good. And then to like dig down into what all that means. But nine times out of 10, I have a leader that says, I think I have a structure problem. And most times it's usually not a structure problem. So...

Russel Lolacher: Why would people think that it's a structure problem? Why would they just default to that being their assessment?

Susannah Robinson: Because it's usually the easiest thing for them to picture because it's literally boxes and lines on a page, and if they somehow just move around the people and the boxes, they can solve the problem. But oftentimes it is, I don't really understand what the job is. I don't understand the handoffs and the, and how it functions in the system.

My employee practices are running completely counter to what I am trying to achieve. So there's a whole bunch of things that goes into figuring out where you're actually falling short of meeting your objectives. But they go to the first thing that they can picture on the page, which is where the boxes on the page.

Russel Lolacher: Which is funny because leadership should be about strategic thinking and big picture thinking, but you are telling me that most are just managers looking at one box on an org chart and going, things aren't flowing way they should.

Susannah Robinson: The mostly because they don't think of the people in the org design as connected to their business results, right? They think they, they think strategically and they create business results and strategies over here, but they don't recognize the impact and the connection between the people and, and the design to meeting those objectives.

Russel Lolacher: So I'd push back and say they're not thinking strategically. They're thinking strategically within a box over there,

Susannah Robinson: Right. That's right.

Russel Lolacher: As opposed to. Yeah. As opposed to the bigger picture thinking, which we want our leaders to have to find the connection dots. So what are the, my, I'm jumping all over the place 'cause I'm like, let's talk a bit about those components

because my mind and obviously the focus of the show is how does organizational design support culture? How does it support how we work and relate to one another? So maybe we should start there.

Susannah Robinson: Absolutely. When I, when I teach organizational design, the very first exercise I give people is I want you to think about an experience you had. Was it at a restaurant? Was it an amusement park, a hospital? Um, was it at a store? I want you to think about what went well and what didn't go well, and then I want you to connect to that what the people.

On that side, the people at the restaurant, the people at the store understood about their role. How it connected to the other roles and how it connected to what the organization wanted them to achieve for your experience. And so to me, it's the connection between what people understand about their jobs.

The job design piece makes it so that I figure out, how do I fit into this? How do I contribute to this? And where do I start and stop relative to how someone else contributes to it?

Russel Lolacher: Have you seen, how have you seen the benefits of that? Because, I mean, my mind thinks I can actually see the value of the work I do because I can connect it to all these other, well lack of a better term, ripples in a pond that I am like, I've got so many... Because people work in silos. They go, I show up, I do my work. My boss tells me I need to get this done by the end of the day and have no concept of, of where it connects. And that's where leaders kind of fall down a little bit, I think, in work to worth sort of thing. So is that what you, is that I'm sort of answering my own question a bit, but is there, is there more to it than that?

Susannah Robinson: Uh, there's not, it's, it's about as simple as that, right? So I, um, in the book, you will see I'm a big Disney fan, so lots of people are not Disney fans. I I completely understand that big Disney fan. When I go to buy the pretzel, the people that are selling me the pretzel are not the same people who are also emptying the trash right next door are not checking people in for the living with the land ride that happens to be next door.

To that, their job is to make sure I have a great experience when I'm actually standing there purchasing the pretzel. They also understand that the person next to them who's emptying the trash and the person taking the tickets for Living With The Land, have something to contribute to my experience because when I'm done with the pretzel, I'm gonna go put the trash in the trash can and I don't want it to be overflowing.

And then after that, I'm gonna go on the Living With The Land ride. So they understand how their role fits with others, but they're not trying to do all the things at the same time. And so that delineation between what my role is and how it fits with everything else and what the company's trying to achieve, which is ultimately my experience, makes it so that they feel like their contribution relative to their role understands all the other ripples in it.

Russel Lolacher: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions with this? Because I, I, like you're saying, people just come in and go fix my box. I'm like, yeah, no, you're a part of a bigger box.

Susannah Robinson: Part of a bigger box. And I think the biggest misconception, uh, that I see with a lot of organizations, because I deal in our consultancy with a lot of small and medium sized organizations, is that everybody should be able to do everything, um, because we're small. And my point is their ability to do it, and you actually having them do all the things, um, are two different things.

Um, when I worked with the YMCA, we had, I, I joined and we had aquatics directors who were responsible for hiring, overseeing lifeguards, making sure the safety around the pool, marketing right? All of these things. And you couldn't find anyone who could do them all. And then when you got them there, they were so burned out because they were trying to do all the things.

When we had them understand and focus and had other people supporting in the right ways, we were able to attract good talent. We were able to keep good talent. We were able to develop good talent because we could then continue to add to their skillset in a pace and a, and a way that was comfortable for them to continue to evolve.

Russel Lolacher: Is there any surefire, like canary in a coal mine where you're like going in and going, this is a place that needs some organizational design work. Like, you know, it's, it's just blatant to you.

Susannah Robinson: Uh, when it's blatant to me is when I ask the senior leader to talk me through their organization, and they can't clearly and crisply do it. When they can't clearly and crisply do it, it tells me that if they don't understand what people's roles are in the organization, there's no way their team understands it.

Russel Lolacher: Does it get confu... uh, there's a lot of pieces of me that are thinking communication is so integral to all of this because there's so, like, and I say this a lot, is every person's job is a communication job. Every job, I don't care where you sit in the organization, most problems and successes are rooted in the quality of the communication. When you are using terms like structure and process and culture.

I'm gonna go back to definitions. How important is it to get those right? How is important is it to get those communicated or is there people getting confused with all this? Because when I asked you for a definition, you got pretty corporate-y on me.

Susannah Robinson: I got corporate-y on you. I got very corporate-y on you. And then our role is to take that and apply it to the organization because what the process in one organization means may be different than what the process in an org, another organization means. What the structure that works in one organization to achieve their objectives, could look very different in another organization of a different size, in a different industry with a different talent pool. So the key is to be able to then apply it to where you are, and the communication is super, super critical. Um, and it's less about making sure the word is a word that they could go out and, and enter into Google or ChatGBT and find out what it's, what it means and what does it mean for us. Right? What's the structure for us? A matrix organization I put into one place may be different than a matrix organization. I put somewhere else.

Russel Lolacher: And, and as a communication nerd, that's one of a big pet peeve is that we communicate at, not with, and we use language that we're comfortable with rather than what people will hear or listen to or connect with. And the, but we, we, thou shalt, I'm like, yeah, that's, there's a reason people aren't buying into this.

Susannah Robinson: Exactly. Exactly.

Russel Lolacher: So as leaders, I want to sort of ref... turn the mirror back on us as leaders that are embracing, oh, you know what? Maybe we should look into organizational design. Are there areas that us as leaders should be leaning into to focus on, to be better prepared for a recalibration of an organization like this?

Susannah Robinson: I think the, what I encourage people to do when they lean in is understand what's working now from the perspective of your team. They're the ones who are in it every day, right? They're the ones who can, if you ask them to tell me three things we could fix, we'll tell you five instantly that you could fix, right?

They just have never been asked, right? Is is to try to think about it from their perspective of what's working and what's not, and then every time you have a change, be it a change to the market you're attacking, be it a change to your, your external competitor space, be it someone who leaves your organization, stop and take a quick step back and say, is there a different way we could be doing this?

It doesn't have to take forever. There's a belief that an organizational shift, an organizational change has to take a long time. I think consultants have trained us that, oh, these are big things. They take a long time. It does not, it simply means to reaffirm for yourself, is there a better and different way to do this going forward?

Russel Lolacher: I think we also have to be open and curious enough to even be open to the idea of change and, uh, I mean, how many organizations go, well, it is what it is. Oh, my least favorite term in the world. Or, you know, it's all. Always been like this.

Susannah Robinson: Always done that way.

Russel Lolacher: Right? And oh, we've been successful. Why should we change anything? Does that change based on generational, like so for individuals to get buy-in on things, is a Gen Xer or a Boomer more easier to accept these things than maybe a Gen Z might be? Like, just trying to understand from their own socioeconomic generational backgrounds.

Susannah Robinson: I think that Gen Xers, we were, we were really good at making sure we were there before the boss got there and that we sort of waited our turn. My daughter's 23, she's a Gen Zer. Waiting her turn is not a thing as much for them. Um, and I think that the one common denominator is that people typically don't come to, um, their job every day wanting to do a bad job, and they don't come not wanting the organization to be successful.

They all want the same thing in that space, and it's trying to figure out how we appeal to them and how we engage them to be able to do their best work.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah, I mean as a Gen Xer, I'm looking at Gen Z, like, wait a second we didn't have to go to meetings like we that we don't like meetings either. Like I was jealous that they were actually vocal about not waiting in line. I'm like, well, I don't wanna wait in line either, you mean I had that as an option?

Obviously it was a different time, different culture, but still it was enlight... It's been enlightening so far.

Susannah Robinson: I think it's enlightening. I think the nice thing is a lot of Gen Zers and a lot of Millennial, younger Millennials have grown up in structured sports because both parents worked. When I was a kid, you know, you came home, we were the latchkey generation, right? We came home, no one was there. We watched television, we did our homework, we did what was expected.

They have grown up in structured sports and structured activities. They are used to constant coaching and constant feedback, and they seek that in their work as well. And I don't think that's a bad thing. It gives us, as leaders an opportunity to engage with them much more frequently than we typically would, some of us as Gen X or see that as a burden because they're like, they want us to talk to them all the time.

Yes, they would like your feedback. They would like your insight. They look up and you are successful. They wanna get there. That's a great thing.

Russel Lolacher: It is, and how many leaders will then in the next sentence go, and we need to be more adaptable. I'm like, but you can't even adapt to a managing a different type of person from a different generation. So we, we have to lean into these things. So that actually leads me into the, the question of ego, because when we look for organizational design how hard is it for us as leaders to go, but I don't want to change the org chart. I like where I sit in the org chart. I like my reporting structure. I like the relationships I have. How much do you feel ego gets in the way or is it play at all when we have to redo these things?

Susannah Robinson: It does play, which is why I always start with the goals, objective, strategy, of the organization because the leaders in particular want those things to be successful and so. If we can show them why it's not going to be successful the way that they are, but it could potentially be more successful another way um, that helps to engage the leaders of the organization to be willing to look at a different way to do it, because now you get them focused less on the boxes and the people and where everything is, and more on what are you trying to achieve. That's the first question I ask. What are you trying to achieve, right?

And how do we need to achieve it? That should then dictate what our structure looks like, what our jobs look like, what our employee practices are. Because if you think you're going to shift your, your objectives or go for a different or a bigger set of objectives with the same design, it will drag you back every time.

Russel Lolacher: That, what is it? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

Susannah Robinson: A different result.

Russel Lolacher: How much does self-awareness come this?

Susannah Robinson: Huge!

Russel Lolacher: Because ego, we're talking about, most people don't realize they have an ego or they have the, but I've worked very hard for this position. I don't want anything to change.

Susannah Robinson: Exactly. And I think the other piece of it is, uh, helping leaders understand that it's incumbent on them to manage their impact. Oh, when you get to a certain level of leadership and you continue to grow, no one cares really about your intent. They assume your intent and your impact are the same and that you should have the best of intentions.

Um, and getting them to recognize it's all about them managing their impact and them supporting the rest of the team because a lot of smaller and mid-sized organizations in particular. The senior leaders have grown up, as grown up as working directors or working VPs where they roll up their sleeves and they have a functional space they contribute to.

They're not simply leaders, but helping them understand that if I can get the team underneath me working really well, I can take a step back and and contribute more to their feedback, contribute more to their development. Because I'm now not rolling up my sleeves quite as much and doing a lot of the work, I'm getting them to be empowered to do it 'cause they really wanna do it.

Russel Lolacher: How about values? Because you're talking about process, impact, intention, but then we see the vision, the mission, and the values on the wall, which is sometimes just a checkbox exercise and other times they embrace it and live it every day. Is that something that plays into it as well?

Susannah Robinson: It is a key piece of the organizational alignment, so I always say the your design needs to be aligned with your values. It needs to be aligned with the strategy, and it needs to be aligned with the goals and objective.

Russel Lolacher: You sort of mentioned it a bit there is that leaders need to do more than just lead that because, uh, there is a distinction and I find, and I keep reinforcing it, managers are not leaders. Leaders are not managers, but they're both important. What does training play into this? Because there's a lot of leaders that are in their positions with no leadership training.

They are barely putting their head above what, it's why I try not to be too hard on leaders because they're put in very difficult decisions because people just wanted to put a bum in a seat. So when we get into re... into an organizational design standpoint, is that a consideration of going, well, some of these leaders need to be better trained actually for them to be as impactful as we wanna be for the end result we're trying to do.

Susannah Robinson: I think it's both training and it is, to me a key component of the design. I worked for a long time with a lot of PhD scientists and engineers, and when they were the best individual contributor as a PhD scientist, we put them in charge of people. And if I ask them, they don't wanna be in charge of people.

And if I ask the people, they're like, we don't want 'em in charge of us. And so I think that from the design perspective, there is an opportunity to think about having two tracks in some space, right? I can have key individual contributors who are driving big things in my organization, but may not be leading people and may not have an interest in leading people, and I can have a leadership track.

And it's really important when you're having someone in a leadership track or taking on a leadership role that you provide them the training to do so. Right? And we, I could, uh, created with my team, it's literally a four session leadership course, right? But what we paired with it, that was key was coaching, individual coaching, because teaching them the things doesn't help them recognize who they are, what their impact is on the organization, and then how they can get better at it. Not how people in general can get better at it, but how they can get better at it.

Russel Lolacher: I, I call it the Michael Scott problem, which is from The Office where he was a great salesman, horrible leader, but because he was good at one thing, they assumed he'd be good at something else, and like, no, you just lost a really good leader and lost a really good salesperson, and gained a horrible leader. Congratulations.

Susannah Robinson: Exactly. As an HR person, my daughter loves that show, and I'm like, I can't even watch it.

Russel Lolacher: It's like too close to home. That hurts. That hurts me too hard. So how do teams generally accept? Because I'll be honest, people are sick of change, susannah. They are. We don't have change management anymore. We just have the next change over the next change over the next change of every day. So I see organizational design and relooking at how organizations are designed.

How are teams going, I want this? Or I'm just trying to understand the difference between buy-in and resistance when it comes to the team acceptance.

Susannah Robinson: And I think it depends on how much you engage them in the process. And how much you help them understand that there's a difference between big sweeping changes that need massive change management all the time. And some of these, um, they do, they do it when they do innovation, they do it when they do process development is sort of incremental types of change. Right. And so if I can, if I can focus on, once we've done an organizational redesign and we continue to look at it as we go, it becomes more incremental and it feels less like, oh, this huge sweeping change and here it comes, another one. And it's the flavor of the day and much more, um, aligned with.

We simply, every time someone leaves the organization, we simply stop and take a look at how we do our work and could we do it better? Right? And so it becomes much more of a muscle memory. My daughter was a sync, uh, a Olympic level synchronized swimmer for a long time. She just went and tried out for a lifeguard job, and she was the only one who could stay above the water because she's like, oh, the muscle memory just kicked in about how you tread water, right?

And so that was 15 years ago for her. And so that muscle memory of change is important and you can look, teach them to embrace it as positive when they're engaged in it. And when you ask them, they're the ones who sit in the jobs. They know what the jobs do better than anybody. It's the reason that when someone leaves your organization, you take the top off the pot.

You're like, oh, they did that too. Right? Because you didn't know. And so when you can get folks in the organization engaged in it, they feel much more empowered to bring forward opportunities to say, you know what? I think we could even do this better. And then when the team starts leading, the change is now when it feels less like constant change and more like simply evolution of the organization.

Russel Lolacher: You talk a lot about how important it is to demystify organizational design. Is that what we're talking about? Because I, I'll, I'll be fair, when I asked you for the definition, you got real academic on me, right? So. So what is the language we may need to use in order to get our teams to do that buy-in?

Susannah Robinson: Um, so typically what we try to do is we try to, although the definition feels corporate-y and, and super, like high-end professional, um, you know, what we try to do is make it approachable. This is what we do every day. But it's important to understand that there are components to what we do every day, um, because it's not just all about you, right?

Um, one of the things that I show when I, uh, when I teach organizational design is I show them a video from YouTube. And if you go out and Google five guys playing one piano, you will find it. There are literally five guys playing one piano. They're not sitting at the piano, they're playing all different parts of it, and instantly, you know the song they're playing, they're all playing different pieces, and you can watch the transitions and the handoffs, and then about halfway through they all swap.

And so that understanding of how. What I do connects with what Rebecca does next to me, connects with what Roger does and we all make the organization work, makes it feel more approachable. But it's important for the for teams to understand there are components of it. It's not just all about my job and what I do.

There are components about. How does the organization flow? What are the pieces of compensation and performance feedback and things that help to make that all work together so that we don't have these unintended consequences of, oh, I thought we were designing a sales organization that was focused on annual goals, but I incented you quarterly.

Okay. Well, there we are. Mm-hmm.

Russel Lolacher: Does diversity play a role in this? We kind of touched on it generationally, but I can see culturally I can see, because their definition of success might be different than others generation of success. So, but we are talking about organizational design, so I'm, I don't have an answer. I'm super curious. Does diversity play a role at all?

Susannah Robinson: I think D, there are different types of diversity, right? And so when I look at things like predictive index and DISC and some of those, it shows me where people sit in terms of their approach to things. But ultimately the definition of success ends up being the organization's definition of success.

Right? And then I, as an individual need to determine whether my definition of, of my success aligns with what the organization's definition of success is. And so I can then figure out, do I have a role in contributing to that success or is my next role somewhere else?

Russel Lolacher: Right. Does that come into, does that happen often, or is it, because I feel now we're talking about are we hiring correctly? Because I can feel that's a big piece of this.

Susannah Robinson: I think talent and recruiting is a big piece of it. Very rarely do you get the opportunity to build an organization from scratch, right? You usually have the people who are there and, um, I would say that depending on the organizational change, you can have people who choose that that's not where they wanna go.

I haven't seen a lot of it. I think there are a lot of people who say, okay, I can understand it and I can shift and change. The majority of organizational change is not, oh, I take you from being a customer service rep and now I'm gonna take you over here and make you a logistics rep. Right? So it's shifts in the way you do your work.

Shifts in how my job transitions into someone else's job and where it stops and starts and shifts in do I report within one function? Do I report within a division? Do I report within both? And so that shifting doesn't have to happen overnight. The communication of what the organization change needs to look like happens, and then we work our way into it.

It's not going to just be, I just pulled off the bandaid and everyone does something different tomorrow.

Russel Lolacher: Do you find that this... That some people want to do this on a team level versus organizational level. Bear with me here 'cause there's some will look at it going, we need to change the whole organization. But as we both know, there's not one culture. There's 17,000 subcultures. So there is different quality of leadership from executive to front line.

And there may be some mid-level managers going, I need organizational design, but my boss doesn't have buy-in, so I need to just do it for my team. Is does that happen?

Susannah Robinson: Absolutely happens all the time, and I love it. I love it because when I'm the customer service head and I, and I gain a new person to my customer service team, I need to stop and think about do I need to rearrange the work? Whether or not the sales manager thinks that the customer service team needs to rearrange the work, the sales manager wants the customer service team to achieve certain things.

And as the customer service manager, I'm gonna sort of sit on a microcosm and say, how do I need to rearrange the work? Which means how do I need to rearrange the jobs, which means how do I need to make sure that I give the right feedback to my team and that I've got their objectives and things aligned properly.

So now I've looked at the structure, the job design, and the employee practices in my microcosm to meet the objectives of the customer service team. So I love it when managers like to do that on their own.

Russel Lolacher: Isn't there a danger of being siloed? Um, and being fri... and having a bit of friction to other, and I'll give you an example. Team is working Scrum, so they're doing, uh, sprints. They're working within finite. We start, we finished in three weeks, we move on to the next thing. But you're doing delivery of a process within a space that nobody else in the organization is.

So your timelines are a little more aggressive when other people are like, I'll get it to when I get to you, because they're, they've got other priorities and other ways of working. So if we organizationally design our team, isn't that rubbing up against the rest of the organization a bit.

Susannah Robinson: It can. Which is why I think that it's super important for leaders in the organization who are leading a group to understand where to make sure they're connected in their head to the objectives of the organization, right. And the culture of the organization. And so when you wanna change the culture of working.

I think that it's super important to make sure you understand where your alignment is as well, because it can. Absolutely. Um, but I also believe that organizations do best when everything doesn't go absolutely perfectly all the time. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: Well, it's a litmus test for sure. I'll give you that like.

Susannah Robinson: And I think that's where you change, right? People change when they're uncomfortable. They don't change when everything is perfect all the time. And so I think that when you watch one part of the organization doing things differently and being super successful, other leaders look and go, oh, how I, how can I do that? How can I do that? So it's not a unhealthy thing.

Russel Lolacher: So I, I, I completely agree with you. I mean, it is there some ter, I mean, I see a lot of territorial behaviors, like people love their fiefdoms, uh, people love what they control, what they can control, especially in a world of change that's happening all the time. When you can control your fiefdom, it feels safer. And, uh, some people might not feel safe with organizational design coming in and making it. Well, I guess for lack of term, unsafe. So what is HR's role in this? What is executive's role in this when it comes to making this, I don't know, grease the wheels smoother to work better.

Susannah Robinson: You know, I think that, I think leaders have a big role in this. I'm a believer that that my role in this as the HR process person is systems, process, tool, support, right? So I'm gonna give you the support. I'm gonna give you the tools and the process and the systems, and then I also need you to lead because not everything that deals with a person in the organization has comes through your HR team.

It really shouldn't, right? Otherwise I got 400 direct reports and that doesn't make much sense. And so I think it's the leaders need to be comfortable with it first. And they need to engage their teams and they need to be comfortable being a little uncomfortable, right? Is most conversations with humans can get a little uncomfortable if you're actually being really transparent and you're being there and present in the conversation.

And so I think they need to be okay hearing feedback that this isn't going great. I was, I was with a board the other day and we had done a big organizational change and gone to a matrix organization. And when we did it, I had told the board, look, this could be a little bumpy. You've never done this before.

And when I was sitting there, one of the board members said, how is, how's it going? And I said, well, to start with, it was a little bumpy. And one of the executives looked down the table at me like, oh my goodness. Why are you telling this to the board? I said, because if I told them everything was perfect, they would think I was a nut because things can be a little bumpy. And it's okay for us to be uncomfortable and it's okay to, for us to take feedback that this isn't going great, because now that's how we fix it, right? We're not gonna be perfect right out of the gate because our leaders are humans, just like the people on our teams, and sometimes as leaders, it gives us an opportunity to be really vulnerable and say, look it didn't do what I thought it was gonna do. Here's what we were trying to do. We all work together, but how do you think we could help make this better? Right? Now I'm looking for your feedback, even though it hurts.

Russel Lolacher: How do you know it's working? How do you know or, or it's not working? Uh, to your point.

Susannah Robinson: Um, I usually know it's not working because you start to see, um, confusion in the organization. People will say, I don't, I don't understand, is usually the first thing that they say. And it's oftentimes not, I don't understand. It's, I disagree, um, but I don't understand. And confusion in the organization tells me.

First that it's not working. Um, when I see it's working is that people are being successful in meeting the objectives that they set out for their team or they're being successful in meeting the business objectives. Um, I think ultimately good HR, good org design, good people leadership leads to the business results.

The business results don't just happen and the, and the business gets to take credit for it. It happens because all the people are aligned in doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Russel Lolacher: So at a, at a high level, what is, is it first understand the organization, then understand what your gaps are like? I'm just trying to understand from soup to nuts, what is an organizational redesign look like?

Susannah Robinson: So typically I start from what are, what are you trying to achieve? And then I try to look at whether that organization as it is designed, will achieve those objectives or not. Because that will give you the gap analysis, but you have to start with what are you trying to achieve? What are your values?

What's your strategy? What are your goals and objectives? What are you trying to achieve? Looking at the organization now, and the pain points will then give you the gaps. By then you can start to think about is it a structure problem? Is it a job design problem? Is it an org employee practice problem? It doesn't necessarily mean I have to take the whole thing and throw it out.

It may mean it's one piece of those things that needs some adjustment. It may mean it needs a complete relook.

Russel Lolacher: And you have to be okay with being uncomfortable.

Susannah Robinson: You do. You have to be, you have to begin to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, right? It's no different than any other relationship that you have, right? If you're not comfortable having an uncomfortable conversation with your spouse, there's a whole bunch of things that are just gonna sit on the sides.

If you're not comfortable having an uncomfortable conversation with your team, your team's never gonna be fully vested in what you're trying to achieve, and, and they won't see you as that trusted, safe place as a leader.

Russel Lolacher: How transparent are you in communication with, because there will. Be a lot of warts when you're looking at an organization and going, what's not working? And there's a lot of leaders, senior leaders will go, we can't tell them that. Or, could you take that word and use a thesaurus and use a different word?

I'm like, but they're not the same thing. They, you can't just replace a word with another word and think they mean the same thing.

Susannah Robinson: Exactly. And I think that you have to be, you have to be willing to be fairly transparent with your team because they know. If we think they don't know, they know. Right. It's kind of like people who are not performing well in the organization. Guess what? As the leader, I was the last one to know, they have tried this 50 ways till Tuesday and can't get it to work, so they already know.

And so if we think they don't, we're fooling ourselves. We need to be transparent with them about what we believe is going well. Let's give credit what's going well, and then where we believe we can get better, and why we need to do that. To be able to get better, because they all wanna meet the objectives and the goals of the organization.

Russel Lolacher: And I think hiding that hurts the relationship with the team. So your org, or the organization. And if the organization knows there's a problem and they all do and the leader doesn't want to admit to it, they either think the leader's an idiot and doesn't know, or that they're hiding something and they're lying to them. Either or, it really hurts the relationship moving forward to, to implement any sort of change.

Susannah Robinson: And to be recog to recognize that as a leader, there are times you take accountability for things that you were not responsible for doing. Right? You take accountability for things that the guy, two times before you did, you take accountability for the way the structure or the organization has been for 10 years.

You had no impact on that. But as the leader, if you can take accountability for that and, and help dig in and make it better for them, then you earn a lot of credibility and you earn a lot of trust within your organization because they, they know you didn't have anything to do with it either, but you are the one who now takes up the torch to try to help make it better.

Russel Lolacher: And I, I so love that you, uh, highlighted accountability. 'cause we default a lot too much to responsibility, which I know that's a job description. Yeah. I know what you're job you're responsible for, but to be accountable, that's where leadership lives. And even to be accountable to things that you're not responsible for, but you may be still perpetuating because it happened before and that's the way you were trained as a leader when you were put in that position.

So to be accountable, to go, you know what, I own some of this, but I think we can do better. You're, you're doing so much better for the relationship.

Susannah Robinson: The example I give people is, look, I've been res, I've been accountable for payroll four times in my career. No one would want me running their paycheck 'cause it's not gonna work. However, when there is a problem, the person who sends out the email, the person who walks around and apologizes, the person who takes accountability, is me.

I'm not responsible for doing it. However, I take accountability for doing it. And when I do that, the people who are responsible for it feel like, okay. I'm okay. Right? I'm, my head's not going to come off because I now got thrown under the bus, right? So...

Russel Lolacher: You're creating a safe space basically for them to be able to continue and to do better.

Susannah Robinson: And to bring you things that you, that they know are gonna make you irritated and that they know are wrong.

Nobody will bring you something if they feel nervous about what, what the approach is gonna be. You need to be consistent and intentional in your leadership.

Russel Lolacher: So I'll wrap it up with the last question, which is, so I'm listening this. I'm thinking, oh my God, organizational design. That's what we need. I hate how we're running things, or at least I know we need to change, and I don't know what it is quite yet. What is the baby step? Susannah? What is the baby step besides buying your book, which they absolutely should do.

What is the, what is the baby step that they may need to take tomorrow to sort of get that ball rolling?

Susannah Robinson: You know the baby step that I say, and I do it so I do it either when I'm running and things. I say, working on your team rather than in your team. So the baby step is just taking a step back and some time to think. That's not back to back in meetings. Time to think to work on your team and versus in your team and thinking about how my team works together, even if it's just me and one other person, how it works together and whether the way that it's working now is gonna get us to the objectives that I have for the team over the next 12 months.

Russel Lolacher: Situational awareness as much as such self-awareness. Absolutely love that. Thank you for that. Well, thank you very much for being here, Susannah. I really appreciate your time and trying to, you know, connect the dots between organizational design and the humans that work there.

Susannah Robinson: Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Russel Lolacher: That's Susannah Robinson. She's an executive coach, organizational design consultant, president of Partnership for Talent. And if you haven't been sold on the book by now, I have no help for you. Definitely check it out. It's called Beyond the Boxes and Lines, Are You Ready For The Next Step? Transforming Business Results Through Organizational Design.

Thank you so much, Susannah.,

Susannah Robinson: Thank you.