A structure that only works because a few people run themselves ragged isn’t a structure, it’s a countdown. Edwin and Claire break down how to build coordination and growth into the design itself, and the four warning signs that tell you your current structure is already failing.
Welcome back to Science of Leading. Last episode we talked about structure versus talent. Today I want to zoom in on a line from the piece that stopped me: coordination cannot rely on heroics.
That line should be on a poster in every ops team's office. So many companies survive on two or three people who happen to be excellent at bridging gaps the org chart never closed. It works, right up until one of them leaves or burns out, and then you find out the coordination was never real. It was just borrowed time.
So what does coordination look like when it's actually built into the structure, instead of running on somebody's goodwill?
Three mechanisms, and none of them are complicated. Shared KPIs across teams that depend on each other, so nobody can hit their number while quietly breaking someone else's. Standardized handoff checklists, so "done" means the same thing on both sides of a transfer. And decision forums with a named decision owner, not a meeting where everyone's invited and no one's accountable for the call.
The handoff piece is so underrated. I've seen teams each individually look busy, each hit their local target, and the customer still has a terrible experience because nobody owned the seam between them.
That's local optimization, and it's one of the most expensive failure patterns in organizational design, because every dashboard looks green while the actual outcome is bleeding out.
And this connects to something else in the piece, designing for growth, not today's firefight. Which I think a lot of leaders skip because they're too busy putting out today's fire to think about it.
Understandable, but expensive. If you're not building repeatable team templates, clean role definitions, and onboarding that ramps people quickly now, every bit of growth you get later multiplies the chaos instead of the output. And there's one test I'd add. Do your decision rights bottleneck at a single leader? Because if every meaningful call still runs through one person's calendar, you haven't built a structure. You've built a queue.
McKinsey's Organizational Health Index work actually frames this really well. They treat alignment, execution, and renewal as the three things that predict long term performance, and renewal is basically this, whether the organization can keep adapting without falling apart every time it grows.
Renewal is the piece people forget. They design for the company they are today, and by the time they're twice the size, the structure that used to work is the thing holding them back.
Okay, so let's say a leader is listening to this and thinking, that sounds like us. How do they know for sure their current structure is actually failing, versus just going through a hard quarter?
There are four warning signs, and they're honestly easy to spot once you know to look. First, decisions take longer than the problem's half life, meaning by the time you decide, the decision doesn't matter anymore. Second, people escalate constantly because peers can't resolve things between themselves. Third, accountability is unclear enough that performance conversations turn personal instead of structural, because there's no clean line back to who owned what. And fourth, teams are hitting their targets locally while the company misses its outcomes globally.
That fourth one is the one that gets leadership teams arguing, because everyone can point to their own scoreboard and say, well, I hit mine.
Which is exactly why you need behavioral and structural data, not just individual scoreboards, to see where the real friction is. Otherwise you're relitigating the same argument every quarter with no way to settle it.
And that's exactly the kind of clarity OAD's built for. If any of those four warning signs sounded familiar, OAD has a free Top Performer Profile that shows you the actual behavioral data behind your team, not just the local scoreboards, in about seven minutes, results in twenty four hours, no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.
See the whole board before you move another piece on it.
Perfect place to leave it. Thanks.
Always.
OAD gives you the same clarity on people our guests talk about, from a 7-minute behavioral survey and instant insights.
