Most companies blame a bad quarter on the people. Edwin and Claire make the case that it’s almost always the structure around them, unclear accountability, slow decisions, and metrics that reward the wrong thing, and why “fit for purpose” beats “best practice” every time.
Welcome back to Science of Leading. I want to start with a claim that's going to make some leaders uncomfortable. Most organizations don't fail because their people lack talent. They fail because the structure around those people makes good work hard.
That claim should make people uncomfortable, because it's usually true. Unclear accountability, slow decisions, conflicting priorities, metrics that reward the wrong behavior. None of that is a talent problem. That's a design problem wearing a talent costume.
A design problem wearing a talent costume, I like that. And it shows up in something we talk about constantly: alignment theater. Where instead of a fast decision, you get a meeting, then an escalation, then another meeting.
Right, and it happens when decision rights are vague. Nobody's actually unwilling to decide, they're unclear on whether it's their call to make. So they protect themselves with process. The org chart still exists, but the real structure is whoever's willing to sit in the most meetings.
McKinsey's organizational health research backs this up in a way that should worry any CEO. Companies that score in the top quartile for organizational health see meaningfully higher total shareholder returns than the bottom quartile, and their research keeps pointing to alignment and execution discipline as the actual driver.
That's the part people skip past. They treat "organizational health" like a soft HR phrase. McKinsey is telling you it shows up on the balance sheet. And when we look across OAD's own data set, over ten million assessments, more than forty countries, the pattern repeats everywhere. It's rarely a single bad hire tanking a team. It's a structure that never made clear who owns what.
So the fix isn't "hire better people," it's "design a place where the people you already have can actually execute."
Precisely. And the test is simple. Can every leader in the room explain the same top three strategic goals, in the same words? Can teams name what they're going to stop doing to make room for those goals? If the answer's no, you don't have a talent gap. You have an alignment gap, and no amount of recruiting closes that.
Okay, so let's say a leader accepts that. The structure is the problem. The next question is which structure. And I think this is where a lot of companies get stuck chasing what they read in a case study about some other company entirely.
That's the second trap, and it's just as common as the first. There is no universally best structure. A functional model protects expertise. A divisional model protects speed and accountability by market. A matrix model buys you coordination at the cost of slower decisions. A product or pod model buys you customer focus, but only if your roles are genuinely clear, otherwise it falls apart fast.
So "best practice" is almost a trick question, because best practice for who, solving what problem.
Exactly right. The question isn't "what structure is best." It's "what problem am I actually solving, and which structure is fit for that purpose." And once you pick one, the real work starts, because a structure only works if roles map cleanly to outcomes. Clear responsibility, clear authority, minimal overlap, explicit handoffs.
That overlap piece is where I've seen so many teams quietly bleed performance. Multiple roles sharing partial responsibility for the same result, so when something breaks, everyone can technically say "well, that wasn't fully mine."
And when nobody fully owns the result, nobody's accountable for the result. That's not a people failure. That's a design failure, and it's fixable the moment leadership is willing to look at the chart honestly instead of defending it.
Which is exactly the kind of clarity OAD helps leaders build. If you're listening and wondering whether your own team's friction is a talent problem or a structure problem, OAD has a free Top Performer Profile that gives you real behavioral data on your own people in about seven minutes, results back in twenty-four hours, no credit card required. That's O-A-D dot A-I.
Start there before you start reorganizing. Know what you're actually working with before you redraw the boxes.
Great 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.
