When a leader says “we need a reorg,” the reporting lines are rarely what’s actually broken.
When a leader tells me “we need a reorg,” I usually hear something else underneath it: something isn’t moving the way it should.
Decisions are taking too long. Work is getting done twice. Senior leaders keep getting pulled into things their teams should be handling. Two departments both think they own something, or neither does, and important work keeps falling in between.
A new org chart feels like the fix because it’s visible. It gives leadership something concrete to change and something to announce. But in my experience, reporting lines are rarely the real problem. More often it’s priorities that were never made clear, a process built for a smaller company, a role that quietly outgrew one person or a conversation about accountability or performance that keeps getting put off. Moving the boxes doesn’t touch any of that.
Here’s the distinction I draw. The org chart shows who reports to whom. The operating model is how the business actually gets work done: how decisions are made, who owns the result, how work moves between teams, what information people rely on, what’s centralized and how performance is measured. You can change the first without touching the second. People get new titles and new managers, and the same decisions still get stuck with the same leaders.
That’s why I want these questions answered before anyone redraws a single box:
- What work creates the most value?
- What work needs to change?
- Which decisions are too slow or unclear?
- Where is ownership duplicated or missing?
- Which teams depend on one another?
- What should be centralized?
- What needs to remain close to the customer or the operation?
- Which capabilities are missing?
- What can current leaders realistically own?
- What problem is the new structure supposed to solve?
Once those answers are clear, the chart tends to follow. It reflects the decisions instead of standing in for them.
Skipping that step is expensive. Leaders spend months planning the change, announcing it and helping people settle into new roles. Underneath that, confidence drops, strong people leave and their knowledge goes with them, and decisions slow down while everyone works out the new boundaries. If the real issues were never addressed, they come back, and the company reorganizes again. After a few rounds of that, employees learn to wait for the next version instead of committing to this one.