Aligning organizational structure with its strategy is essential for an organization to deliver its plans and achieve success.

Here is how we define:

• Strategy is how your organization goes about its work is its strategy (vs. your strategic plan document). This includes the plans that set out how your organization will use its major resources to meet specific goals.
• Structure is the way the pieces of your organization fit together to meet a common goal. The structure is much more than an organization chart. It is the people, positions, procedures, processes, culture, technology and related elements. It defines how all the pieces, parts and processes work together.
• Alignment means that every human, organizational, technical and financial resource increasingly supports and contributes to the achieving strategy in a fashion that is: demonstrable, measurable, efficient and effective, and comply with your principles, policy directives and constraints.
• Workforce is the resources to deliver your plans. It includes staff, partners, outsourced work, and consultants.

Do not view structure separate from strategy

Your organization’s structure is a powerful force. It can support your efforts or work against them. You cannot direct your organization to do something for any length of time unless the structure is capable of supporting your strategy. Task overlap creates confusion, inefficiencies and lack of accountability because it is not clear who does what by when. A strong foundation for long-term productivity requires you to structure your entire workforce to avoid task overlap and confusion.

With our Governance Alignment Program, you optimize your structure. It provides a platform to adjust the structure every time you adjust your priorities.

Aligning structure with your strategy improves efficiency, promotes teamwork, creates work together, and reduces cost. Structure and strategy are dependent on each other. You can create the most efficient and team oriented structure possible and still end up in the same place you are or worse if a good strategy is not adopted. Great your strategy right first.

With a clear focus on what you want to do, align your structure in such a way to best do this. Be thoughtful. Divide responsibilities for optimal results, create branches and decide whether each effort or group participation is the best method for it to meet your goals. The structure needs to support strategy. The strategy is fluid. When you change your strategy, you must make sure your structure supports the new strategy. Otherwise, the existing structure pulls your organization back to its old strategy.

When you make major changes, you must carefully think out every aspect of the structure required to support the strategy. Every part of your organization, every person working for it needs to focus on supporting the vision and direction. Integrated all the effort and resources support the strategy.

It takes the right structure for a strategy to succeed

Management that is solely focused on results can have a tendency to direct everyone on what they need to do without paying attention to the current way your organization works. While members of the workforce may carry out these actions individually, it is only when their daily work supports strategy that your organization’s direction is sustainable over time.

To carry out such a strategic shift requires a change in your organization itself. A well-thought-out structural change is based on a detailed cause and effect analysis. You do not just change a structure to change it. Make sure the changes support your strategy and your workforce understands the reasons for the change. At the same time, do not just start a better leadership and engagement approach in your company or alter the organizational chart without evaluating how that will affect your ability to carry out your current strategies.

We cover this in detail in our "achieving strategy approach." Our "goal alignment program" provides robust tools and methodologies to create the structure that best supports meeting your strategic goals.