If your goal is to build a company that can operate smoothly without you, you’ll need a great team all working together towards a clear common goal.
The four structuring steps below outline how to connect your long-term plans to your organisational structure.
Hopefully by now you’ve already built out your four plans (lifetime, long-term, medium-term and short-term). If you’ve not – then I suggest stop reading here!
What job roles will you need?
Look at your 3 and 10-year plans. Write down what job roles you’ll need your company to have if you’re going to hit your targets.
Tips…
- A job role is not a persons name, nor is it a job title. Often something like “person to do the bookkeeping” will be fine to get started with.
- Don’t make a role for a person. Write the roles your company will need.
- Most companies have “sales”, “operations” and “finance”, with each of those roles usually having other roles reporting to them.
- You’ll likely end up having more roles than you think you need, that’s OK !
- We always struggle to figure out if “Purchasing” belongs under Operations or Finance.
Define the responsibilities
What do you want from each role? Take each role and list the core responsibilities for each.
Write 4-5 simple sentences for each role, explaining what “a good job” looks like.
Tips…
- Don’t go too in-depth, 5-7 responsibilities per role should be ample – too many more and you’re either going into too much detail, or you need to make another role.
- If a role has a subordinate reporting to them, then you’ve just made a manager. “Manage” should be on the list of responsibilities – no exceptions.
- Clear responsibility removes ambiguity. Who “owns” a task should never be in question.
Define Measurables
It should be easy to know if a job is being done well. Look over each role and decide what measurables can use to gauge if a role is working correctly.
Tips…
- Don’t drown in data, a manager should know a job is working well with 3-5 simple numbers.
- Never overcomplicate it. Measurables should be simple.
Assign
Decide who occupies each job role.
Tips…
- One person in multiple roles? No problem!
- Two people in one role? Massive problem – do not do this.
- Third-party services or contractors often occupy a role (with SMEs, it’s usually book-keeping, or a marketing service). This is not a problem, just make sure the role they report to has management factored into their responsibility list.
- Design roles & responsibilities first – put names against them last. Otherwise you may end up making a role specially for someone
- If you have a role on your plan but nobody to fill it, just put a question mark against it – filling roles is often on the 1 and 3-year plans.