Most leadership teams treat org structure as an administrative artefact. Boxes, lines and titles that get updated when someone asks for them. Structure becomes a maintenance task rather than a strategic discipline.

But a good organisation structure should give people clear answers to four questions: What do I own? Who am I accountable to? Where do decisions sit? And how does work move across organisational boundaries? When those answers start to blur, the symptoms appear quickly – work gets duplicated, decisions slow down, accountability becomes harder to pin down, and more and more responsibility accumulates with the people willing to pick up what falls between roles. The org chart may still look fine. The organisation underneath it may not.

We recently worked with an infrastructure group with close to 1,800 staff across multiple business units, several operating brands and offshore teams in two countries. The business had grown significantly over time, but its structure had evolved largely in response to immediate needs. Different leaders maintained different versions of the organisation chart, roles had accumulated through growth and acquisition, and there was no single view of how the organisation was supposed to operate.

The review resulted in several changes:

• A business partner and shared-services model was introduced, moving specialist support into central functions that could serve every business unit rather than duplicating capability within each one.
• Roles and organisational structure were benchmarked externally against competitors and comparable organisations, testing whether scope, seniority and spans of responsibility were appropriate rather than simply internally consistent.
• Executive and Senior Leadership roles were standardised across business units, so equivalent roles carried comparable scope, accountability and decision-making authority wherever they sat in the group.
• Team sizes were reviewed against actual functional requirements, ensuring headcount reflected the work that needed to be performed rather than legacy allocation.
• Duplicate roles were identified across the organisation, particularly where acquisitions had introduced positions or capabilities that already existed elsewhere in the group.
• Every role on the structure, filled or vacant, was validated against budget and approved by the CFO, ensuring the organisation reflected what the business could actually fund rather than an aspirational structure disconnected from financial reality.
• Leadership governance was clarified through two standing leadership teams and one forum, with the forum explicitly defined as non-decision-making. People therefore knew where decisions were made, where issues were escalated and what each meeting was actually for.

None of these changes were simply about redrawing boxes. They were about ensuring that the formal structure matched how the organisation needed to operate.

The cost of a stale structure

Organisation structures do not stay accurate on their own. As businesses grow, acquire companies and change how they operate, the formal structure can gradually drift away from reality. Roles stop matching responsibilities, authority becomes unclear and duplicate capability accumulates.

The impact shows up in slower decisions, duplicated effort and confusion over ownership. That is why structure should be reviewed deliberately and regularly, not only when a restructure or crisis forces the issue.

Reviewing organisation structure does not automatically mean reducing headcount. Sometimes the answer is consolidation. Sometimes it is greater clarity, centralisation or additional capability.

The objective is not to create the smallest possible organisation. It is to ensure accountability, authority, capability and cost are aligned with what the business is trying to achieve.

Best practices worth adopting

• Create one governed source of truth. There should be one authoritative view of the organisation, with downstream systems aligned to it rather than maintaining competing versions.
• Use consistent role naming. Equivalent roles should carry equivalent titles across entities and business units, so titles signal broadly the same level of responsibility and authority.
• Make primary accountability unambiguous. Cross-functional and matrix relationships may exist, but every role should still have one clearly defined primary accountability line.
• Check structure against budget. Every position, including vacancies, should be linked to an approved budget so the structure reflects what the organisation can actually sustain.
• Review spans and team sizes. Headcount should reflect the work, complexity and management requirements of the function rather than historical allocation.
• Look for duplication after growth and acquisition. Expansion frequently creates overlapping roles and capabilities that can remain hidden unless deliberately reviewed.
• Benchmark externally. Roles, layers and seniority should be tested against relevant competitors and comparable organisations, not assessed in isolation.
• Build reviews into the operating calendar. A regular review cadence helps catch structural drift before it becomes embedded.

An organisation structure is never truly finished. As the business changes, the structure has to keep pace.

A good org chart is more than a picture of who reports to whom. It is a representation of how accountability, authority and work are intended to operate.

The organisations that do this well do not treat organisation design as a one-off project. They treat it as a management discipline.

At Forvane, we help leadership teams assess whether their structure still reflects how the business operates, redesign where needed, and put in place the governance and review processes to keep it current as the organisation evolves.