05BUSINESS SITUATION
Roles, rhythm and accountability.
The company has grown, and the way it is run no longer matches its complexity.
Unclear accountabilities, overlaps, slower decisions, weak KPIs and reporting.
Designing accountabilities → management rhythm → KPI framework → delivering the change.
But very often people simply are not sure what they are actually allowed to decide. The manager thinks they should ask the director. The director assumes the decision has already been made. And so the decision travels around the organisation. Formally, nobody has made a mistake. But time passes.
So the problem is not specific to one company. As an organisation becomes more complex, more people have to be involved, information passes through more layers, and the boundaries of accountability get less and less clear.
You can draw a new chart, rename functions, appoint another director. But if decisions are still made the same way, the management structure has not actually changed. Because the cause is not who reports to whom.
What matters far more:
That is where a real management structure begins.
A company can hold a management meeting every Monday. That does not mean it has a working management rhythm. If the same topics come round again every week, if reporting mainly serves to explain last month, and if agreed actions have no owner and no deadline, the meeting becomes a place for exchanging information. Not for running the business.
A good management meeting should follow a very simple logic. First, check where we stand against plan and where the variances are. Then establish why the variance happened and what has to be done. Finally, it has to be clear who is accountable for the agreed action and by when it has to be delivered. And the next meeting starts by checking what was actually done.
It sounds simple. But that is exactly where the difference shows between a meeting where things are discussed and a meeting where the business is actually run.
As a company grows, so does the number of reports. But management still has to know quickly: did we hit the plan? If not, why? Who will do what, and by when? A KPI is only useful if it helps you see a variance and take a decision. And then it also has to be clear who is allowed to take that decision and who answers for the result.
A good management structure therefore has to answer four questions clearly:
Then KPIs, accountability and decisions become part of the same system.
A few things need to be clearly connected:
Only then does it become clear whether what needs to change is the people, the organisational structure, or simply the way management works.
A management structure is not an organisation chart. It exists only when it is clear who decides, who is accountable and how the result is tracked.
If important decisions keep coming back to the owner, the CEO or the board, the management structure is not doing what it exists for.
The problem may not be the people.
Accountability may exist on paper while the authority to decide has not really been handed over.