Read the full transcript of digital and retail executive Dr. Janet Sherlock’s talk titled “Is Your Business Organized Poorly? Here’s What To Avoid”, at TEDxUWMadison, June 24, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
The Hidden Cost of Organizational Chaos
Dr. Janet Sherlock: Did you know that in many companies today, employees waste nearly 20% of their time navigating unclear roles and responsibilities? That’s one day a week lost to chaos. Chaos caused by overlapping departments, vague roles and responsibilities, unclear decision-making authority, and conflicting priorities and motivations.
And companies today are struggling more than ever to find the balance between productivity, profitability, and employee engagement. Yet there is a powerful and achievable way to start addressing that balance through the practice of structured organization design.
But ironically, organization design, a practice that’s meant to create structure and combat chaos, has instead contributed to it. It is a neglected discipline at the heart of every organization, but it’s been largely abandoned for the past decade. And in its place, reactionary organizational decisions have created complexity over clarity.
The Pace of Change vs. Human Nature
Now, it’s understandable as the past 25 years have produced rapid and disruptive change to both business and society, driven through changing market dynamics, social change, and most substantially, due to technological advancement. In response, companies have created additional functions and leaders, often without considering the long-term structural impact or the effect on employees. And this rapid pace of change is only going to continue to accelerate.
And here’s the problem. Business is changing fast, but we can’t expect people at their core to change at that same rate. Workplace change affects employees at deep, visceral, and emotional levels. And it affects every level of employees’ psyches, because their income, their livelihood, workplace connections, relationships, self-worth and self-value, and career aspirations are all tied to what employees do, their responsibilities, and how well they’re able to perform or contribute.
Now, in my research, I can tell you that employees are clamoring for clarity.
They want to know their roles, responsibilities, processes, and decision-making boundaries to help them perform better. And the good news is, if employers provide that clarity, they’ll reap the benefits of increased productivity and efficiency. Structured organization design truly is a win-win for both employees and employers.
Two Major Pitfalls in Organization Design
So today, what I want to do is discuss two of the biggest pitfalls that are largely unrecognized in organization design that, if addressed, would yield such positive results for both employees and employers. The first is the excessive expansion of leadership roles and functions, particularly in the C-suite. And the second is the backwards approach for structuring organizations around people versus work.
Pitfall #1: Leadership Role Expansion
Now, this first pitfall about leadership role expansion isn’t about titles. It’s about structure. It’s when a new leader is created, and they take some of the responsibility from one or more leaders, creating overlapping conditions.
So some very common examples in today’s business environment are a chief information officer that now shares technology responsibility with a chief digital officer, or a chief customer experience officer that sits between the head of sales and the head of marketing, or a chief growth officer that has been named to be responsible for the company’s growth strategy when the chief commercial officer thought it was their responsibility.
These types of things are very common, and they have the same common issues with them. First is that oftentimes these new roles are created without altering the existing roles, and the decision-making boundaries and processes aren’t accommodated to accommodate the new functions, and then the new leaders, the existing leaders, and their teams are just left to figure it out on their own, and they can’t organize their way out of the chaos.
And then when you create new functions like this, it usually involves additional headcount and cost, which then constrains budget, and then causes contention for resources across teams. And these issues continue to cause problems across the organization.
Research Findings on Leadership Overlap
In my research studies, I quantitatively examined the impact of these overlapping functions by comparing the singularly-led functions with functions led by multiple leaders that shared responsibilities. I’d like to share a couple of my research findings with you.
First, when asked if there was any overlap of responsibilities with another executive in the organization, the singularly-led leaders said that they had 23% overlap, but those led by multiple leaders had 59% overlap. So what this suggests is that even when you have a single leader who has sole responsibility for something, there are still inherent leadership issues and overlap due to things like matrix organizations, from regions, geographies, channels, brands, or other decision-making factors. So when you expand roles and departments, you’re only exacerbating the problem two and a half times, to be exact.
The second key finding that I want to share was that the groups led by single leaders that are non-proliferated are 22% more productive than those being led by multiple leaders who shared responsibilities. So when you proliferate teams, you just elongate processes, create more meetings, add more decision-makers, and lengthen processes. It’s like adding more steering wheels to a car to try to ensure better navigation. It only makes the ride bumpier.
Executive Perspectives on Organizational Overlap
In addition, in my studies, I interviewed dozens of executives, and I want to share just a couple of quotes that I think speak very well to this particular topic. The first is a chief marketing officer speaking about her chief customer experience officer peer:
“We try to act like we work well together and align, but everything is a struggle with him, and it’s across our organizations. The people on my team have a really hard time with the people on his team.”
And this one is a chief information officer speaking about the chief data officer in his organization:
“We’re peers because we both report to the chief operating officer, but he has no authority over data, architecture, investment, or tools. Essentially, he’s a powerless exec with a big title.”
Ouch. I wish these types of sentiments and scenarios weren’t common, but the truth is that they are, and these weren’t even the meatiest of the comments.
Oftentimes, new departments and leadership roles are created to bridge real or perceived gaps in organizations. What we do when we do this is that we are often setting leaders up for failure by introducing competition and unclear ownership rights. This causes internal turbulence, which is then often marked by quiet disdain, passive aggressive behaviors, and covert turf battles.
Instead, if we build our structures with more clear responsibility, instead of adding in new leaders, we encourage and support our leaders to bridge any potential gaps with communication, trust, respect, collaboration, and empathy to help us build a stronger organization.
Pitfall #2: The FORTH Method vs. People-First Approach
To help with the second pitfall of organization design, does everybody remember PEMDAS from grade school? I see all the kids nodding yes. PEMDAS is the order of operations for math. PEMDAS ensures the consistency of mathematical calculations, and if you don’t follow the correct order of operations, you’ll likely get the wrong answer.
Well, I’ve devised a similar order of operations that can be leveraged in organization design using a work first approach. It’s called FORTH. First you start by determining the function and work that needs to be completed. Then you create the optimal organizational structure. Then you create the roles that are required to complete and execute the work. Then you apply titles to each of the roles using clear descriptive language and staying away from jargon. And then, and only then, do you name the optimal person or human for each role.
Now this sequence and order of operations sounds pretty straightforward and simplistic, right? But many companies are doing the exact opposite. They make their decisions around people, who we have, who we want to keep, who we want to hire, who we want to reward, instead of looking at the work itself.
The Franken-Org Problem
If you’re in corporate America, this type of scenario may sound familiar. We hire Beth as a VP from our top competitor and we create a role for her, but we need to take people from other departments to make her role. But Bill won’t work for Beth and we want to retain him, so we keep him under Bob and we create a dotted line to Beth. And we want to promote Val because she’s a high potential employee, so we make a role for her with dual reporting. But that guy Bill, he resigns anyway, so then Beth and Bob fight over his department and then we split it into two.
Anyway, you see where this is going. Organizational drift, continually restructuring around people, dotted lines, dual reporting, triple reporting, can all lead to the dreaded Franken-org. It’s not just because the organization chart looks ugly or menacing. The menacing part is the fact that with every one of those moves, we’ve had to reconstruct decision-making rights and processes. You’d be surprised at how common this is and we wonder why decisions take so long to make in our organizations.
But this is the way it works in small companies and large companies, unfortunately. I can tell you this from research and from my own experience.
personal experience. And I can tell you that it can send unintended messages to the organization that you elevate people who threaten to quit, you place favorites, or that you reward land grabbing. And these unintended messages corrode your culture and create resentment. The success of your organization depends on a strong strategy and a strong structure, not on accommodating individuals.
Now, employee development and retention is critically important, but there are better ways to address that without disrupting the entire organization. When you design around people, it is a slippery slope. You will continue to reorganize again and again. When you design around the company, the strategy, and the work, you create unity and clarity. Organizations must prioritize clarity in their structures over the chaos of these reactionary changes.
There’s no such thing as a perfect organization and I am not suggesting a completely static organization, as we do need to create new capabilities and we do need to create new roles. And sometimes we need to make a decision around a particular person, but these should be the exception and not the norm. The really hard part in organization design is the detailed mapping of people, structure, technology, and processes.
If our leaders and our future leaders would focus on recognizing and avoiding the two pitfalls of overlapping functions and designing around people, you would really benefit your employees and your employers.
Four Suggestions for Organizational Clarity
So I have just four suggestions to help with avoiding these pitfalls that I believe will help with clarity in an organization.
First, start with a blank org chart that focuses on the work and not on people and resist that temptation to start naming people into the function before you’ve figured out the structure. And don’t create roles and departments just to give people a place. Before you create new functions and new leadership roles, consider giving that capability to an existing or incumbent leader. And if they don’t have the skills or capability to accept that, they might not be the right person and you might need to replace them.
Next, create job descriptions with care. And when things change, make sure that they are updated accordingly. And rethink job description, the traditional job description formats, and add new sections that clearly define the decision-making authority for that particular role.
Oh, that’s a great use for AI. Use AI to scan all the job descriptions across the company to look for overlapping responsibilities or duplication of effort. And instead of designing around people, consider a job rotation process. It really helps to strengthen and develop employees while giving more capabilities in the organization and strengthening the structure.
Conclusion: Clarity is Kindness
Organization design and clarity isn’t just a nice to have. It is critical. In today’s turbulent world, employees are desperate for clarity. Clarity is kindness. Lack of clarity in the workplace is actually cruel.
When we design our organizations with clarity, we can conquer chaos, enable our employees, and drive results that matter. If you fix the structure, you can fix the results.
