Flat Bottlenecks

Having a flat organization is a goal for a lot of business leaders. In many cases, they may not be sure why they want a flat organization, they just know that they do because they have heard it’s a good idea.

Organizations become flat by reducing levels in the hierarchy. The fewer the steps between the lowest worker and the Big Boss, the flatter the organization. This is generally considered to be good for firms in growing or changing industries, because innovation tends to get slowed by having too many people in the approval process. More explanations are needed, more presentations need to be made, more time is spent waiting for someone to make a decision, and of course, you always run the risk of someone making changes, not because it’s really important or necessary, but because they want to make sure they have a say in the final result.

So people try to flatten their organizations to speed things up, which seems to make sense. But does it always work?

Well, think about it: does anything “always” work?

In this case, simply changing the organizational structure without changing the organizational culture will most likely make things worse. If you reduce the number of people who have to provide their approval before something moves forward, but you don’t change the approval process itself, the end result is that you have just as much work to do but fewer people to do it. Rather than moving slowly throughout the whole process, your good ideas will all hit a point and get stuck there, and that’s not an improvement.

If you are going to flatten the organization, you need to give more authority and responsibility to your employees who are doing the actual front-line work. By reducing the number of people in management roles, individuals need more authority/responsibility for managing themselves. The purpose of flattening is not just to reduce the size of the payroll, it’s also to give people the flexibility to do what they need to do. If you are going to speed up your innovation, you need to make sure people are working in a different way that goes along with the structure.

People used to say the world was flat, and it wasn’t. Now people often say their organization is flat, when it really isn’t. It takes more than just changing an organizational chart; it takes changing the mindset, too.