Structure & Resources

Work specializations are less formally known as roles or job descriptions. They outline what a person is responsible for within an organization or on a smaller team. Clear work specializations allow you to make the best use of talent. They make it clear what an individual person’s responsibilities and measures of success are, and help safeguard against a thinning of resources.

If your organization, like many, relies on a mix of people managers and individual contributors, you need to establish a chain of command. This gives people clear direction on who they should reach out to for support. When people from other departments need to check on the status of cross-functional projects, it makes it easy to find out who’s driving them.

Compartmentalizing people into departments creates teams of people whose jobs are organized around a specific type of work. A department could be human resources, sales, marketing, or IT. People in these departments often share common skill sets and work together frequently on projects. 

The number of team members that report to a given manager is formally referred to as “span of control.” If a manager has a large number of direct reports, the team is often subdivided into smaller departments. This happens often at large companies, where multiple people may fill a similar job function.

the terms centralization and decentralization refer to how much influence upper-level leaders have over an organization. Of course, all leaders have power over their organizations. But decentralized management structures tend to have more agile decision making happening at all levels. 

Formalization determines how much standardizing there is across the organization. It may affect functions, systems, job descriptions, and the flow of information. Organizations with high formalization are often more mature and highly systematized.