There is a strange moment that can happen when an organization grows.
You look at the org chart and, technically, everything still makes sense. Everyone has a title. Everyone has a supervisor. The boxes connect in a way that looks perfectly reasonable.
And yet, somehow, the organization feels harder to run than it used to.
People are asking the same questions over and over. Decisions take longer. A few people seem to be involved in everything. Staff are not always sure who can make a decision, so they ask several people just to be safe. Leaders are spending more and more time solving problems that they thought they had already delegated.
Sometimes that is when someone suggests that the organization needs a new org chart.
Maybe it does.
But the chart is rarely the whole problem.
We have both been in organizations where the structure made sense when it was created. Then the organization grew. Programs changed. Teams got bigger. New funding brought new responsibilities. People took on leadership roles because the organization needed them to.
The structure did not necessarily change along with everything else.
One of the places this becomes especially visible is with people who become player-coaches.
A person who has been a great attorney becomes a supervisor, but continues carrying a caseload. A program leader takes on responsibility for a growing team but is still expected to do much of the direct work that made them successful in the first place.
At first, this can work beautifully.
They stay close to the work. They understand what their staff are experiencing because they are experiencing some of it themselves. They bring practical knowledge into leadership decisions. And in organizations where resources are limited, it can feel like the most responsible way to structure a role.
But there is a point when being a player-coach stops being a bridge into leadership and starts becoming a barrier to it.
The person is expected to lead, but there is no real space for them to learn how.
Their calendar fills with supervision meetings, staff questions, program responsibilities, and organizational meetings, but the caseload is still there. The work still needs to get done. And when something urgent happens, the easiest thing is often for the leader to jump back in and do what they already know how to do.
That is the work they are good at.
It is the work that got them promoted in the first place.
So they keep doing it.
Meanwhile, the organization is waiting for them to become the leader it needs.
That can be an unfair expectation.
Leadership takes time. It takes practice. It takes enough distance from the day-to-day work to notice patterns, think ahead, and pay attention to what the team needs rather than only what needs to get done today.
If someone is spending nearly all of their time being the practitioner they used to be, it is very difficult to ask them to simultaneously become the leader the organization now needs.
And this is where organizational structure matters.
A restructuring is not always about adding another layer of management or moving people into different departments. Sometimes it is about recognizing that a role has changed and allowing the role to actually change.
That can be uncomfortable.
There is often a very real need for the work that person has been doing. In legal services, particularly, there are more clients who need help than there are people available to provide it. Taking an experienced attorney out of a caseload can feel like losing capacity at exactly the moment the organization needs more of it.
But leadership is capacity too.
If that person is responsible for developing a team, improving a program, or helping an organization navigate its next stage of growth, then creating the space for them to do that is not taking them away from the mission.
It is part of the mission.
The same thing happens in other parts of an organization. A role gets created to solve one problem, then gradually accumulates three more responsibilities. A manager becomes the person everyone goes to because they have been around the longest. A program expands but remains tucked inside a structure that was designed when it was much smaller. People develop informal ways of getting things done because the formal structure no longer quite fits the work.
Eventually, the organization can start feeling inefficient or disconnected.
But often, the people are not the problem.
The structure is simply asking them to work in ways that no longer match the organization they have become.
That is why we think restructuring should begin with the work, not the boxes.
What has actually changed? What is the organization asking people to do now that it was not asking them to do two years ago? Where are leaders spending their time? Where does work get stuck? What decisions are unclear? What has become dependent on one person simply because nobody has had the time or space to build something different?
Those questions tell you much more than an org chart alone can.
Sometimes the answer will be a new structure. Sometimes it will be a different distribution of responsibilities. Sometimes it will mean creating more leadership capacity. And sometimes it will mean letting someone stop doing work they are very good at so they can become good at the work they have been asked to lead.
That last one can be the hardest.
Growing organizations have to be willing to let people grow with them.
The structure that helped you get here may not be the structure that will help you get where you are going. That does not mean it was wrong.
It means the organization has changed.
And sometimes the first sign that your organization has outgrown its org chart is not that the boxes look wrong.
It is that the people inside them no longer have enough room to do the work those boxes are supposed to represent.