The Flat Team Problem in Growing Businesses
Draw your team on a page. If what comes out is a row of people sitting side by side, all reporting to you, all expected to do a bit of everything, that is a flat team structure, and it is one of the most common and most avoidable problems in a growing business.
How a Flat Team Structure Happens
Nobody designs a flat team structure on purpose. It happens by accident. Work comes in, so you hire someone. More work comes in, so you hire someone else. Over time, the business ends up with a group of generalists rather than a genuine structure, each person expected to handle a bit of everything rather than the specific part they are actually good at.
The Symptoms Look Like a People Problem. They Usually Are Not.
A flat team structure tends to produce a familiar set of symptoms: write-offs, turnover, and people who are quietly unhappy without being able to explain exactly why. It is easy to read that as a hiring problem or a motivation problem. Most of the time, the people themselves are fine. They are simply being asked to play out of position.
What a Sports Team Gets Right That Flat Structures Miss
A goalkeeper and a striker have completely different skill sets, and nobody expects them to swap positions during a match. Everyone plays where their strengths actually fit, and the result is a team that performs better together than any individual talent within it would suggest. The same principle applies inside a business. Some people genuinely enjoy client contact and have the interpersonal skills for it. Others would rather focus on the work itself without the client conversation attached. Both are valuable. Both get wasted when a flat structure asks them to be equally good at everything.
Fixing a Flat Team Structure
The fix is to build the structure deliberately rather than let it form by accident. A useful starting shape splits the client relationship from the production work: someone out front managing the client relationship, and someone else running the work and the team underneath them. The relationship stays with one person. The work flows through a different one. Draw the structure your business should actually have first, then find or develop the people to fit it, rather than building the structure reactively around whoever happens to be available.
If your own team has grown into more of a flat structure than a deliberate one, we would be glad to help you think through what a better shape could look like. Get in touch with the team at MBP Advisory.