Don’t sap your company’s power
Small companies are naturally powerful -- until they start acting like big companies. If you are looking to reduce your company’s flexibility, speed, and overall intelligence, you won’t find anything more effective than an organization chart to get the job done. You may need a lot of structure for your business. Go for it, if that’s the case. But if you have a small company, you can maximize its power by avoiding the temptation to compartmentalize your people and other resources for as long as you can.
Decentralize for growth
In many ways, a rigid, centralized organization goes hand-in-hand with a static business model. And that just doesn’t fit most small growth businesses. As Brafman and Beckstrom imply in The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, you can sometimes foster and protect growth more effectively by decentralizing some of the basic functions of your organization. Use your business plan to define the mission, but don’t stifle the energy and creativity of your people. Incorporate leadership-by-example throughout your company, and let “bottom-up collective intelligence” rule.
Structure isn’t strategy
Unless they are unusually enlightened, big companies believe that they need a lot of structure in order to operate. This is not to say that structure isn’t needed in organizations at some point in their development. However, many CEOs feel the need to centralize their operations and impose a traditional hierarchy right from the start. “We’re organizing for growth” typically means an executive is substituting structure for strategy. As Brafmen and Beckstrom point out, every business has to work to find the optimal mix of centralization and decentralization. However, for a small company, it’s probably better to err on the side of decentralization.
Check egos at the door
If your organization learns to value true leadership and to avoid reliance on positional power, it’ll be well on its way to realizing its full potential. Of course, egos are always the biggest impediment to success in this regard. In a centralized hierarchical organization, each person’s responsibility, authority, and accountability are well defined by management. Egos are routinely fed through the prestige of titles and power fixed by job descriptions -- not that there’s anything wrong with that. However, if you want people to focus on supporting the company’s mission, instead of their own, keep your organization from creating ego-driven functional silos (i.e. empires). Don’t let the chain of command be the chain that binds ideas and communication.