Roles and Reporting Structure
Who owns what, who answers to whom, and where the handoffs land.
In a lot of organizations the structure is informal. People worked out who handles what over time, and it holds together because the people who've been here a while have learned it.
But nobody has the whole picture. Your longest-tenured person knows more than your newest, you know some of it, and a lot of it has never been said out loud to anyone.
That shows up fastest with a new hire. They don't know who to ask about anything, and asking costs them something every time, so they guess, or they go to the wrong person, or they sit on a question for a week. Weeks of ramp-up get spent learning an org chart that could have been handed to them on day one.
It shows up elsewhere too. Two people both think a task is theirs, so it gets done twice or argued about. Something falls between roles and nobody notices until a customer does. A client gets passed between three people before landing with the right one. A decision waits because nobody's sure whose call it is.
None of this means the structure is wrong. It means nobody has ever assembled the whole picture in one place.
The map only exists in pieces
Naming it is most of the work
I sit down with you and with the people doing the jobs, because those two accounts are rarely identical. Then I map what's actually happening: who does what, who decides what, where work passes between people, and which parts nobody has claimed.
That map almost always surfaces a few things worth talking about. A role that's absorbed three jobs because one person kept saying yes. A decision everyone routes to you that shouldn't need to. Two people quietly duplicating each other.
The output is an org chart and a set of role descriptions written in plain language. Not job postings, and not a corporate document nobody reads. Something that says clearly what each person owns and who they go to when something isn't theirs.
What this changes
The practical benefit is fewer dropped balls and faster decisions. But there's a second thing worth naming.
People want to know what they're responsible for. Working without a clear scope is stressful in a way that's hard to articulate, because you're never sure whether something is your problem, and being wrong either way costs you. Writing it down tells your team that their role is real and considered, and that someone has thought about what they do.
It reaches your clients too. When your team knows exactly what they own, they can tell a client who's handling what, and answer without checking first. Clear internal structure shows up externally as a business that has its act together.
And it gives you something to point at when you're delegating, promoting, or hiring, instead of relying on an understanding that only exists in the room.
What this Usually Includes
Interviews with you and with the team
Mapping current roles, ownership, and decision rights
Identifying gaps, overlaps, and unowned work
An org chart that reflects how the business actually runs
Plain-language role descriptions
Clarifying who decides what, and at what threshold
Documenting handoffs between roles
A structure that has room for the next hire
Why me
I spent three and a half years at a marketing and PR agency and finished as Director of Traffic and Operations. Traffic sits at the center of who's doing what, which means I spent every day working across roles and seeing exactly where the structure held and where it didn't.
I also know what this looks like from the inside. The agency nearly tripled in size while I was there, and for a long stretch there was no org chart. As a new hire I wanted one badly, mostly because I couldn't tell who to go to, and nobody wants to spend their first month asking everyone where to find things. Later I wrote job descriptions for new roles, and I partnered with our VP of Account Services to restructure the account team entirely: adding layers of support and defining what each role actually owned. Before that, everyone was doing a bit of everything, which sounds flexible until you notice what's falling through the gaps. The clients felt the difference too. When your team knows exactly what they own, they can tell a client who's handling what, and the whole relationship gets easier to manage.
I've heard executives say titles and descriptions don't matter. They do. Not because people need to be boxed in, but because people need to know what's being asked of them, and what doing it well looks like. Clear scope doesn't limit anyone. It's the opposite: when someone knows where their edges are, they'll go past them, because they're confident about what's theirs.
An org chart does something similar. It shows people where they could go next in your business, which is often the difference between someone growing with you and someone leaving to grow somewhere else.
What Comes Next
Writing Down How It’s Done
Knowing who owns a task is half of it. The other half is documenting how the task actually gets done, so it survives someone leaving.
Not Sure Who Owns What?
Tell me where things are getting dropped or duplicated. That's usually where the structure needs clarifying.