BUSINESS BEACON
When Roles Are Built Around Tasks, Not Outcomes, Companies Stall ORG DESIGN ISN’T AN HR PROJECT. IT’S A LEADERSHIP RESPONSIBILITY, AND MOST COMPANIES GET IT WRONG BY JANE GENTRY & PAT ALACQUA
The CEO called after a four-hour leadership meeting that went nowhere. “We’ve tripled revenue in four years,” he said. “I’ve got great people, but decisions are slow, projects keep slipping, and everyone’s frustrated. Is this a people problem or an organizational issue?” “Tell us how you’re defining roles in your company,” we said. They gave us their documented job descriptions, but none defined the outcomes each role was responsible for. Every role was framed around activities, not results. And that’s where the breakdown started. Most roles had been shaped by titles and task lists, not by the result areas they were meant to deliver. And when we looked at their org chart, it mirrored the same problem. Structure built around titles and responsibilities, not outcomes. The people weren’t the problem. The design was. They had scaled from $20 million to $60 million on the same structure, just with more volume, more pressure, and more friction. If your org chart needs a legend and someone to explain it, it’s not a design. It’s a maze. 20 Jan/Feb/Mar 2026 Exhibit City News
Why Most Role Definitions Set You Up to Stall Too many leadership teams treat organization design like a seating chart: move a person here, stretch someone’s span, change a few titles. That’s not design. That’s rearrangement. Real design is about role clarity, ownership of outcomes, and speed of decision-making. When you keep adding headcount to yesterday’s structure, you don’t scale. You stall. Here’s what it looks like when structure lags growth: » Blurry roles: Job descriptions list tasks, not outcomes. Execution depends on guesswork and goodwill. » Slow decisions: No one knows who owns the call. Everything gets stuck. » Project drift: Too many people are involved but no one is truly accountable for delivery. » Burnout at the top: Your best people spend more time compensating for unclear structure rather than leading real progress. The common mistake is handing it off to HR and saying, “Fix this.” HR can support but defining roles and
structure around outcomes is a leadership decision.
How to Redesign Roles Around Real Results Instead of redrawing the org chart, we mapped roles to define four to six key result areas each person was accountable for. The org chart didn’t drive the changes. It reflected them. We broke apart one overloaded VP of Operations role into distinct outcomes, each with clear accountability and decision rights. Here are three of the result areas we defined for that role. » Customer Fulfillment: owns the ship date, not just the schedule » Inventory Health: owns the reorder point and product availability » Supplier Performance: owns keep, coach, or replace decisions on vendors No more “Let me check with three people.” Authority matched the outcome. By week five, the old reflex crept in: “We should add a layer to keep an eye on this.” That’s how bloat begins. We held the line. Fewer layers. More clarity. Sharper ownership. It felt uncomfortable at first. It worked immediately. Six months later, cycle
times dropped. Projects moved. Customer issues got resolved. The executive team got their headspace back. Less triage. More leadership.
Why Credentials Don’t Equal Capability Even the right structure fails if the wrong people are in the seats. You don’t need a title. You need the ability to deliver on outcomes. That means building roles around the results required today, not the activities inherited from yesterday. Most teams overvalue credentials and underestimate capability. We flip that. What matters is whether someone can own a result and move it forward.
Five Gut-Checks to Use Right Now
1. Pick one role. Can you name four to six result areas it owns and the decisions tied to each? If not, the role isn’t designed for outcomes. 2. Look at one project that’s stuck. Who owns the result? If you hear three names, you’ve got drift, not accountability. 3. Open a job description. Is it a list of activities, or a clear contract for outcomes? Rewrite it until it