In today’s competitive environment, the ability to scale efficiently is more important than ever. In the construction, energy, and infrastructure sectors, scaling isn’t simply about hiring more people or increasing project pipelines—it’s about building a system that supports sustained delivery. As project complexity rises and delivery expectations accelerate, organisations often find their existing structures are no longer fit to scale.
McKinsey’s research highlights that organisational health remains the strongest predictor of long-term performance and competitive advantage.
Healthy organisations are more resilient, better positioned to weather market disruptions, and consistently deliver results. Companies with healthy organisational practices deliver three times the total shareholder returns (TSR) of unhealthy companies over the long term.
Without a strategic focus on organisation design, firms risk becoming overwhelmed by growing demands, operational inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.
In this article, we explore why organisational design is critical to scaling execution and maintaining performance over time. By aligning teams, processes, and decision-making with strategic goals, organisations can avoid common pitfalls and position themselves for sustainable growth.
The Principles for a Scalable Operating Model
Clarity That Drives Execution
To scale effectively, role clarity must be non-negotiable. When roles aren’t clearly defined, teams end up working on overlapping tasks, leading to inefficiency and confusion. Every team member needs to know exactly what they are accountable for, how their work contributes to the bigger picture, and how they fit into the broader strategy.
Gallup’s data reveals that engaged employees—those with role clarity—are 14% more productive and 23% more profitable than their disengaged counterparts. When roles are clear and employees are aligned with strategic goals, productivity increases across the board.
Aligning Teams with Strategy
Scaling isn’t just about adding more people or projects—it’s about ensuring that your teams are aligned with your strategic priorities. Each function should directly support the overarching goals of the business. When teams are built with purpose and aligned with organisational strategy, execution becomes more efficient and impactful.
This alignment allows teams to work towards a unified objective, whether that’s delivering high-value projects, improving client satisfaction, or increasing profitability. A clear strategic alignment ensures that everyone is pulling in the same direction, making execution smoother and more effective.
Distributed Accountability
As organisations grow, a key factor to scaling effectively is ensuring that accountability is shared at every level. Accountability shouldn’t be concentrated at the top. Teams at all levels must be empowered to make decisions within their defined roles.
By distributing accountability, teams can move quickly, make autonomous decisions, and drive results without constantly waiting for approval from senior leadership. This decentralisation fosters a culture of ownership, where employees feel more invested in their roles and the organisation’s success.
It also allows leadership to shift focus from day-to-day operations to long-term strategy, enabling them to make more informed, impactful decisions.
Research from McKinsey shows that organisations with distributed decision-making and accountability are 4.2 times more likely to be healthy and perform at a higher level than their peers.
By embedding accountability across the organisation, firms not only increase efficiency but also enhance employee engagement and retention. Employees who feel empowered and connected to the company’s goals are more motivated to achieve outstanding results and drive sustainable growth.
When to Rethink Your Structure
Sometimes the need for organisational change is obvious, but often, it’s more subtle. If your company is struggling to grow, the issue may not be with your team’s capability but with how your teams are structured.
Here are a few signs that your structure may be hindering growth:
Excessive Coordination
If your teams are bogged down with meetings, approvals, and reports instead of executing on deliverables, your structure might be creating unnecessary coordination overhead. When there’s too much time spent coordinating instead of delivering, it’s a signal that your systems need to be streamlined.
Process Fragmentation
Over-customizing processes for individual projects or clients leads to inefficiency. As you scale, you can’t afford to reinvent the wheel each time. Standardising key processes, where possible, allows you to scale without sacrificing quality or flexibility.
Knowledge Silos
A lack of shared knowledge across teams creates inefficiencies and duplication of effort. When teams are unable to easily access or share critical insights, they waste time reinventing solutions rather than leveraging the knowledge already in the business. Creating systems for knowledge sharing is essential to scale effectively.
Leveraging collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, or building a centralised knowledge management system, ensures that critical insights are easily accessible, helping teams avoid reinventing the wheel and instead focus on delivering value quickly.
McDonald’s: A Case for Scalable Operations
To illustrate system-led delivery, consider McDonald’s. The company serves billions of meals every year, not because every worker is an expert, but because their system is designed for efficiency. Each step of the process—from order to preparation to delivery—is standardized and repeatable, ensuring speed, consistency, and scalability.
McDonald’s doesn’t rely on fast people; it relies on a fast system. By creating a predictable, replicable workflow, they can scale effortlessly while maintaining quality across thousands of stores. This same principle applies to business operations: when the system is streamlined, and roles are clearly defined, the organisation can scale without losing quality or efficiency.
Re-designing Your Organisation Around Growth
As you assess your organisational structure, it’s critical to ask: Is this design serving our strategic goals? Organisational growth is as much about structure as it is about people. To scale effectively, your organisation must be designed to support execution, empower decision-making, and align roles with outcomes.
Here are a few steps to redesign your organisation around strategic priorities:
- Evaluate your workflows: Ensure tasks and decisions flow seamlessly across the organisation, with clearly defined roles that align with business objectives.
- Standardize key processes: Streamline workflows to eliminate inefficiencies, ensuring the core functions can scale without starting from scratch.
- Distribute accountability: Ensure that accountability is clearly defined at every level of the organisation, empowering teams to take ownership of their work.
By focusing on these principles, your business can evolve its organisational design to support scalable, sustainable growth. Beyond structure, it’s about creating a system that delivers results consistently.
Conclusion
The right organisational design is a strategic enabler of growth. By aligning roles, accountability, and processes with the business’s strategic goals, companies can scale with confidence and efficiency. The future of your business doesn’t lie in more resources, but in building an organisation that’s structurally aligned to deliver at scale.
Organisational design is the key to ensuring that your teams are not just working harder, but working smarter—delivering tangible outcomes like increased revenue, higher customer retention, and greater operational efficiency.
References
Gallup. (n.d.). What is employee engagement, and how do you improve it? Gallup. Retrieved from https://www.gallup.com/workplace/285674/improve-employee-engagement-workplace.aspx
McKinsey & Company. (2024, February 12). Organizational health is (still) the key to long-term performance. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/organizational-health-is-still-the-key-to-long-term-performance