An inevitable concern in expanding any business is to ensure that the strengths that initially enabled the business to flourish are maintained while the organization exploits new areas of growth. A new position of location coordinator would enable someone to troubleshoot issues with other location managers while the two of us as CEO and CIO work out the details of franchising new operations or using venture capital to open up more company-owned shops. The location coordinator would handle any issues which arise based upon geographic and regional issues on a case-by-case basis but would still have a general managerial level position and authority.Of course, the idea of delegating is an important one for any growing organization. No one can do everything and currently the organization’s main leadership responsibilities are divided between ourselves. On the other hand, however, there is great concern in adding to an already bloated bureaucracy for our company. Consider the hierarchical levels which already exist—they are already quite deep.
At present, at all of the existing eight locations, there are location managers who report directly to the CEO and reporting to each location manager is a team supervisor with four customer associates beneath that manager....
Adding another level to the vertical organizational structure will likely only further dilute our authority and create confusion about who is issuing particular decisions. Furthermore, it also means that the two of us must police the new, coordinating manager in his or her new position. Any time saved by instituting a new coordinator will likely be offset by the creation of the additional layer in the hierarchical structure.
There are, however, other options. Our organization could shift to a matrix-based structure, in which work assignments rather than locations determines authority. But given that the ultimate goal of our organization is to spread out geographically, this is unlikely to be effective for our type of business, particularly if we elect to franchise our next series of operations. Matrix structures are more suitable for advertising or architectural firms that work on a project-by-project basis (Hall 2018). Another option is a more horizontal organizational structure in which levels of authority are flattened. But this would result in both of us losing valuable control over the organization during this very fragile time in its organizational history.
Thus, given these considerations, I would not recommend creating a new position with a relatively…
