HRBPs: From Support to Strategy

Research shows the HRBP role is at an inflection point. Only about half of stakeholders perceive HRBPs as truly strategic, with many HRBPs consumed by transactional demands. Yet, when HRBPs function as strategic advisors—using data, organization design (OD) tools and change leadership, the gains are tangible: stronger performance, healthier organizations and faster execution of strategic priorities.

The opportunity to use your HRBPs as a stronger asset is clear: shift them from support to strategy, build OD capability and formalize a partnership model where HRBPs help Alignment Leaders win across design and activation. ​

One of the best ways HRBPs can support Alignment Leaders is by helping translate strategy into an operating system. This means:

• Clarifying the strategic problem to solve
• Identifying differentiating capabilities
• Making structural and governance choices
• Activating change so behaviors, roles and decisions reflect the new design

To deliver this, Alignment Leaders need HRBPs who can:

• Read the systems: detect misalignment across strategy, work, structure, metrics and culture.
• Shape design: use OD tools to connect strategic intent to operating model choices.
• Orchestrate activation: coach leaders, sequence role changes and guide communications so the design sticks.

The Value of a Strategic Partnership

Engaging HRBPs as a strategic partner seems like an obvious solution, but the reality is more complicated. Most HRBPs find themselves devoting the majority of their time to handling personnel issues and daily operations.  

Despite the challenges, organizations that can make the shift from generalist support to strategic talent advisor see tangible benefits:

• Improved organizational health: Organizations with capable, strategic HRBPs report higher employee performance and improved financial outcomes — a 2020 Gartner guide reported that businesses with strategically effective HRBPs improved employee retention by 24%, performance by 22%, profitability by 9% and revenue growth by 7%.¹ These outcomes show up when HRBPs are embedded early in strategy planning and design—not just involved post-decision.
• Maintained momentum: Experience has shown that HRBPs can serve as a “secret weapon” during and after design, sustaining momentum during implementation, where most transformations falter.

The evidence is clear. When HRBPs and Alignment Leaders work closely together, they play a critical role in keeping an organization healthy and ensuring it meets its strategic goals.

HRBPs in Action

The role of Alignment Leaders is to make choices. HRBPs are then responsible for converting those choices into human systems that perform. We’ve outlined six concrete contributions HRBPs can provide to support Alignment Leaders:

1. Create clear design criteria and tradeoffs

• Work with leaders to set clear rules for design that support strategy, considering factors like speed vs. specialization and customer proximity vs. scale.
• Make tradeoffs clear so structure and decision rights reinforce, rather than dilute, the strategic bet.

2. Apply the design to the operating model and structure

• Translate strategy into work by determining what differentiates the organization and what should be done as efficiently as possible.
• Inform organizing rationale, spans/layers and linkage mechanisms; pressure-test where centralization/decentralization supports capability flow.

3. Determine decision rights and governance

• Map critical decisions and decide who makes the call. Set up simple, transparent decision-making mechanisms to prevent bottlenecks.
• Build leader routines (cadence, forums, metrics) that maintain alignment without adding bureaucracy.

4. Define capabilities and set workforce strategy

• Define mission-critical capabilities; shape staffing, decide whether to build talent internally, hire it or bring it in temporarily, and create focused training.
• Partner with COEs to align rewards, career paths and mobility with the new operating model.

5. Set metrics and track organizational health

• Construct a small, visible scorecard linking design intent to outcomes (cycle time, quality, customer impact, cost).
• Track adoption and health markers such as how fast decisions get made, how clear people are on their roles, and how often work must be redone. Use these signals to make quick adjustments.

6. Help leaders support the change

• Prepare leaders to “live the design” through active support, clear messaging and the small everyday behaviors that reinforce strategy.
• Plan the timing of role changes and communications. Create an environment where people feel safe asking questions and can raise issues quickly.

Putting It Into Practice: A Partnership Model That Works

Alignment Leaders also have an important role to play when it comes to supporting HRBPs in their strategic role. They can catalyze HRBP impact by:

• Treating their HRBP like the chief organizational strategist. This means asking for an explicit point of view on structure, decision flows and capability bets before approving designs.
• Investing in HRBP capability. By funding OD training and providing access to playbooks, they create a safe space for HRBPs to facilitate design debates and challenge assumptions.

Equipped HRBPs do not just “support” change; they architect alignment. They ensure the operating model reinforces the strategic bet, leaders live the design and the organization sustains the change long after workshops end. In a world where strategy cycles shorten and talent markets tighten, that capability is not a luxury—it is a competitive advantage.

If you want alignment that lasts, elevate your HRBP function. Clarify the operating model, build OD capability, embed HRBPs early in strategy and measure design health with discipline. Do that and your HRBPs will become the strategic muscle behind your Alignment Leadership—turning intent into impact, at speed and at scale.

Check back here or follow us at linkedin.com/company/alignorg-solutions for part 2 of this three-part blog series.

1. Gartner. Gartner for HR: A Nine-Step Process to Improve HR Business Partner Performance. 2020.

Across the life sciences sector, common questions are emerging as organizations navigate growth, complexity and changing capabilities.

Our experience spans biopharma, biotech, medtech, medical devices, diagnostics and life sciences, with organizations at very different points in their evolution. Some are expanding into new parts of the value chain. Others are managing increasingly complex portfolios, integrating acquisitions, building enterprise platforms or exploring how AI may reshape work.

The specific organizational challenges vary. What is striking, however, is how often the underlying questions are similar:

• What capabilities should we own?
• Where should they sit?
• What should be shared across the enterprise?
• Where does business-unit autonomy create value?
• How should functions come together around products or assets?
• How does AI change the way decisions are organized?
• And, perhaps most fundamentally, who should make which decisions?

Let’s explore these seven common questions in more detail.

1. As we expand across the value chain, what should we own?

Life sciences organizations are moving beyond their historical areas of focus. Depending on the organization, that can mean adding manufacturing capabilities, diagnostics, clinical support, patient services, data and analytics, digital capabilities or other adjacent offerings.

The strategic rationale can vary, but the organizational implications are often similar.

Adding a capability is not simply a matter of adding people or creating a new function. It can introduce new interfaces, new expertise, new decision rights and new dependencies across the organization.

This creates an important question:

Which capabilities are becoming strategically important enough to differentiate, and which can be delivered effectively through partners or the broader ecosystem?

Organizations often find that the answer is not binary. Some capabilities may need to be deeply owned internally, while others may be accessed through partnerships, outsourcing, acquisitions or shared platforms.

The operating-model challenge is determining where ownership creates meaningful strategic value and where it simply creates additional organizational complexity. That distinction carries real consequences: owning the right capabilities can sharpen differentiation and accelerate speed to market, while owning the wrong ones drains resources, slows execution and delivers little in return. Getting this call right, and revisiting it as the business evolves, is where much of the value is won or lost.

2. As our portfolio matures, where should we integrate and where should we differentiate?

Many large life sciences organizations have already evolved into portfolio models through acquisitions, therapeutic areas, franchises, platforms, business units or geographic expansion.

Once that portfolio is established, another question emerges:

How much should the enterprise operate as one company, and where should individual businesses retain autonomy?

We see organizations navigating a familiar set of tensions:

• Enterprise scale and business-unit autonomy
• Standardization and flexibility
• Shared capabilities and differentiated capabilities
• Enterprise governance and speed of decision-making
• Common platforms and business-specific requirements

There is no universal answer. What makes sense depends on where value is created, where expertise resides, where scale matters and where differences between businesses are strategically meaningful.

The right balance can change as a portfolio matures. The organizational choices that make sense during acquisition or rapid expansion may look very different once businesses, capabilities and platforms become more established. Organizations that design fluidly can adjust as the market shifts. They’re better able to absorb new capabilities and new technologies without triggering a disruptive, top-to-bottom reorganization every few years. That agility protects speed to market and preserves momentum when conditions change quickly.

3. How do we organize around products and assets without losing functional expertise?

We are seeing increasing interest in bringing technical, scientific, medical, commercial, manufacturing and operational capabilities together around products, assets, programs or therapeutic areas.

The intent is straightforward: create greater end-to-end accountability, improve alignment and reduce the friction that can occur when important decisions cross functional boundaries.

But bringing people together around an asset does not eliminate the need for deep functional expertise.

It raises a different question:

What should be organized around the product or asset, and what should remain organized around the function?

This creates a balance between functional depth and end-to-end accountability.

The organizational structure is only part of the equation. The more consequential questions often involve who owns the outcome, who owns the expertise, who makes tradeoffs and how disagreements are resolved when functional and product priorities diverge.

In that sense, cross-functional operating models are as much about decision rights and interfaces as they are about reporting relationships.

4. Which capabilities should we build, buy, partner for, or share?

“Make vs. buy” has traditionally been framed as a sourcing or cost question.

Increasingly, it is also an operating-model question.

As capabilities become more specialized, organizations are considering not only whether they can perform the work internally, but how much organizational capability they actually need to own.

The choices can span a broader spectrum:

Build internally → acquire → partner → outsource →divest →access through an enterprise platform

The answer can also change over time.

A capability that begins as an outsourced service may become strategically important enough to develop internally. Conversely, an internally developed capability may eventually become something the organization can access more efficiently through a partner or shared platform.

The recurring question is therefore less about whether something is “make” or “buy” and more about:

Where do we need to own the expertise, decisions and organizational muscle ourselves?

That distinction becomes particularly important when a capability has implications for differentiation, intellectual property, speed, risk or long-term strategic flexibility.

5. When does a capability become a platform?

We’re also seeing movement away from repeatedly building capabilities around individual programs or businesses. Instead, organizations are creating reusable enterprise capabilities and platforms.

This can occur across areas such as manufacturing, clinical operations, data, technology, analytics and scientific capabilities.

The underlying idea is compelling: build something once, establish scale and expertise and allow multiple parts of the organization to benefit.

But platform models introduce a different set of operating-model questions:

• Who owns the platform?
• Who funds it?
• Who determines priorities?
• How do businesses influence the roadmap?
• Who establishes standards?
• What happens when the needs of one business conflict with the needs of the broader enterprise?

A platform therefore changes more than where a capability sits.

Once multiple businesses depend on a shared capability, the organization needs mechanisms for making enterprise-level decisions about that capability.

In this sense, platformization is as much an operating-model decision as it is a technology or capability decision.

6. How does AI change the way work and decisions are organized?

AI is generating significant discussion across life sciences, but one key question extends beyond the technology itself.

If AI changes how work gets done, what happens to the way that work is organized?

The implications could extend across several dimensions:

Work: What activities change, accelerate, or become automated?

Capabilities: What new expertise becomes important?

Structure: Where do those capabilities reside?

Decision-making: Which decisions can be augmented by AI, and which require human judgment and accountability?

Governance: What new controls, oversight and risk-management mechanisms are required?

One possibility is that AI’s organizational impact will not come primarily from eliminating entire functions. Instead, it may change the boundaries between roles, functions and capabilities.

That could make existing operating-model choices more visible.

Where work currently moves through multiple handoffs, where decisions are fragmented, or where expertise is difficult to access, AI may create opportunities to rethink how those connections work.

7. How do we increase decision speed while maintaining rigor?

For life sciences organizations, organizational agility has a particular constraint: speed matters, but so do quality, safety, scientific rigor, regulatory requirements and risk management.

That makes governance an especially important operating-model question.

The challenge is not simply to reduce governance.

It is to understand:

Which decisions need enterprise oversight? Which can be made closer to the work? Who has the authority to decide? And when does a decision need to be escalated?

We are seeing organizations revisit decision rights, governance forums, approval processes and escalation paths with this in mind.

One observation is that greater agility does not necessarily require fewer controls.

It can instead come from clearer decision rights, fewer unnecessary handoffs and greater clarity about which decisions require escalation.

For organizations operating in highly regulated environments, that distinction can be particularly important.

What connects these questions?

While these seven questions appear different on the surface, they point toward a common challenge.

Life sciences organizations are increasingly designing around capabilities and the connections between them, rather than simply around functions or organizational boxes.

As capabilities expand, portfolios mature, platforms emerge, partnerships increase and technology changes the nature of work, organizations must continually make choices about four things:

Integration: Where does bringing capabilities together create value?

Differentiation: Where does the organization need specialized capabilities or autonomy?

Ownership: What should be built and maintained internally versus accessed through the ecosystem?

Decision rights: Who needs to make which decisions, and at what level?

There’s no single operating model that works across biopharma, biotech, medtech, medical devices, diagnostics and life sciences. Even organizations within the same sector can have very different strategic priorities and organizational needs.

What appears more consistent are the questions leaders are having to navigate.

The answers will vary. But increasingly, the ability to make those choices deliberately, and to evolve them as the organization changes, may be as important as the organizational structure itself.

The operating model is ultimately not just a question of where capabilities sit, but how those capabilities, accountabilities and decisions work together to create value.

The results? Mixed. Operational costs drop. But guest satisfaction scores—the hotel’s defining metric for decades—begin to slide. Long-time guests feel processed, not welcomed. The brand’s hallmark sense of personal connection has quietly eroded.

Nobody made a reckless decision. But somewhere between the technology roadmap and the rollout, a critical question went unasked: Which of our capabilities actually make us who we are, and which ones just keep the lights on?

The Real Challenge Isn’t Adopting AI. It’s Knowing Where to Apply It.

Across industries, executives are under real pressure to move quickly on AI. The tools are increasingly accessible, use cases are multiplying and competitors are experimenting broadly. The instinct is to act.

But, as we note in our Executive Guide, Designing AI Into Your Operating Model, “Without clarity, it’s easy to apply AI generically—standardizing what should be distinctive or optimizing what should be reimagined.”

The executives who generate sustained competitive advantage from AI aren’t just moving fastest. They’re moving deliberately to focus AI on the capabilities that reinforce their unique value proposition, not just the areas where automation is easiest.

Start with the Work: Distinguishing Differentiating from Foundational Capabilities

This process starts with understanding the two types of organizational capabilities:

Differentiating capabilities are those that directly shape how customers perceive your value. They reinforce your strategic identity and are the reason clients choose you over alternatives. For the luxury hotel, that’s the personalized guest experience. It means knowing a guest’s preferences before they ask and making them feel recognized rather than processed.

Foundational capabilities are necessary but non-distinctive. Compliance management, billing, inventory tracking and standard reporting all keep the organization running, but they don’t win customers. They’re table stakes.

This distinction matters enormously because it determines where and how AI investments create the highest return:

• Applied to differentiating capabilities, AI should amplify by deepening personalization, enabling real-time responsiveness and extending what your best people can do.

• Applied to foundational capabilities, AI should drive efficiency by reducing cost, increasing consistency and freeing human talent for higher-value work.

Let’s return again to our luxury hotel. AI-powered demand forecasting, automated check-in and housekeeping all belong in the foundational tier. But the personalized guest experience—knowing that a returning guest prefers extra pillows, a quiet room and a late checkout—that’s differentiating. AI here should support and extend human judgment, not replace the warmth that defines the brand.

Match AI Depth to Strategic Intent

Once capabilities are classified, the next step is defining how deeply AI should be integrated. In our guide, we identify three distinct levels of strategic intent:

• Optimize: Automate and streamline existing processes to drive efficiency. Best applied to foundational work.
• Transform: Rethink how work is performed, restructuring workflows and roles to create meaningful differentiation. Suited to high-value, customer-facing capabilities.
• Expand: Unlock entirely new capabilities, insights or value offerings that open new market opportunities.

Each level demands a different investment profile, governance model and organizational design. Mismatching them is where many AI initiatives lose traction. Over-engineering a transactional process with transformative-level AI investments dilutes strategy. Under-investing in differentiating capabilities with basic automation misses the competitive opportunity entirely.

Strategic intent also shapes accountability. When AI is driving transformation in a customer-facing capability, who owns the outcomes? Who decides when AI recommendations are acted on, and when human judgment overrides them? These aren’t IT questions. They’re leadership questions, and they need answers before deployment, not after.

AI Isn’t a Strategy—It’s an Enabler

There’s a pattern in organizations that struggle with AI: they treat it as a strategy in itself. They set adoption targets, track tool deployment metrics and measure success by the number of functions touched. But none of that creates competitive advantage.

AI amplifies what’s already in your system, good or bad. A coherent strategy gets amplified. A fragmented operating model gets more fragmented. An organization with clear differentiating capabilities deepens them. One without strategic clarity standardizes everything, including the things that made it distinctive.

Where to Start

If you’re evaluating or scaling AI integration across your organization, these are the questions worth prioritizing:

• What are our differentiating capabilities? Where does customer perception of our value actually come from?
• Where are we applying AI—and does that match our strategic intent? Are we optimizing foundational work and amplifying differentiation, or accidentally standardizing what should be distinctive?
• What does each type of work demand? Have we mapped tasks carefully enough to determine the right level of AI involvement?
• Who is accountable when AI informs or executes decisions? Are decision rights clear before deployment?

Getting these answers right before scaling AI investment is the difference between building a competitive advantage and building an automated version of the status quo.

Access session slides

Dive deeper into the insights from our executive guide, Designing AI Into Your Operating Model, with this live webinar. Learn how to align AI with your strategy and workforce, and gain practical strategies to lead your organization into the future.

What You’ll Learn:

• Aligning AI with your strategy for maximum impact
• Preparing your workforce for AI-enabled roles
• Real-world case studies and actionable takeaways

If you’ve spent time around agile teams, you know they are fond of a few practical concepts: prioritize people over process, respond to change over worshipping the plan and avoid pretending that a slick, 47-slide roadmap is the same thing as progress.

Those ideas translate well to organizational design. After all, org design is complex, human, political, iterative and occasionally held together by sticky notes and one brave person willing to ask, “Wait, who actually owns this decision?”

One agile concept I especially love for org design is the Definition of Done. In Scrum, the Definition of Done is the shared quality standard an increment must meet before it can be considered complete, usable and ready for inspection or release.

Org design needs the same discipline. Without a shared Definition of Done, teams can spend weeks polishing boxes and lines without really knowing when enough is enough.

Why “Done” Gets Weird in Org Design

In software development, “done” might mean the feature is tested, integrated, documented and ready to be released. In org design, “done” is more slippery. Is it done when the future-state model is approved? Announced? When employees know what changes when they show up on Monday morning? Or is it only ‘done’ when employees are successfully working in their new roles, with new responsibilities?

The answer, inconveniently, is yes. And also, it depends.

A strong Definition of Done creates transparency. It gives the design team, sponsors and stakeholders a shared understanding of what “complete enough to move forward” actually means.  

What “Done” Might Mean

For an organization design effort, a practical way to get to Definition of Done might include aligning on a few key questions:

• When we say the design is complete, what will be true in the organization?
• What would a leader or employee experience that tells them the new design is working?
• What are you assuming is happening when we say this transformation is complete?
• What would not be acceptable to call done?
• What needs to be in place for you to confidently step away from this and trust it will sustain?
• Have all areas of our organization been aligned around our central strategy?

When moving from design to implementation, these questions can help the project team draw the chalk line of what is done vs. what is required maintenance.

Why “Done” Matters

Having a definition of done does not automatically guarantee success. It does, however, establish a shared standard the team can point to and say, with confidence, “This is coherent, communicable, and ready to sustain.” Without that standard, it’s all too easy for “done” to become wherever you land when priorities shift or the redesign team runs out of steam.

The value is straightforward:

• Clarity over guesswork. It replaces “we’ll know it when we see it” with questions the team has already answered together.
• Protection for your people. It ends the cycle of endless polishing.
• Protection for your design. It prevents work from being declared finished before it can stand on its own.

This discipline only grows more critical as transformations move toward smaller, continuous shifts. When change never fully stops, clear milestones become essential, defining when to pause, assess and reset before the next adjustment.

The bottom line is, define your “done” before you begin. Document it. Align on it explicitly. The alternative is not flexibility; it’s confusion.

Earlier in my career, I led the implementation of a new leadership model and meaningful changes to our performance management practices. We had done thoughtful internal and external research. We had a compelling “why.” We had some visible support. Then, in one of my first meetings, an HR leader asked, “Why do we need this right now?” My immediate thought was, “Oh dear—if we are not aligned in our own function, how are we ever going to bring 17,000 people along?” We forged ahead, but it often felt like pushing a rock up a hill.

Organizational design work is especially vulnerable to this kind of ambiguity because structure can feel personal and changing an organizational system is complex. It affects roles, reporting lines, decision rights, status, workload, career paths, customer handoffs, metrics, and how work actually gets done. A redesign may look logical on paper, but if leaders have not aligned on the problem, the boundaries, the criteria for success and the people who need to be engaged, the work can quickly become political, slow, or over-engineered.

The good news: successful organization design does not require leaders to have every answer at the start. It does require them to create enough clarity to make good choices as the work unfolds. Three practical tools help: a project charter, design criteria and a stakeholder engagement plan.

1.  Start With a Charter: Name the Work Before You Start Doing the Work

A strong organization design charter is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the leadership team’s shared contract for the work. It answers the questions that, if left unclear, will show up later as churn:

• What problem are we solving? And what outcomes matter most?
• Why now? What constraints are real?
• What is in and out of scope?
• Who decides what?

Executive leaders bring the enterprise vision, mission, strategy and business case. As they enroll a team to lead the redesign, the charter helps translate that strategic intent into practical guardrails so the team can move with confidence—not wait for direction at every turn.

At minimum, an organization design charter should include:

• The business problem or opportunity
• Strategic objectives
• Expected deliverables
• Scope and exclusions
• Timeline
• Resources
• Roles and governance
• Decision rights
• Key risks
• Assumptions
• Success measures

The discipline is not in making the charter long. The discipline is in making it useful. A practical charter should be clear enough that a team member can use it to make decisions, a sponsor can use it to test whether the work is drifting, and a stakeholder can use it to understand why the work matters.

A simple test: if the project team cannot explain the charter in two minutes, it is probably not sharp enough yet. Before moving into interviews, structure options or implementation planning, take the time to align on the charter. It will save weeks of rework later.

2. Define Design Criteria: Decide What “Good” Looks Like Before Debating Boxes and Lines

Design criteria are the bridge between strategy and structure. They answer the question: “A new design will be successful if…” Without criteria, leaders often evaluate design options based on personal preference, functional advocacy, legacy norms, or who makes the strongest argument in the room. With criteria, the conversation becomes more objective and grounded in the outcomes the organization is trying to create.

Good design criteria are specific, strategic and usable. They should reflect who the organization is built to serve, what capabilities are required to deliver value and what tradeoffs leaders are willing to make. For example, criteria might include faster customer decision-making, clearer enterprise accountability, stronger local market responsiveness, or better end-to-end process ownership.

The most useful criteria are written in plain language and used actively. They are not a slide that appears once and disappears. They become the mirror leaders hold up to each design option:

• Does this option improve the capabilities we said matter most?
• Does it make decision-making simpler or more complex?
• Does it help us serve the customer or audience better?
• Does it create new risks we are not prepared to manage?

One practical approach is to limit the list to five to seven design criteria and pressure-test them with the leadership team before generating design options. If everything is equally important, nothing is. Senior leaders should expect healthy debate here. The discussion about criteria is often where hidden assumptions surface: Do we value speed over consistency? Enterprise leverage over local autonomy? Specialization over simplicity? These are exactly the conversations leaders need to have before the organization starts moving.

3. Make Stakeholder Engagement Everyone’s Job

Stakeholder engagement is often treated as the job of change management. Change professionals may own the mechanics—messages, engagement plans, feedback loops, leader toolkits—but the responsibility cannot sit with them alone. In organization design, stakeholder engagement is leadership work. People need to understand the case for change, see how decisions are being made, trust that their input has been considered and know what will happen next.

A practical stakeholder plan begins with a few simple questions:

• Who is impacted?
• Who has influence?
• Who has information the design team needs?
• Who will have to sponsor, implement, or live with the new design?
• Who is likely to be concerned, skeptical, or overloaded?

Then, for each group, clarify the purpose of engagement. Are you informing, listening, co-creating, validating, preparing, or mobilizing?

Not every stakeholder gets the same level of involvement and that is okay. The key is to be intentional and transparent. A senior executive team may set direction and make enterprise tradeoffs. Senior leaders may shape options, identify operational implications and prepare their teams. Managers may help translate what the change means for work, roles and priorities. Employees may provide insight into customer pain points, process friction and unintended consequences. The mechanics differ, but the principle is the same: engage people in ways that match their role in the change.

Leaders should also plan for listening, not just telling. In a redesign, stakeholders may not agree with every decision, but they are more likely to support the direction when they understand the rationale and see evidence that real input shaped the work. Build feedback loops into the project rhythm: stakeholder interviews, design workshops, pulse checks, manager forums, office hours, or targeted reviews. Then close the loop by saying what was heard, what changed and what could not change—and why.

Bringing the Three Tools Together

A tool is a means to an end. Used well, they build trust and smooth the path to a successful design. The charter, design criteria and stakeholder engagement plan are most powerful when used together. The charter creates alignment on the work. The design criteria guide choices. The stakeholder plan builds understanding, input and ownership. Together, they help leaders avoid three common traps: starting too fast without alignment, designing around preferences instead of strategy and work and communicating too late after the major decisions are already made.

For senior leaders, the practical challenge is not to over-process the work. It is to create enough structure to enable speed, quality and trust. Before launching your next organization design effort, pause and ask: Do we have a charter clear enough to guide decisions? Do we have design criteria strong enough to evaluate options? Do we have a stakeholder plan thoughtful enough to bring the right people along at the right moments?

Organization design is ultimately about enabling strategy through the systemic alignment of people and work. A thoughtful structure matters, but the process leaders use to get there matters just as much. Start with clarity. Make the criteria visible. Engage stakeholders with intention. Those three disciplines will not eliminate every hard decision, but they will make the work more focused, practical and much more likely to stick.

That was the mandate an aerospace and defense CEO gave his senior leadership team at the outset of a major transformation. And he meant it…literally.

He required all site leaders to be fully empowered with everything they needed to deliver—no finger pointing or excuses for missed numbers. At the same time, he expected the new design to protect and sustain the technical depth and expertise the business had taken decades to build, and it needed to grow and evolve. Nothing in a single quarter’s results was worth eroding it.

Most executives I work with want both accountability and functional excellence, and yet they often find themselves feeling forced to pick one over the other. I don’t think it has to be this way, but getting both takes more than choosing a better assortment of “boxes and wires” on an org chart.

The Three Usual Answers

You know the standoff. You ask a business unit head to give up direct authority over the engineers and other experts who create the value that makes their numbers possible. So, they resist and push back. If I don’t own them, I can’t hold anyone accountable for hitting the number. Across the table sits the opposite worry. Break up that specialist group and the standards start to drift, and the craft and technical expertise gets diluted. Often this is where the “secret sauce” of the business exists—the unique capabilities that provide the competitive edge.

So, leaders usually reach for one of three answers.

1. Keep them in the function. Protect the depth.
2. Embed them in the business. Protect accountability.
3. Split the difference. Solid line one-way, dotted line the other.

The debate cycles for weeks, sometimes months. It rarely lands anywhere, because each option gets judged on which value it protects rather than on what the work truly requires.

What, specifically, are we protecting?

Ask the functional leader what they’re afraid of losing, and the answers are scattered:

• Consistent technical standards
• Bench strength and talent pipeline
• Depth that stays deep because experts sharpen each other
• The ability to move scarce specialists to wherever the hardest problems exist.

Numerous organizational challenges all grouped under one name—functional excellence. In reality, each issue usually has a different answer. As long as the conversation stays at the level of functional excellence, leaders are weighing a bundle of associated issues against clear accountability and strong execution, and that debate has no winner. Get specific about the unique challenges for which functional excellence is striving to solve, and the conversation shifts. The question changes from which value wins to what will protect/strengthen this particular thing.

The Reporting Line is Not Always the Answer

Underneath all of this sits an assumption that functional excellence comes from the direct reporting line. Executives believe this for good reason. Often, this is true in practice, even if it is never true in principle.

When a function lives under one leader, the structure groups together a variety of work processes and activities that together create excellence—i.e., common standards, shared coaching, technical reviews, and clear career paths from junior to senior. All of this lives “inside the box,” so it’s easy to credit the box. In reality, the reporting line wasn’t the reason functional excellence was achieved; rather, it served as the container for the required work activities for excellence to flourish.

Reporting relationships do one job well: they establish accountability. They tell you who owns a decision and who answers for a result. Standards, technical depth, career paths, the muscle memory of a craft, those are sustained by the linkages you build around the structure.

Structure determines who decides. Linkages determine how the organization works together. Redraw the chart and the linkages rarely grow back on their own. Most organizations assume they will, then blame the new structure for a problem the missing linkages caused.

The Dotted Line Isn’t a Rescue

Which brings us to the third solution. Dual reporting gives the specialists a business boss and a functional boss, and it looks like a way to have both benefits with no downsides. Drawing that second line on the chart is easy. Announcing that this is how we will operate is easy. Making it work is far from easy. People in this dynamic consistently report less clarity about what’s expected of them (which turns out to be one of the better predictors of how an organization performs).

I want to be careful here, because we deliberately design matrix structures that are successful. A matrix is a legitimate structural choice, but it should not be chosen to avoid making difficult tradeoff decisions.

The design work is often the easy part. Interlock the targets so both leaders are working one plan. Put a shared result in both sets of numbers. Name who holds the tie-break on the decisions everyone knows will be contested. You can finish all of that in a workshop.

The test comes when the new design must survive a hard quarter. A matrix requires leaders to behave, consistently and under real pressure, in ways the previous structure never rewarded. Give up a scarce specialist when your own timeline is slipping. Accept being measured on a result you don’t fully control. Settle a disagreement with a peer instead of escalating it. Collaborate without turning every decision into a committee.

It’s easy to agree on playing nicely together during a design session. It’s much harder to repeat on Day 200 when incentives still reward the old behavior. Protecting your own people is the rational choice, not a lapse in character. Leaders often agree to collaborate “in the matrix” without understanding what it will cost them. The tendency is to comply on the surface, protect their own underneath and point at the structure when the results disappoint.

Matrix readiness is a selection and development question long before it is a design question. In my experience matrices rarely fail as a structural design choice. They fail in practical execution.

Diagnose Before You Design

Name what’s genuinely at risk, then choose the linkage that addresses it.

• Inconsistent standards point to governance and standards ownership.
• Losing the next generation of critical SMEs points to talent mobility and a real community of practice.
• Deep expertise spread too thin points to rotation programs and deliberate cross-business staffing.

Get it wrong and it can cost you either way, but the two failures look different.

• Keep the work in the function when it belonged with the business, and the disruption shows up fast. Key priorities are set and governed in ways the business leader can’t control. Specialists produce excellent answers to questions the market stopped asking two quarters ago.
• Pull it into the business, when it needed to stay centralized, and the damage is slower and harder to see. Nothing immediately breaks. Each unit gets its own small team, and the tyranny of the urgent supersedes the need to share best practices across and within the specialist teams. Then the day comes when you need to fill a senior role requiring deep, cross-business technical competence, and you have no one internally capable of stepping up.

One failure is abruptly felt. The other compounds in silence, and leaders overcorrect against the first because it’s glaringly apparent.

Diagnosis Tip: It’s also important to look for shadow work while you diagnose. It is not uncommon to find that business leaders have quietly built their own versions of what central functions were supposed to provide. Shadow work tells you a real need is going unmet, and it should be assigned an intentional home in the new design.

What the Aerospace & Defense Team Found

Thinking back to the aerospace and defense team, their design engineering was strong and nobody proposed touching it. However, manufacturing engineering was a weak point that was thin across all three sites, and the instinct was obvious—pull it under engineering to be developed and shared across the enterprise. Weak functional capability, so make the choice to protect and grow it.

One site leader pushed back hard. He recalled how they had tried this before and it had failed miserably. His argument wasn’t that centralizing was bad. It was that for their business, manufacturing engineering was not a highly transferable capability. Design engineering principles and competence traveled well between sites. But how you build this product, on this line, against these constraints, did not.

Additionally, he argued that to move manufacturing engineering (who were critical players in delivery) into someone else’s direct control would run against the mandate to fully empower site leadership…which would perpetuate the culture of excuse-making and finger-pointing they were trying to eliminate.

They decided to pull it back under the site leaders. The original instinct wasn’t wrong. Manufacturing engineering really was weak. But weakness in a functional capability can often be a linkage problem, and relying on structure to solve a problem better addressed by a linkage can leave you further behind than you started.

Six Questions Before You Move the Boxes

The following set of questions won’t tell you which design option to choose, but they can serve as a helpful guide to make more informed decisions related to functional excellence.

1. What exactly are we protecting? Not the idea or value. The specific work. If the answer is still “functional excellence,” better diagnosis is required.
2. Does this work need enterprise integration, or local ownership? Some work creates value by being consistent everywhere. Some creates value by staying close to a market/location and moving fast. Most functions hold both kinds to some degree, and it’s important to determine which is the priority.
3. Where is authority required, and over which decisions? Authority doesn’t need to be all-or-nothing. It can show up as hiring and firing, as work direction and prioritization, or as performance management, all of which can sit in different places. Name the specific decisions before you name the boss.
4. Is this permanent or temporary? Stewardship of a standard usually needs to last over time. Transferring a skill to a team that lacks it does not. Give temporary work an end date to avoid the tendency to quietly become permanent.
5. Where is the shadow work, and what is it replacing? Find the work that is being performed out of necessity, then ask what it’s compensating for before you decide whether to absorb it, legitimize it, move it or leave it alone.
6. What holds under real pressure? When deadlines and KPIs are in jeopardy and leadership owning execution wants to override the standard, who can stop them and on what authority? If the answer is that everyone will sit down and work it out, you don’t have a linkage—you have wishful thinking.

Organizations don’t lose functional excellence because they decentralize. They lose it because they decentralize without designing the linkages that create and reinforce expertise. The CEO was right to demand both. He needed a team willing to lean into the challenge of sorting out what work needed to be resolved by structure versus that which was better resolved by linkages. 

How do you understand and design for functional excellence? Have you seen an organization actually achieve and maintain it? If so, how did they do it?

That question was on my mind while reading David Epstein’s Inside the Box: How Constraints Make us Better.

One of the opening stories is about General Magic, a Silicon Valley company that envisioned handheld computing, digital assistants, app ecosystems, maps and many of the technologies we now take for granted, years before they were possible. The company attracted remarkable engineers, many of whom would later lead some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies. Investor enthusiasm was so high that General Magic became one of the first true “concept IPOs,” meaning that it went public on an idea.

Despite all of that, General Magic was a commercial failure. Extraordinary vision and extraordinary talent proved insufficient on their own. Generating possibilities and realizing them are two very different leadership challenges.

The Problem of Too Many Good Ideas

From the outside it appeared to have everything, but General Magic’s story reflects a broader truth. Many organizations, from start-ups to global conglomerates, don’t struggle to generate ideas. If anything, they struggle with the opposite.  Success creates a constant stream of worthwhile opportunities competing for the organization’s attention.

Growth creates opportunities. New products. New markets. New customer requests. New internal initiatives.

Success creates opportunities faster than organizations create capacity.

People still have the same number of hours in a day. Managers can only lead so many initiatives well. Employees can only absorb so much change before priorities begin competing with one another.

The more successful an organization becomes, the more disciplined it must become about choosing where to focus.

Declarations Are Easy. Tradeoffs Are Hard.

This sounds easy enough, but it’s often difficult in practice. It starts by understanding the distinction between a declaration and a tradeoff.

A declaration says, “This matters.”

A tradeoff says, “This matters more.”

Across teams and organizations, adding another worthwhile priority is rarely the hard part. The real work is translating declarations into tradeoffs: the tough conversation that begins when someone asks, “Okay, so what’s getting less of our attention and resources if we add this priority?”

Clarity comes by thinking of your organization as a multi-dimensional cube. Each of the cube’s sides represents a different system within your organization—interconnected parts of a whole, with strategy always at the center. Tradeoffs should be made in a way that enables strategy, with a careful eye on how choices made in one area can reinforce—or disrupt—alignment in another.

The conversations around tradeoffs are rarely easy, but remember: organizations don’t struggle because they lack good ideas. They struggle because every declaration competes with every previous declaration unless leaders make the tradeoffs explicit.

The Overlooked Constraint

When leaders talk about organizational constraints, the conversation usually centers on budgets, staffing, technology or capacity. Those are all real.

Another constraint is just as important: leadership attention.

Every new priority requires leadership attention. Managers spend time explaining it. Teams spend time learning it. Employees spend time figuring out how it fits alongside everything else they’re expected to accomplish.

None of that appears on a balance sheet. Yet leadership attention is every bit as finite as financial capital.

In my experience, execution rarely falters because people don’t care or aren’t capable. More often, it falters because too many worthwhile priorities compete for the same leadership attention.

Leadership attention is expressed in practical ways: what leaders ask about in meetings, what appears on scorecards, what receives recognition and what is revisited week after week. Those signals tell the organization what truly matters. When too many priorities compete for those same signals, even strong strategies begin to lose clarity.

What distinguishes organizations that are inundated with new priorities from those that successfully translate strategy into execution is the presence of leaders who consistently make tradeoffs, reinforce focus and protect alignment.

This is where the role of an Alignment Leader^® becomes critical.  As we describe in our Executive Guide, Becoming an Alignment Leader, an Alignment Leader is someone who:

• Speaks the language of choices and tradeoffs
• Champions choices that enable strategy
• Protects emerging processes and structures while keeping the business running

Most importantly, the Alignment Leader understands that until you’ve defined the “nos,” you don’t really have a strategy—you have a wish list.

Declarations have a cost. Every declaration consumes a little more of an organization’s finite leadership attention. Tradeoffs determine whether that attention is directed by design or dispersed by default.

One Question Worth Asking

General Magic’s story isn’t an argument against ambition. It’s a reminder that every organization has more good ideas than it can pursue.

The next time your team introduces an exciting new priority, pause before asking, “How do we fit this in?”

Instead, ask: “What will receive less of our attention and resources, so this has a real chance to succeed?”

Every declaration has a price.  The price isn’t just budget or headcount.  It’s leadership attention.  It’s management capacity.  It’s organizational focus.

Every organization has a strategy.  The question is whether its attention reflects it.

I remember wondering what would happen if I put a paperclip into an electrical outlet. I found out almost instantly. There was a bright flash, a loud pop and a lesson I never forgot. Fortunately, the only thing that suffered was my pride. 

As children, that’s often how we learn. We experiment, make mistakes, experience the consequences, and carry those lessons with us. Failure becomes part of the learning process. Looking back, I’m grateful that my biggest takeaway from that day was simply a healthy respect for electricity. 

Transformation doesn’t have that same luxury. 

Organizations rarely have the opportunity to learn through failure. A transformation that loses momentum or falls apart isn’t simply an expensive lesson. It can erode employee confidence, diminish customer trust, delay strategic objectives and make future change significantly more difficult. The cost of getting it wrong extends far beyond the project itself. 

The Importance of Maintaining Momentum 

One idea has stayed with me throughout my career: 

Momentum is perishable. 

Unlike a project plan, momentum isn’t something you create once and then simply maintain. It is built through consistent leadership, strengthened by trust and reinforced every time people see progress and believe the organization is moving in the right direction. It can also disappear surprisingly quickly. A delayed decision, inconsistent communication, uncertainty about roles, or a loss of confidence may seem like isolated events, but together they quietly erode the momentum that every transformation depends on. 

The good news is that organizations don’t have to figure everything out through trial and error. Every transformation is unique, but the moments that strengthen—or derail—momentum are remarkably consistent. Leaders who have navigated these moments before recognize the signals early, anticipate the risks and help organizations avoid learning the hardest lessons firsthand. Experience doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, but it can dramatically shorten the distance between recognizing a challenge and responding to it. 

Transformation Activation: Key to Reaching Your Destination 

Protecting momentum is precisely why I believe transformation activation deserves far more attention than it typically receives. 

Most organizations devote significant time to designing the future. They define the operating model, redesign processes, establish governance and develop implementation plans. Those activities are essential—but they are only the beginning. 

Design defines the destination. Transformation activation enables the organization to arrive there. 

Where Human and Operational Realities Meet 

Activation requires leaders to think beyond organizational charts and implementation milestones. It requires thinking deeply about the human and operational realities that determine whether a transformation will actually take hold. 

People still have customers to serve, teams to lead and commitments to deliver while the organization around them is changing. Effective transformation activation helps people understand how their work is evolving, equips them to succeed in new ways of working and provides enough clarity to move forward with confidence—even when every detail of the future state hasn’t yet been finalized. 

At the same time, leaders must recognize that the people closest to the work will uncover practical realities that no design session could fully anticipate. Those insights shouldn’t be viewed as flaws in the design—they’re part of refining it. 

Organizations don’t transform because a new operating model has been announced. They transform when thousands of individual decisions begin reflecting a new way of working. That’s when strategy becomes execution, organizational design becomes organizational reality and momentum begins to compound. 

Building Trust Through Consistent Leadership 

Activation also depends on establishing the leadership rhythms that create confidence throughout the organization. Employees watch far more than they listen. They observe whether leaders make timely decisions, honor commitments, communicate consistently and reinforce the same priorities over time. Trust isn’t built through presentations or announcements; it is built through repeated evidence that leadership will do what it says it will do. 

Every employee experiences a transformation one decision, one interaction and one leadership moment at a time. Role clarity influences execution. Execution influences confidence. Confidence strengthens trust. Trust accelerates adoption. When these elements reinforce one another, transformations build momentum. When one begins to weaken, the effects often ripple throughout the entire organization. 

This is why I often say that transformation activation is not a workstream within a transformation—it is the discipline that connects every workstream together. It is the bridge between a well-designed future and an organization that is truly ready to operate differently. 

Many of these ideas are explored in our recent Executive Guide, Activating Transformation: A Leader’s Roadmap to Turning Strategy into Results. At its core, the guide is about protecting momentum. It explores the moments where leaders either strengthen confidence and accelerate progress or unintentionally slow the transformation. While every transformation is different, the moments that preserve—or diminish—momentum are remarkably consistent because they are fundamentally human. 

Why Transformation Activation Matters 

Looking back, the lesson I learned in elementary school came at very little cost. I was fortunate that a moment of curiosity resulted in nothing more than a memorable story. 

Organizations rarely have that luxury. They can’t afford to discover the most important lessons only after momentum has been lost. 

That’s why transformation activation matters. It helps leaders anticipate the moments that define success, preserve the momentum they’ve worked so hard to build and turn a well-designed future into an organization that is truly ready to live it. 

The Discomfort of Dissonance 

My husband and I are avid concertgoers. As children raised in the 80’s, our love of music spreads across genres. Recently we learned that one of our favorite pop-rock groups was coming out of retirement. The day tickets went on sale, I logged on and quickly picked front row seats. A touch of keys, a credit card entered, and the tickets were ours! With a couple more clicks, a hotel room was secured and airlines tickets booked. We were ready for the musical experience of a lifetime. 

As the date of the concert approached, we listened to old records on the hi-fi, reacquainting ourselves with their work: timely lyrics that rang with social justice and calls for peace and equity. The group’s unique harmonic voice was crisp and melodic. We couldn’t wait. Our travel was seamless, the hotel was beautiful and the venue was newly renovated. In our seats, we waited with bated breath for the concert to start. 

The iconic bars of one of their world-famous songs opened the show. And then they sang. Their distinct voices were off and the harmony of their youth wasn’t there. They were half a beat behind and slightly off key—just enough dissonance to make the audience squirm. 

My brain tried to resolve the missed harmonics and shaky timing, but as the night wore on, I became more uncomfortable and critical of what I was experiencing. I was disappointed. What I had expected was vastly different from what I had actually experienced. The musical dissonance made the entire concert fall flat. 

Dissonance Creates Inner and Outer Conflict 

Dissonance refers to the lack of harmony, agreement or consistency. This term spans across multiple fields including psychology, music, culture and emotions. The basic tenants of dissonance hold to the idea that this lack of harmony creates conflict, whether that is an unpleasant combination of sounds in music or subconscious messaging that clashes with your behavior, attitude and beliefs. 

Within the workplace, dissonance can look like disengagement, lack of interest and focus or confusion. If there is a gap between how an organization promotes its ways of working and its actual daily routines, then employees end up suppressing their true emotions to work within the bounds of expectation. 

Forging the Path 

If we want harmony within the workplace, then we need to conduct it deliberately. This means fostering open communication, empowering employees to contribute, holding space for constructive feedback and acknowledging efforts that build trust and a sense of belonging. 

This can look like: 

• Modeling respectful dialogue 

• Encouraging open conversations among employees, across all levels of the organization

• Establishing clear expectations about how concerns should be addressed with respect to all voices involved 

• Acknowledging good gestures and recognizing those who show consideration and kindness for others

Whether within the organization or with public accolades, acknowledging other’s efforts is essential to building a supportive culture. Cultivating a culture of feedback is another way to minimize dissonance. How you give feedback and how you accept it will determine how you grow as both an individual and an organization.

A Leader’s Call to Action 

If you are experiencing dissonance within your organization, see this as an opportunity to root out the cause. Get curious about what is causing the discord. Ask critical questions of yourself as a leader. Diagnose the cause. Enact a plan to address and resolve the conflict and find harmony again. If unresolved, misalignment can cause tension, leading to disengagement, burnout and loss of good talent.  

I love the concept of harmony within the work environment. It signifies that not every person is on the same note, but operating from a complementary space, giving depth and warmth to an organization. It demonstrates that an organization is intentionally working from the same page while allowing employees to act authentically, using their voice to add to that of the organization’s.  

While harmony is often discussed as a cultural outcome, organizational harmony is ultimately created through alignment. At AlignOrg, we use the Cube Model to help leaders understand that culture and people practices do not exist in isolation. The behaviors we seek to encourage are shaped by how work is designed, how decisions are made, how success is measured, and how people are rewarded. When these organizational elements reinforce one another, teams can move from dissonance to harmony – not through better intentions alone, but through a system intentionally designed to support the desired outcomes.

Unlike my opening story, don’t let dissonance within the organization leave a bad impression with those you encounter. Be deliberate in your attempts to create a harmonious work environment. Find a state of balance, a blend between choices and people that are unique to your brand and the people who work in it. The payoff is tangible: better morale, individual strengths enabled and improved collaboration towards the common goal. Harmony.