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About the guest
Learn more about Nicole Gee and her experience in Org Design on her expert page
Summary
In this insightful episode of the Org Design Podcast, Amy Springer and Rory Mustan from Functionly are joined by Nicole Gee from Geenius Consulting to explore the nuanced journey of organizational design.
Nicole candidly shares her early struggles in org design, emphasizing the pivotal role of confidence and clarity. She highlights that successful organizational change requires leaders to deeply understand the strategic 'why' behind decisions and thoughtfully manage the emotional impacts on their teams.
Listeners will gain valuable insights on:
- How Nicole overcame initial setbacks by embracing continuous learning and feedback.
- The critical balance between strategy and empathy, ensuring that people are always central to org design.
- Practical steps for leaders to confidently and transparently guide their teams through complex changes.
- The importance of clearly articulating challenges, required capabilities, and roles early in the process.
- Why active listening and informal conversations can be powerful tools for leaders anticipating organizational shifts.
This episode emphasizes that effective org design goes beyond structural changes—it's about building confidence, clarity, and genuine engagement throughout the process.
Show Notes
Geenius Consulting - geeniusconsulting.co.uk
Organization Design: A Guide to Building Effective Organizations by Patricia Cichocki & Christine Irwin - Amazon
Transcript
[00:00:00] **Amy Springer:** Welcome to the Org Design Podcast. You're joining me, the host, Amy Springer, my co host, and my colleague at Functionly, Rory is joining us from North London, and our guest today is Nicole Gee, also joining us from North London.
Nicole works with Geenius consulting, and we met her last week at the European Organization Design Forum. Thank you for joining us, Nicole.
[00:00:25] **Nicole Gee:** Thank you for having me.
[00:00:27] **Amy Springer:** So, we like to kick off by understanding what was your journey into org design? It's still an emerging concept for a lot of people. It's not something you pick at the beginning of a career. So what was your story? How did you end up in this space?
[00:00:44] **Nicole Gee:** Yeah, that's that's a good question. It was by accident, as I'm sure, many people get into org design by accident. I started my career within HR and, I kind of worked out what I enjoyed doing was more of a learning and development side, less of the, performance management, business as usual, disciplinary side. I got more and more into a projects work, until I moved roles into consultancy, and that's when I had my first org design project, which actually didn't go very well at all. I think actually sometimes it's the things which irritate you or nag at you, which makes you go, I need to know what was happening and how that needed to change and what I could have done better. And so, sought out organization design, which was absolutely insane and stupid at the time because you kind of think, go back to your comfort zone, do the stuff which you know. But I was fascinated cause I just had this inkling that I thought, I should be good at this, but I don't really feel that I am. I don't really know what's going on, there's a lot of terms which were chucked around and the organization, called it accelerated organization design.
It was even worse if you're just a complete newbie and you don't know what you're doing and you're suddenly going in at the deep end, trying to lead a team on something that you are trying to get your head around. So that's how I got into it, which is unusual. When we was in the European Organization Design Forum, was a activity at the end of it, said: "Thank for people that you really owe." you Owe your career or your mentoring or something like that, and at the time I picked up this book, which is _A Guide to Organization Design_ and read it from cover to cover, trying to understand what the hell was going on. That book was instrumental to help me to understand what organization design is as a starter and how I could fit my work into that, because I think it is very much led by yourself as well as the organization you are working with.
[00:02:46] **Amy Springer:** Do you remember who the author is?
[00:02:48] **Nicole Gee:** Yeah, I do. Christine Irwin and Patricia Cichocki.
[00:02:54] **Amy Springer:** Nicole, you mentioned right at the start that you said your first org design project went wrong. What do you mean by wrong? Was it the project itself, the outcome, the people involved? What did wrong mean in that situation?
[00:03:09] **Nicole Gee:** The first thing to say at the time is that, because I didn't really know how to structure the organization design project, and I was being led by what the consultancy want, I therefore didn't structure it well, and I was lacking confidence. Then the second thing which then went wrong is that, it's very difficult to lead a team if you are not confident with what you are saying. The combination of stakeholders, which didn't necessarily really want to engage with organization design, which happens a fair bit because it's difficult with someone who wasn't really exuding confidence, that's where it started to go wrong, to the point that, I didn't feel that I could lead it and I asked to be taken off that project.
Because once you've lost your team and the people you are trying to guide through, there isn't much value in continuing.
[00:04:04] **Rory Mustan:** How do you, when you went into the next piece of org design work that you did, how did you, build that confidence that you recognized that you needed?
[00:04:14] **Nicole Gee:** Yeah, so definitely did a lot of research, I also asked for feedback about was it that was expected, learning from your own mistakes, and getting that feedback but also a sense of, trying to understand what it was that was outside of your control.
You know, and then my next project I I was a bit clearer about what organization design was. The extent of a project was far less, it was just an assessment, to begin with. I worked really closely with the HR business partner and we got on. I think you can't do organization design unless you've got a good, healthy relationship with the per, with the people who are making the critical decisions. So you'll have a design team, who are making decisions, but the ones who have the absolute; yes, no; they are, critical, because you're trying to get the feedback, you're trying to get the cues. You're trying to say, is this working for you?
In some ways it's a bit like flying a plane and changing the engine at the time and hopefully you're not changing the engine en masse, so you're hopefully just making a few tweaks. It's that whole thing again: " oh, well, I thought the problem was X", it turns out that actually it might be more cultural nuance, it might be more of a leadership thing, It's actually might not be your structure. It might be, how you do your governance. Identifying that and feeding that back and getting that relationship and flow, with your critical stakeholders, that's essential.
[00:05:51] **Rory Mustan:** So the buy in, from the partner is very important.
[00:05:54] **Nicole Gee:** It's essential, and I also kind of think, that partner has to want it. I think I mentioned it. no one in their right minds actually goes into organization design because they think it's something to do. It's a really difficult thing, It's you, you're putting people who have spent probably years, hopefully not their entire career, but certainly years building up what their role is and how they see themselves in a new organization. Only for you who doesn't know them, doesn't appreciate everything they've gone through to say: "Well, actually, I don't think that we want to continue this model. Let's change it. Let's take away everything that you've already done." At least that's, I think, the messaging that they might be hearing, rightly or wrongly. There is definitely an emotional impact.
[00:06:40] **Rory Mustan:** How important is it to factor in when you begin that process, the emotional side?
[00:06:44] **Nicole Gee:** It's massive. For me, I think, it's creating that psychological psychological safe space. It is trying to be as upfront and transparent as possible. The ideal scenario is knowing that those people who are in that room developing that design with you, they know what their position is, and I've been in positions where that's not clear at all. You definitely have to be very sensitive, open-minded to what might change within your project, Also, how you relate to people. So, a sort of openness and acceptance that while you've got the, this idea that the project management of this is probably going to be three to six months. At any stage you can get a curve ball, and it might finish tomorrow, or it might carry on for another 12 months because there's quite a lot of other things that need to be sorted out. That can be quite challenging on a personal level, you know, their roles aren't affected, but the people who they're working with, they know that they are going to be affected, or they're going to have to have difficult conversations. I try quite hard to say: "what we're not gonna start off doing, is talking about people." Because you can't stay objective, but it's really, really challenging because in their mind, they're going: so that's Bob's role, Hey, I quite, quite like Bob." We're literally taking his job away. And they know that, you are saying: "please, let's talk about capabilities. Let's talk about what is right for the business." That's hard. They're working, with a different mindset to what they do every day. So every day it's kind of like they're looking at the budget they're looking at resources, they're looking at performance. What they're not doing is going: "Let me take a step back and see how the organization is performing." So I think there's lot of emotional content and sometimes it's not even realized until they're quite a bit down the process.
[00:08:49] **Rory Mustan:** When we were at EODF, one of one of the strands that came up consistently was something that you were kind of alluding to there, which was, people versus strategy, right? Which comes first. What's your take on that?
[00:08:59] **Nicole Gee:** Yeah. That's an interesting one, wasn't it? I think you have to have a view about what your strategy is. Um, it, the likelihood of why you have an organization design, you need to know the reason for it. So is it going to be, you are pivoting your products to such an extent that the current capabilities need to change. You want to massively grow your sales base, which is also probably gonna create significant capabilities. You want to decrease your cost base, so, you possibility of redundancies and all that kind of stuff. Or it's, a complete service change because things aren't working, and everything is clunky, and the processes don't work and all that kind of stuff. I think if you do not know that to begin with, about why you are doing this, it's very, very unconvincing to everybody else as to why you're putting 'em through that process.
One person, I can't remember who it was but said you have to have a people orientated mindset though. I think If you can go into an organization design with a view that we are developing the organization so that, in some cases, so it can carry on running, therefore protecting as many roles as you can. Or in an alternative so you can grow the organization and bring on more people and develop roles and people, that's probably quite a good starting point, and then it's about how you then manage people through that, and sometimes it's not not gonna be a great outcome. Strategy has to come first. I would hate for it to be done in a numbers kind of way, without minding how the people are impacted.
[00:10:44] **Rory Mustan:** It's also, mean, you're kind of saying doing it through love of the greater company, right? It's to protect the company and more people's roles, but ultimately there seems to be some sacrifice that comes with that.
[00:10:59] **Nicole Gee:** Yeah, I think it happens in everyday life in a business though, doesn't it? I mean that;s why you go to work, or why a business exists is to make profit or, if it's public sector, provide a service and you have to constantly think, how do we better this? is what organizations need to do. I think an organization design is where it's saying, we need to make more significant changes than just, let's say we're gonna change a few people's roles or we're gonna train people up to do something different. It's much broader and it's got much more depth to it.
[00:11:38] **Amy Springer:** Can you think of an example from one of your previous employers or previous clients where you can give an example, maybe where they weren't clear on strategy, and so it didn't quite work out, or maybe an example of where someone was trying to make a decision in a not- loving way, and you're able to coach them through it. Where did it nearly go wrong?
[00:12:01] **Nicole Gee:** I suppose I'm thinking back to a smaller organization when I was working with a finance guy. if we got rid of X amount of people, there's cost saving of Y. I was like: yes, I get that. And he said to me, I had a previous boss who would literally have a spreadsheet of people and just cross them all out as to doing it that way. And I did say: we're not gonna do that, are we? And he said: no in a kind of slightly shy way. And I said: you do realize that anything that you do now will impact the organization way after I've left. Probably the critical thing here is you can go through people and go: actually, that one is not particularly great; I don't particularly like what they're wearing or whatever the reasons are. Or you've got an opportunity to do it in a way which is logical, makes sense for the organization, and is done with a level of love and kindness and respect. I think that's an easier one to then get over after the organizational design, if negative one happens.
[00:13:05] **Amy Springer:** What is that next step? We've come up with the strategic change that we've decided to make and everyone's clear on that. What does the next step look like?
[00:13:15] **Nicole Gee:** By strategic change, I'm assuming that we've got to the stage of going: this is what our changes are going to be. It's then has to be about the implementation. There's a whole range of different ways you can do that. One organization I did it which was pretty much big bang. The leader announced this is going to happen, and then we went through all of the HR due processes, with really significant communications . It worked really well, but it was by and large, relatively positive organization design change. There was a few role losses, but literally a handful.
Or you can do it in a way which is: we have to do it by interim steps, the organization is not going to be ready to manage all of it. It might be: we would like to do the level below our C-suite and work with them, and then we're gonna change them, and then we're going to get them involved, and get them to change the next part the organization.
It depends on what's right for that organization. What's the urgency? If you know the strategy about why you are going to change things, then you know how you're going to do the change. If there's an urgency which says, we have to take X millions out of the business, then the likelihood is against it as a big bang.
If you're saying we're trying to pivot, you can evolve and engage with far more, and it can become a very positive experience where you talk about what's the art of the possible.
I recall working with a public sector organization, and we certainly were looking more about how to engage more people and how to try to simplify some fairly complex processes. In actual fact in some ways, the complexity of the current business was so complex that anyone trying to understand it from outside was very challenging.
But getting more people engaged was a far better outcome because people could understand it. I think once you understand it and then are contributing to it, you have skin in the game and you want it.
A friend and colleague of mine, Richard Lucas, has a saying of "people protect what they build". It's absolutely right. So you get people engaged and they want it to then happen. If you have it as some secret society, which is done in a dark room, the likelihood is; your change management and implementation where you now go: " Everyone, why aren't you all behind this?" "Cause we haven't a clue about what you're talking about. We haven't understood it for the last six months or three months that you have."
[00:15:41] **Rory Mustan:** So the openness is very important.
[00:15:44] **Nicole Gee:** Where it's possible. And sometimes it's very sensitive and it's not possible, but yeah.
[00:15:47] **Amy Springer:** So putting aside the really sensitive ones, like, you we're gonna dies unless we do a big cut, picking the more _the art of possibility_ strategic project, something else I picked up on was the, you mentioned like that top leader needs to be really confident. And when they're really confident, they can then really clearly communicate, they can start that open process.
What are just those handful of steps? That need to happen to build that really strong confidence in them to then lead into the rest. Is there anything you find that just lines up nicely that they're all set to go? Whether it's a mindset or even a specific process to follow
[00:16:33] **Nicole Gee:** I think there is two key things, The first thing is that they are involved in the process from the beginning so that they have had the opportunity to argue and discuss. And the second thing is that they have the confidence of their leadership team, and by that, I mean that they've been evolved as well in that discussion.
So if we're talking about, bringing in a new product, how are we going to, how does that impact our sales team? How does it impact our research team? How does it impact our marketing team? each of those people have had their opportunity to talk about it. And that collectively as a group, they say, We know what the best answer is for our organization. And I think that confidence because you've got,
[00:17:25] **Amy Springer:** what might they be talking about to start with like is there Is there some tangible outputs they create before they even get to structure? Like, what are the types of
[00:17:36] **Nicole Gee:** yeah, absolutely. My preference is to understand what the current challenges are. and what needs to change. So you start to angle it into the right discussion point. I think you then are able to start saying, is this going to be a process issue? Is this about, working out how the accountabilities work? But you get some of the critical issues and you're actually just discussing them. So one of the things which tends to come up almost the whole time is whether, how much control a central Leadership team should have versus how much its decentralized, and regionalized, and then you are getting into autonomy and accountability and it's interesting to sort of see where people are landing. I think the other thing is then to go use capabilities. Where do the current capabilities sit? they logically in the right place? So I start to map those out. Have we got missing capabilities? What should we actually stop doing, which we're just wasting our time doing?
Thinking about my public sector example. There's a lot there where we just kind of went. why are we still doing this? I was like, is it because it's expected or it's liked, or does it actually have genuine value? Can we be brave enough to push back and say, this is wasting time. We don't need to do this. Um. you know, once you start that debate, it becomes a, "gosh, we're gonna have to have a difficult conversation with someone".
[00:19:05] **Amy Springer:** We started off talking about very clear on the strategic choice through to the senior leader being able to then engage everyone. What are those things that make them have that confidence to be like, all right, we're getting everyone involved now.
[00:19:23] **Nicole Gee:** So I was mentioning about being really clear about what pain points are anchoring it to what the critical questions are, which need to be answered
[00:19:33] **Amy Springer:** Yeah
[00:19:33] **Nicole Gee:** within the context of organization design. So something like centralized, decentralized, uh, accountabilities. I'm quite keen to understand what capabilities are needed. You know, so do they sit in the right place? Are there ones which we should be doing and are missing, which particularly in, in a world of AI that tends to crop up a little bit. Oh, we don't like to have a capability of AI. Fantastic.
I quite like doing an activity to kind of go, what should, what are you wasting your time doing at the moment? it is a little bit like as much as you want to do new stuff with AI, what is the stuff which you need to be doing? So therefore the opportunity to kind of get to release those, that the amount of resource, which is doing that, which it may not be one or two people it might be like 10% of someone. Are we already kind of thinking ahead to kind of go, well, we, if we freed up fat resource to do that, what else can they do?
And then you're starting to build up a picture. I quite like to start off with a broad picture and then drill it down and peel the onion rings off. And sometimes we'll go back to, hold on, we talked about capabilities. It turns out that as in our discussions, we now that it's not just about AI capability it's missing. It's also business information. It's also data analytics. Okay. is there reason for building a data analytics team? What do you want to achieve from it? Again, strategy first, you know, and and so I think having gone through of conversations. what the shape is and why you are doing it, being able to answer the why question, and leading you to some sensible conclusions, I think gives confidence to be able to stand up to people and say, this is why we're doing it. That's not saying that you can can automatically just do that. You do need a good change management plan. You do need fantastic comms and you do need people to help to support that leader in doing that.
[00:21:38] **Rory Mustan:** I had a quick question Nicole, I went through your website earlier and I was looking at the services you offer and one of them I noticed was target operating model. Can you explain a little bit about that to us.
[00:21:53] **Nicole Gee:** It's a really funny one actually cause target operating model, I feel is interchangeable with organization design. So as you're mapping out how you want the organization to designed, whether that's with people or you're actually target operating model is how does it function? I kind of see them almost interchangeably. I don't feel that the business world has a particularly good difference between one and the other I think maybe owing to consultancy, target operating models, perhaps better understood but it going back to that book I told you about they talk about a compass model, and there's effectively four segments. Only one is roles and responsibility and structure. The other's about information and tools. So IT, another one is about process and we have one about governance and for me, that really encapsulates, that is how a target operating model can be built to start with.
[00:22:54] **Rory Mustan:** Thanks for, for sharing a bit more .
[00:22:56] **Nicole Gee:** I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of other definitions, but that's the one which I like.
[00:23:03] **Amy Springer:** Nicole, to wrap up, one question I love to ask people, especially in a world where those strategic change moments are happening more and more often, based on your experience within organizations as a consultant, what's one skill you wish every leader could have to prepare them for this process happening more often? That would give you a head start in the process.
[00:23:30] **Nicole Gee:** I mean, obviously, crystal ball gazing, great. It's probably listening, more than anything else, it's listening. There are going to be significant experts in the organization, who if you ask them a question every so often, and not, and first it not to be some big HR activity, but ask them a question, what you think are our barriers? What do you think we should be doing better in? What are our competitors doing? You can just sort of imagine, that it could be so easily just translated into an MS form sort of pulse survey. And It's just like: "Oh God, please don't." have a breakfast meeting with people who you wouldn't normally talk to and just ask them the question and have it as a nice informal social.
The more listening that happens and the less opinions which are formed instantly, taking the time to step back and listen is the critical skill.
[00:24:26] **Amy Springer:** Amazing. Thank you, Nicole.
[00:24:32] **Nicole Gee:** My pleasure. Thank you very much.
[00:24:35] **Amy Springer:** Thank you so much for joining us on the Org Design Podcast. And if anyone that was listening would like to, see more about what you do, read up on the website, like Rory did, where would they find your information?
[00:24:46] **Nicole Gee:** The best place for me is LinkedIn. My name's Nicole Gee, G-E-E, and my website is: geeniusconsulting.co.Uk. But as with many consultants, LinkedIn is probably still better.
[00:24:58] **Amy Springer:** Perfect. Thank you so much.
[00:25:01] **Rory Mustan:** Thanks Nicole.
Functionly provides a robust platform that empowers organizations to design and manage their structures effectively, aligning with the key takeaways from this episode.
By leveraging Functionly's capabilities, leaders can visualize their organizational design, understand the relationships between roles, and create an inclusive environment that fosters collaboration. The platform enables organizations to build adaptable and resilient structures that not only address current challenges but also anticipate future needs.
This focus on strategic alignment and inclusivity makes Functionly an essential tool for any leader aiming to enhance their organizational effectiveness and cultivate a culture where every individual can thrive
