Redesigning an organization around the work, ahead of a chief executive succession

The Work Behind the Work

The association sets professional standards, credentials clinicians, and publishes the education its field relies on. Over a decade its membership roughly tripled, its budget grew several times over, and its staff moved to fully distributed work. All of it happened faster than the organization's structure could absorb.

At the same time, the association was preparing for the retirement of its long-serving chief executive and the succession of an internal leader into the role. Rapid growth and a planned leadership handover together make the moment when an organization can institutionalize what it has built, or carry its improvisations forward into the next decade.

Leadership chose to examine the organization before the handover.

How the roles came to be

The assessment began with interviews across the entire staff, a staff-wide survey, and a function-by-function analysis of where effort was actually going.

Staff described real commitment, deep subject-matter expertise, and a proven ability to rise to the moment. They also described friction, and a great deal of it.

The two turned out to be connected. Over a decade the organization absorbed one demand after another: membership growth, an expanding credentialing load, new education formats, and then a pandemic that required the field to be re-equipped within months and the staff to move to fully distributed work. Each time, people stepped forward and took on whatever was in front of them. The association got through every one of those moments because individuals made it their business to.

What followed each moment was quieter. The work people picked up stayed with them. Responsibilities blurred and accumulated. Several people had inherited work that was now assumed to be part of the job, without anyone ever having decided it should be. Some work had no home at all. Decision-making lines settled wherever they had landed during the last stretch of pressure.

That history explained much of what the interviews surfaced. Decision rights were unclear, and staff named waiting for sign-off as the leading reason work stalled. Subject-matter experts were absorbed in high-volume transactional work, which showed up in every conversation as a shortage of capacity. Most of the association's work was project-based even when it was recurring, and it ran without a shared method. Very little of how the organization operated was written down, and several processes existed only in one person's head.

Each adaptation made sense at the time it was made. Together, over a decade, they had produced a structure that nobody had sat down and designed.

Sequence over speed

Every structural decision followed the same order, deliberately.

Start from organizational priorities. Establish what work is required to deliver them, and what skills and experience that work needs. Determine the optimal way to organize around that work. Define roles and reporting relationships accordingly. Only then turn to the question of who sits in them.

Holding that sequence is slower at the front and considerably faster afterward. It is also what allows the decisions that come later to rest on documented analysis, which matters when those decisions affect people.

Weighing the options

The work developed alternative structures and made the tradeoffs visible: different reporting lines and what each one optimized for, how work should be grouped into roles, total headcount, and the level and seniority each role required.

Leadership chose from those options with the reasoning in front of them. An organization that chooses between well-framed options owns the result, and can revisit it later without starting over.

For one contested role, the work went further. Three benchmarked configurations of the same position at different levels were weighed against internal evidence, with the driving choices documented so that a future leader could reopen the question and see how it was settled.

Carrying the design into practice

The engagement moved from advice into implementation partway through and stayed there.

That phase covered sequencing and dependencies across workstreams, the interim coverage and redundancy needed while roles changed, and the risks attached to each step.

It also covered the part organizations most often underestimate, which is how the change is communicated. Communications were planned in detail: who heard what, in what order, and from whom. Sequencing options were developed and weighed with leadership before anything was said, and the supporting material was drafted in advance so that every conversation could be held properly.

Change management ran alongside. As roles and reporting relationships shifted, the work covered how expectations were set, how questions were routed, and how the pace of change was set against what staff could absorb while continuing to serve members.

Throughout, Two Five One project managed the engagement itself. A weekly leadership working session, a tracked plan across every workstream, and clear sequencing of what had to happen before what. Association staff were carrying their own jobs at the same time, so keeping the work moving between sessions was part of what we were there to do.

People, process, and systems do not separate

The engagement was scoped around structure and roles. In practice those cannot be pulled apart from the processes an organization runs, the systems it runs them on, and the way it makes decisions. Work with no clear owner is usually also work with no written procedure and no system of record.

So the work widened as the evidence required it to. A register of the processes that needed documenting, with a template and a set of rules defining what belongs in a written procedure, a project tool, an intranet, and a chat channel. Written procedures for the areas where knowledge sat with a single person. A register of the policies the organization needed, with the items requiring legal or benefits review marked as such. A reference covering the association's digital estate, and a review of who held access to what.

All of it sat in the way of the structure working, which is how it came into scope.

What stays after the engagement ends

Findings were played back to the entire staff at a full-team retreat. The same session taught a project management method the organization went on to adopt, with templates for launching and running work.

The engagement closed by handing over working assets and a prioritized register of improvement opportunities, sequenced by priority and timing. The register is deliberately larger than any plan, so that nothing observed over nine months is lost and the organization can work through it as capacity allows.

The final recommendation was a practice: an annual planning process, performance management, and a leadership team that regroups quarterly to set priorities, commit to each other, follow through, and change direction on purpose when a priority genuinely shifts.

Why This Work Matters

Membership associations carry an unusual burden. They are accountable to a board, to a profession, and to a public that depends on the standards they set. When internal structure lags growth, the cost shows up in how quickly credentials get reviewed, how reliably education gets delivered, and how well the organization absorbs its next leader.

An organization chart takes an afternoon to draw. What takes nine months is the evidence underneath it: talking to everyone, sequencing the questions in the right order, showing the tradeoffs openly, and handing back something the organization can keep running on its own.

We measure our success by what continues to work after we step back.