The chair was filled before anybody asked what it was for

A company gets busy. Someone at the top says we need an operations manager. A box appears on the chart, a title goes in the box, and a person goes under the title. Within a month that person has work. Within six months the work has a shape, and everybody starts treating the shape as the job.

Ask what the box is for and you will get a description of what the person does. Those are two different questions, and the distance between them is where companies start leaking.

A function is something the company needs done in order to reach the place it is trying to reach. A position is a chair with a name on it. The chair should come second, and in most shops I have been inside, it came first.

The right order is dull, and I have rarely seen it followed. Write down the one thing this company exists to do. Work out what has to be true for that to happen. Group what has to happen into functions. Then draw a chair under each function and go find the person who can sit in it.

Built that way, every seat has a reason you can say out loud in one sentence. Built by addition, the chart just grows, and six years later you are paying a manager whose real job is forwarding email between two departments that should have been one.

A chair ought to be able to say in one sentence what the company needed when it was built.

Here is the tell I watch for. Somebody gets hired, and in the first week he is asked to write his own job description.

It sounds generous. It says that the people above him cannot name his function, and they are hoping he will name it for them.

I worked somewhere that did this and I left over it. The people making decisions there saw the parts clearly and lost sight of the company as one thing aimed at one place. Every one of them was capable. Together they were pulling the business apart by being present in it, because each one drew his own patch, and the patches overlapped in some places and left holes in others.

In a trade shop the same thing shows up smaller and costs just as much. A service manager who is a dispatcher with a better title. An office person who owns the pricebook because she was the one sitting there the day it arrived. A general manager hired to take load off the owner, who ends up carrying the same load with a second signature on it.

Every one of those chairs was built from pressure, and pressure is a worse architect than a goal.

The test takes an afternoon. Write the one goal at the top of a sheet. Under it list every position you pay for. Beside each one write the function the goal needs from that seat, in a single sentence, using no verbs borrowed from the person currently sitting there.

The seats you cannot finish are your answer.