Building structure is an important part of building an organization. I find standing up structure, whether it’s a process, a template, or a way of operating, to be a difficult task, but when you get it right, it’s quite fulfilling. Structure makes things repeatable across an organization. It sets consistent expectations around quality and can help you scale efficiently by ensuring people are not repeating work and wasting time on building new processes.
The downside of structure is that it commoditizes whatever you’ve built structure around - whether that’s a process or deliverable. In other words, applying structure to something means you’re limiting, if not eliminating, the opportunity to be creative on that specific thing. That can be good. Building structure and killing creativity in certain parts of the organization means freeing up cognitive space so teams can focus on areas where applying creativity builds outsized value. In fact, if you’re intentional, it’s a good way to channel creativity to specific parts of the business. For example, in sales, I want my team to be creative in how and what solutions and updates are presented to clients. These should feel very custom to the client’s specific needs and reflect the unique partnership. Weekly internal status update that are aggregated to leadership? This should be highly structured. Internal status updates are not the place to create your Mona Lisa. Still, there’s a temptation to apply structure wherever possible because it can build predictability and control, but it’s important to be intentional about where you build process and repeatability so you’re not killing creativity.