Your Team Doesn’t Have a Communication Problem. It Has a Structure Problem.

Early in my time running a county IT department, work kept falling through the cracks. A firewall change went in without the applications team knowing, and it took down a permitting system for half a day. A department head called to ask why two of my teams had contacted her about the same project, separately, without knowing about each other. Decisions that crossed team lines sat for weeks because nobody was sure whose call they were.

My answer was a Monday coordination meeting. When that didn’t fix it, I added a Wednesday status meeting. Then a shared project tracker. Then a rule that every change got emailed to every manager.

After one of those Wednesday meetings, a supervisor stayed behind. She waited until the room cleared and said, “We don’t need another meeting. We need to know who owns this stuff.”

She was right. And it took me too long to admit it.

The Meeting Cure

I was running what I now call the Meeting Cure: treating a structural disease with communication medicine. More meetings, more status updates, more coordination calls. Every dose bought a little relief. None of it touched the disease.

The disease was that our structure didn’t match our work. We were organized in technology silos, infrastructure, applications, support, and almost everything that mattered crossed those lines. Nobody owned the seams. So either everyone jumped in, which created chaos, or no one did, which created gaps.

Once I saw it, the fix wasn’t more communication. We wrote down who owned what. We defined which decisions each level could make without asking permission. We named a lead for any work that crossed team boundaries and gave that person real authority to convene people and make calls. Within a few months I cancelled the Wednesday meeting, and the Monday one got shorter. The cracks mostly closed. Not because my people got smarter or worked harder. Because they stopped fighting the org chart to do their jobs.

Is That You?

Count your standing coordination meetings. If the number keeps growing while the same problems keep coming back, you’re running the Meeting Cure too. You’re medicating symptoms and calling it leadership. That recurring problem in your shop, the one that survives every process tweak and every team-building session? It survives because your structure keeps producing it.

Most CIOs inherit a structure and never question it. They treat the org chart like the weather. But structure is a design choice. You can change it.

Accountability Without Authority

A colleague from another county learned the second half of this lesson the hard way. He created a service delivery manager role and made her accountable for customer satisfaction across his biggest departments. Smart move on paper. Except every decision that touched satisfaction, work priorities, escalations, resource calls, belonged to functional managers who didn’t answer to her. When satisfaction scores dropped, she took the blame for outcomes she had no power to change.

She finally told him straight: “You made me accountable for everything and gave me authority over nothing.”

To his credit, he heard it. He gave her authority to set cross-team priorities for her departments and a direct escalation path when managers wouldn’t align. Within two quarters, complaint volume dropped, and two department heads who had routed around IT for years started calling her first.

That’s the principle underneath all of this: authority must match accountability. If you hold someone accountable for an outcome, they need the authority to make the decisions that drive it. Assign one without the other and you’re not delegating. You’re setting a trap.

Five Fixes Before You Reorganize

You don’t need a reorganization to get most of this. Start here.

Ask the diagnostic question. For every recurring problem, ask: is this a people problem or a structure problem? Someone not doing their job is a people problem. Nobody knowing whose job it is, that’s structure. Be honest about the answer. It’s structure more often than you think.

Write down who decides what. Define the decisions each level can make without asking: what front-line staff decide, what supervisors decide, what managers decide, what only you decide. Then train people on it and hold to it. Ambiguous authority produces both over-escalation and under-escalation, and both slow you down.

Never assign accountability without authority. Before you hand someone an outcome, list the decisions that drive that outcome and confirm they can make them. If they can’t, either give them the authority or stop holding them accountable.

Name a lead for anything that crosses boundaries. Cross-functional work doesn’t coordinate itself, and hoping people will collaborate organically isn’t a plan. Designate a lead, give them authority to convene and decide, and define where issues go when managers can’t agree.

Check your spans. Four to seven direct reports for a CIO. Five to twelve for managers, fewer when the work is complex. Outside those ranges, either someone isn’t getting the coaching they need or you’re carrying layers you don’t need.

And if you’ve done all five and the dysfunction keeps showing up at the same boundaries, then consider reorganizing. Structure change is surgery. Try medicine first. Just make sure it’s the right medicine, and the Meeting Cure isn’t it.

Stop Fighting the Org Chart

Your community doesn’t care about your org chart. They care that permits get issued. That dispatch stays up. That payroll runs. Your structure either lets your people deliver that, or it makes them fight for every inch of it.

So find the problem in your shop that keeps coming back no matter how many meetings you throw at it. That’s your structure talking. Are you listening?