How Our Branding Agency Solved Its Structural Challenge: The Lean Hierarchy Model
Back in 2021, when we were just two founders and a small team, we didn’t consciously choose any hierarchy. We simply didn’t have enough people for anything else. But as we grew our branding agency, especially expanding internationally, we learned that different functions need different approaches, and that good intentions aren’t enough without proper systems.
We also learned a lot from the companies we work with. Mid-sized businesses tend to be very traditional in their setups, but with ever-changing markets and new working approaches, some start to think about flattening their organizational structure and testing out other methods.
But how should companies organize to maximize performance, adaptability, and employee satisfaction?
To understand our approach, it helps to first look at some established frameworks. Afterwards we will explore what we’ve seen from the companies we worked with and describe our own journey to a hierarchy model which we call: The Lean Hierarchy.
Mintzberg’s Organizational Configurations
Henry Mintzberg, one of the most influential management thinkers, provides a compelling framework for understanding the question at hand. His research identifies distinct organizational configurations, each with specific strengths and limitations. Mintzberg’s framework suggests that organizations can be differentiated along three basic dimensions:
- Which part of the company drives success (is it leadership, analysts, or front-line workers?)
- How work gets coordinated (through rules and procedures, direct oversight, or team collaboration?)
- How decision-making authority is distributed (who gets to make which decisions?)
From these dimensions emerge distinct structural configurations, and while working with mid-sized businesses, we consistently observe two dominant, traditional patterns:
Machine Bureaucracy (Traditional Hierarchy): Built around standardized work processes, with the techno-structure (analysts, planners, engineers) as the key component. Decision-making is centralized, formalization is high, and coordination happens through detailed procedures and hierarchical oversight.
Professional Bureaucracy (Traditional Hierarchy): Built around standardized skills and professional expertise, with the operating core (lawyers, consultants, accountants) as the key component driving organizational success.
However, with changes in management and modern working expectations, many leaders are seeking flatter alternatives.
Traditional vs. Flat — The Black and White View
While testing out our own approach to organizational structure, we’ve experimented with some versions of both. Our creative work is actually a great setup for a flat hierarchy model; however, our quality control setups and mentoring programs often demand more structure. A brief rundown of the two configurations:
The Case for Traditional Hierarchy (Machine or Professional Bureaucracy)
Traditional hierarchies exist for good reasons. Mintzberg’s bureaucracy models explain why many successful organizations maintain multiple management layers:
Standardization and quality control. When work processes can be standardized, traditional hierarchies excel at maintaining consistent quality. Each layer serves as a checkpoint, ensuring procedures are followed and standards maintained.
Clear accountability and career progression. Employees understand reporting relationships, responsibility allocation, and advancement opportunities. This clarity reduces uncertainty and provides motivation through defined career paths.
Coordination at scale. As organizations grow, informal coordination becomes insufficient. Traditional hierarchies provide the structural backbone necessary for managing complexity.
Risk management. In environments where mistakes carry significant consequences (regulated industries, safety-critical operations), multiple oversight layers provide essential safeguards.
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The Case for Flat Hierarchy (Simple Structure)
Flat hierarchies have gained popularity, particularly among startups and creative organizations, for compelling reasons:
Speed and agility. With fewer layers, decisions move faster from identification to implementation. This responsiveness provides competitive advantages in rapidly changing markets.
Direct communication. Information flows directly between decision-makers and implementers, reducing the “telephone game” effect where messages become distorted through multiple hand-offs.
Employee empowerment. Reduced hierarchy often correlates with increased autonomy, leading to higher engagement and ownership among team members.
Cost efficiency. Fewer management positions mean lower overhead costs and more resources directed toward productive activities.
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Some Common Limitations
Each approach works well in its optimal conditions but creates trade-offs that can become problematic when applied universally or as organizations evolve:
Traditional hierarchies can become bureaucratic bottlenecks. Multiple approval layers slow decision-making, stifle innovation, and create frustration among capable employees who feel micromanaged.
Flat hierarchies often lack the coordination mechanisms necessary for sustainable growth. As teams expand beyond 50–75 people, informal communication networks become insufficient, leading to alignment problems and quality inconsistencies.
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As stated before, both setups addressed certain challenges we’ve been dealing with in our organization. However, neither felt right to roll out across the entire company. They plainly fail to recognize that different types of work require different coordination mechanisms and therefore different hierarchy setups.
That’s when we started to dig deeper and develop a structure that addresses our challenges while maintaining flexibility and staying lean where we need it to be.
The Lean Hierarchy Model
What we call ‘The Lean Hierarchy Model’ draws inspiration from another of Mintzberg’s configurations called ‘The Adhocracy Configuration’, but adapts it for the practical realities of growing businesses. Rather than imposing uniform structure, lean hierarchy recognizes that different projects and functions benefit from different organizational approaches.
How Lean Hierarchy Works
Lean hierarchy operates through project-based leadership rather than permanent organizational charts, allowing for flexibility and dynamic team structures based on the task at hand. This includes:
Project-based sponsors. Instead of permanent department heads, leaders and senior team members step into project sponsor roles for specific initiatives. These sponsors move the project forward and provide quality oversight without creating fixed bureaucratic roles.
Project-based managers. The same approach applies to roles directly overseeing the work. These project managers are mainly responsible for guidance, mentorship and quality control. Critical product launches might involve multiple project managers across different functions, while R&D exploration might operate with minimal oversight, making this structure adaptable for different needs.
Selective decision-making authority. Decision-making power shifts to whoever has the most relevant expertise for each project phase. A technical lead might drive architecture decisions, while a marketing specialist leads go-to-market choices, regardless of their position in the overall company hierarchy.
Flat hierarchy within projects. Each project team operates as a small flat hierarchy with direct communication and collaboration rather than formal procedures. This enables rapid response to changing requirements while keeping teams small enough to maintain the benefits of flat structure without the coordination problems that emerge when flat hierarchy spans an entire company.
Traditional hierarchy where it’s needed. Lean hierarchy acknowledges that some functions require standardized processes and clear hierarchical oversight. Finance departments with monthly reporting cycles, HR with compliance requirements, and operations with quality control procedures benefit from traditional structure. Rather than forcing these into flat models, lean hierarchy supports them with automation and digitalization to maximize efficiency while maintaining necessary oversight.
The Appeal of Lean
This hybrid approach creates several distinct advantages over pure organizational models:
Right structure for each function. Initiatives or tasks with high uncertainty receive flat project teams for speed and creativity, while operational tasks maintain traditional hierarchy for consistency and quality control.
Scalable growth. Organizations can add project-based coordination for new initiatives while strengthening operational processes through automation, avoiding the “grow or flatten” trade-off.
Balanced autonomy. Teams have creative freedom within clear project boundaries while operational stability provides the foundation for reliable execution.
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The Challenges
Implementing lean hierarchy requires certain setups to be in place:
Cultural foundation. Success depends on developing strong communication systems and collaborative cultures emphasizing trust, ownership, and shared responsibility. This requires more active management, not less.
Role clarity. With project-based leadership, organizations must clearly define roles and responsibilities for each initiative to prevent confusion or conflict.
Career development. Traditional promotion paths become less relevant. Organizations must create valued growth opportunities through project leadership, technical expertise, and cross-functional experience.
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What This Looks Like in Practice
Netflix demonstrates lean principles through their “relatively flat” structure where executives report directly to the CEO, but maintain coordination roles. This way upper management stays close to the work, ensuring quality guidelines and can intervene if needed. Making management work more efficient and purpose-driven.
Spotify embraces the approach through “organizing around work rather than following specific processes,” using autonomous “Squads” with coordinating “Tribes”. Essentially project-based teams who are overseen by larger instances for guidance.
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Our Journey to Lean
Our ambition is to create a branding agency of curiosity and growth, which requires mentorship, guidance, and creative freedom to be in place. Something neither a completely flat nor traditional hierarchy could provide us with. So we started to think about what needs to happen and slowly developed a hierarchy model out of this.
The first step: A safe environment was created through direct access to team members. Not just to leadership, but across all levels and departments. When team members can collaborate easily with colleagues in different roles and approach leadership with challenges, learning accelerates and barriers vanish. But this requires intentional design, not just hoping it happens naturally.
Turning (almost) everything into a project: While growing, we’ve realized that everything becomes new again. Processes don’t work anymore, communication fails and tasks don’t meet our quality standards. The solution was to start by putting everything into a project with a clear sprint duration. This way we’ve been able to control the output within a given timeframe and extract processes from it where beneficial.
The cultural challenge: In our Indonesian office, workplace culture emphasizes respect for leadership, which can recreate the barriers we’re trying to remove. We learned that breaking down these barriers requires structured approaches like workshops, facilitated discussions, and requiring new employees to work on-site initially to experience the collaborative culture firsthand. Creating the conditions for a culture to emerge rather than declaring it.
The filtering process: Not everyone thrives in this environment, and that’s okay. Some employees join us, experience our culture, and realize it doesn’t match their working style or career expectations. This natural filtering has become essential for building a cohesive team with shared collaborative values. It’s better to discover this early than force a poor fit.
How to Understand Your Hierarchy Needs?
Our path was based on trial and error and we went through a lot of different approaches. Mintzberg’s structures were nothing we’ve encountered on the first day, but we found them very informative while working on various improvements of our current structure. If you want to challenge your current organizational structure, here are some questions we found helpful asking:
How do you coordinate work? If you need consistent quality across standardized processes, traditional process standardization might be optimal. If you need rapid adaptation and innovation, in projects or across your organization, lean and flat approaches might be the way to go.
Where does your competitive advantage originate? Organizations competing on efficiency and scale often benefit from traditional structures, while those competing on innovation and adaptability may require flatter approaches.
What stage of organizational development are you in? Simple structures (flat hierarchies) work well for early-stage companies but become coordination bottlenecks as teams grow. Project-based approaches provide a path for scaling without bureaucratic overhead.
What does your industry demand? Regulated industries with high compliance requirements may need traditional hierarchy’s multiple checkpoints, while creative industries may thrive with flexible coordination.
In the end, no structure is permanent nor superior to the other. As our company grows, we continue to adapt, and we encourage our team to push back and shape how we work. What helps is knowing the range of models that exist, and so we close our story with a table of the hierarchy types we’ve explored so far.
