Create an Organizational Chart that Gets Results

Ahh, the org chart.

I haven’t heard much talk about this little tool lately. I guess that’s my cue to bring it back!

First, an organizational chart is simply a visual of how your organization is structured. It answers the question of who reports to whom, or who is responsible for whom.

Second, it helps you define the future of your organization. It’s much easier to get where you’re going if you have a map you can see. And that’s where you’ll see how to get results out of the business.

You’ll actually want to create two organizational charts. One for the current structure of your real estate team, and one for how your lead agent envisions the team as it exists in the future.Org Chart for 2016

Org Chart 2020

When you start planning for how the team is going to look in the future, you can see who your next hires are. In my case, we need to be building our bench for showing agents, a lead coordinator, a listing manager, and a lead listing specialist.

What’s interesting is when you have conversations with the team about how everything looks in the future. Our buyer specialist is perfectly suited to lead a team of showing agents, but will he? After mentioning it to him, he feels as though he would lose one aspect of serving buyers that he loves most and that’s building the relationship. He loves spending time with buyers and showing them homes. So perhaps this arm of the org chart will need to change in light of how Scott feels about it. But at least now we know.

Once I started building out the agents, I can see that as we grow, we are going to need more admin support. That’s why I added in an assistant to the buying side to help schedule showings, write contracts, and follow up with buyers who are under buyer agency agreement. I also added a transaction coordinator for the expansion team to fully support the agent in that expanded area.

I used popplet.com to create these organizational charts. You can create 10 charts for free, and then there’s a fee if you want more.

Here’s a video for you explaining exactly how to create one of these charts for your team!

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Have you used popplet.com to create your organizational chart, or have you used a different tool? Share your thoughts in the comments! Have a question? Email me directly at egilbert@kw.com

3 Comments

  1. Susan Shouse

    Elizabeth — this was right on time! You have that knack of knowing just what it is that we needed with regard to Team Building.

    Thanks so much,
    ~S

    Reply
    1. Elizabeth (Post author)

      You are welcome Susan! This is one of those easily-overlooked basics.

      Reply
  2. Nishadha Silva

    Hi Elizabeth, couldn’t agree more about future planning. However most just use it to visualize the current structure and not for future planning. And even in the current structure it can be used to show more than just the hierarchy. For example performance data can also be include there to make better decisions.
    In the post you’re using Popplet but we also have a great org charting tool that you can use to create professional and beautiful org charts. here are some features.

    – Professionally designed templates
    – Ability to add links, images to your org charts ( and preserve them when you export as PDF, or SVG )
    – Real-time collaboration to work with together with the team, this also enables multiple people to update the org chart
    – Embed code to add it in the website or blog. And once you update the original diagram those changes will be reflectedo in the embeded pages as well. So even if you’ve added in multiple places you just have to update the original diagram.
    – Some cool productivity features like 1-click create to come up with beautiful org charts quickly.

    Do give us a try, I’m sure you’ll like it.

    Reply

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