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How to build an org chart that people actually use

Most org charts are drawn once, printed, and never looked at again. Here is how to draw one that answers questions.

5 minute read · part of the free minekop guides

An org chart is a picture of who reports to whom. That sounds too simple to be worth a guide, and yet most charts fail at it. They are out of date, or they show job titles nobody uses, or they quietly hide the fact that four people think they run the same team.

A chart earns its place when somebody can look at it and get an answer. Who do I ask about invoices? How many people does this manager really carry? If we lose this person, what falls over? Everything below is aimed at that.

Start with people, not boxes

Write a flat list first. Name, job title, and who they report to. Nothing else. Do it in a spreadsheet or on paper. If you start by dragging boxes around you will spend an hour making it pretty and still not know whether it is right.

The list forces the awkward questions early:

• Somebody has no manager. Is that the founder, or did you forget?
• Two people are down as managing the same person. One of them is wrong, or you have a matrix and need to say so on purpose.
• Somebody's job title is three lines long. That usually means the role is really two roles.

What goes in a box

Name and job title, always. After that, add a field only if you will use it to answer a question:

Field	Add it when
Department	You want to see at a glance how big each function is. Colour does this better than text.
Location	You have more than one office and time zones matter.
Team	People work in squads that cut across departments.
Photo	The company is big enough that people do not know each other by name.

Resist the urge to add salary. The moment a chart carries pay data it becomes a document you cannot show anybody, which defeats the point of drawing it. Keep pay in the budget, where it belongs.

How deep to go

One chart, one purpose. A board pack wants three levels: the founder, the function heads, and the team leads. An onboarding pack wants every name. Trying to serve both in one drawing gives you a wall of tiny boxes that nobody can read.

If a chart does not fit on a single sheet of A4 at a readable size, either it is the wrong chart for the purpose, or you should be collapsing branches and printing one function at a time.

Matrix reporting, without lying

Plenty of people genuinely have two bosses. A designer sits in the design team but works day to day inside the product squad. The wrong answers are to pick one and pretend, or to draw a spaghetti of extra lines.

The workable answer is a second box for the second role, drawn differently — a dashed border, say — so the eye reads it as "also this". The person appears twice, which is honest, and the counting still has to know they are one person. That is the subject of the headcount guide.

Show the empty chairs

A chart of only the people you have is a chart of today. Add the roles you have agreed to fill and mark them as open. Suddenly the picture answers a different question: what does this team look like in six months, and can the manager at the top of that branch actually carry it?

Open roles are also the cheapest way to make a hiring plan visible. Nobody reads a hiring spreadsheet. Everybody looks at a chart with three dashed boxes under one manager and says "that is too many at once".

Keeping it alive

A chart is only useful if it is current, and it will not stay current by itself. Two habits do most of the work:

1. Update it when somebody joins or moves, in the same ten minutes as the other joining admin. Not at the end of the quarter.
2. Keep the source as a list. If your chart is a drawing, every change is manual work. If it is generated from a list of names, titles and managers, you edit one line and the picture redraws itself.

That second point is why exporting matters. A chart you can pull out as CSV is a chart you can hand to somebody else, keep in version control, or rebuild after a reorganisation. A chart trapped in a drawing tool has a short life.

The four mistakes

• Drawing the org you want. Draw the one you have, then draw a second one for the one you want. Mixing them helps nobody.
• Titles instead of names in the boxes. "Head of Growth" tells you nothing about who to email.
• One manager with fourteen direct reports. The chart is not wrong; the organisation is. That is the chart doing its job.
• No date on it. Put the month on the chart. A chart with no date is assumed to be current, and it never is.

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