The mortal sin

Twenty years of organisational design work, in companies large and small, across more geographies than I care to count, and I have developed one clear allergy: dotted reporting lines. I consider them the mortal sin of org design.

Dotted lines should not exist. Ever.

I know the temptation. You have a global function (compliance / finance / IT) that needs some grip on local teams; a project leader who needs to direct people from other departments; a centre of excellence that wants influence without owning headcount. The dotted line feels like a clever compromise: not quite a boss, but more than a colleague. It is a compromise alright; just not a clever one.

Here is what dotted reporting actually does, despite all the good intentions of those who reach for it:

• It creates confusion. Two managers, two priorities, two sets of expectations; the unfortunate person at the bottom of the dotted line ends up spending more energy on internal politics than on the actual work.
• It diffuses accountability. When two managers are responsible, no manager is responsible; performance issues quietly slip between the cracks, and so do the people working under them.
• It kills the internal client / service provider model. A dotted line pretends to formalise a relationship that should, in healthy organisations, be governed by clear service expectations. Instead of a clean provider-customer dynamic, you get a muddled hybrid that satisfies no one.
• It adds unnecessary layers of management and friction. Every dotted line is a meeting that wasn't needed, an alignment exercise nobody asked for, a status update sent to one manager too many.

So, what to do instead? If a role genuinely serves the "dotted manager's" organisation, treat it as exactly that: a service relationship. Set clear expectations, define the deliverables, agree on KPIs and SLAs, and let the solid line do its job. The internal client gets what they need; the service provider has one boss; everyone knows where they stand. If you cannot articulate the service expectations clearly enough to write them down, the dotted line was never the answer; you had a fuzzy thinking problem disguised as an org design problem.

Next time you sit down to design an organisation, set design principle number one: no dotted lines allowed here. The rest will follow.