A horse herd has never had an HR department. It’s never run a finance function or an IT team. And nobody in it has ever had “Head of Procurement” on a name badge. Yet a herd coordinates — navigating predators, terrain, and the competing needs of every member of the group. It does so with a precision most businesses would kill for.
I want to start there, because Impactful Teamwork’s latest episode makes an argument some leaders find genuinely uncomfortable. The departments running your business right now might not fit what’s coming next. Not restructured. Not rebadged. Quite possibly gone — and replaced with something far more fluid.
A fifty-nine-point gap
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends survey put a number on this. Sixty-six per cent of C-suite leaders say it’s very or extremely important to move beyond traditional functions — HR, finance, IT, legal and procurement. Yet only seven per cent say they’re making real progress.
That’s a fifty-nine-point gap. And gaps that size aren’t usually about ability. They’re about appetite. Leaders know, in principle, what needs to happen. Far fewer are willing to be the ones who actually do it. After all, doing it means dismantling the very structure that gave many of them their title in the first place.
Running the business is not growing the business
Deloitte offers a distinction worth borrowing. Split your organisation’s work into two categories: running the business, and growing the business.
Running the business is the repeatable stuff — payroll, compliance, vendor management, routine reporting. This work looks remarkably similar whether it sits in HR, finance, IT or supply chain. And increasingly, it suits shared services and automation, regardless of which department’s name happens to be on the door.
Growing the business is different. A new market entry. A merger. A product launch. This kind of work doesn’t respect departmental lines at all. Instead, it needs finance, HR, IT and supply chain pulling together — often through the same people, at the same time.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit. Most organisations build themselves — beautifully, efficiently — around the first category. Then they ask that same structure to handle the second. Almost half the leaders Deloitte surveyed admit that their own organisational structure is the primary barrier to fixing this. Read that again. The structure is the barrier to fixing the structure.
Why breaking down departments is so controversial
None of this is simply a logistics problem, which is partly why it provokes such resistance. Deloitte is candid about the real obstacle here: turf. As they put it, leaders hoping to reimagine functions need to face the human tendency to protect territory and political power. And that’s true no matter how agile or cost-effective a new structure might look on paper.
That’s worth sitting with for a moment. If your function disappears, does your role disappear with it? For a great many senior people, the honest answer feels like yes. And that, more than anything technical, is why so few organisations move past the seven per cent making real progress. Even when sixty-six per cent agree, on the record, that it matters.
The Diamond Model: a shared-leadership alternative to fixed departments
So what does “fluid” actually look like in practice? In Business HorsePower, I talk about the Diamond Model of Shared Leadership — drawn directly from how horse herds operate. Leadership rotates depending on what the moment requires. Different members lead from the front, the side, or behind, always moving in alignment behind a shared direction. Nobody holds a permanent title of “leader.” Leadership simply moves to wherever the herd needs it.
One of the most important positions in that diamond isn’t “leader” at all. It’s attention — the capacity to read the environment, sense the energy of the group, and notice what nobody’s saying. When a predator appears, the herd doesn’t convene a meeting to agree whose responsibility it is. The horse with the clearest read of the threat moves. The others follow.
Translate that into a business, and the first question changes. It stops being “whose department is this?” and becomes “who’s best placed to lead this, right now?”
Decoupling expertise from the org chart
Deloitte calls this decoupling domain expertise from organisational structure. In practice, that means letting people apply what they know wherever the business needs it — rather than locking it inside a single function.
We’re already seeing it happen. Moderna merged HR and IT under a single leader. Unilever recently gave its CFO responsibility for supply chain, procurement, digital and business services. At Cisco, leaders describe the rise of “dynamic teaming.” These are cross-functional squads that form around a problem, not a department. And the static team, they say, is becoming a thing of the past.
A lead mare in a herd isn’t “the logistics horse.” She leads because, right now, she has the clearest read of the ground ahead. Tomorrow, leadership might shift to someone else entirely — and nothing about her standing changes when it does. That’s the part most organisations haven’t worked out yet. How do you let leadership move without anyone losing status when it moves on?
Where you sit on the fifty-nine points
I’ll be honest — this episode isn’t a comfortable listen if your function defines who you are. It isn’t meant to be. But the discomfort is worth examining. Staying exactly as you are, while the gap between intention and progress widens, carries its own cost too. It just arrives more quietly.
Have a listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork. Then notice where your own leadership team would nod along — and where they’d bristle. Both reactions are useful.
Show Notes
00:46 Work Stuck Between Teams
01:34 Deloitte Gap Revealed
03:30 Why Functions Strain
07:09 Running Versus Growing
09:44 Horse Herd Leadership
12:28 Tension And Delays
16:36 Decouple Expertise
20:35 Turf And Clarity
23:16 Unbridled Adaptability
26:56 Key Takeaways
28:14 Teamship Invitation
