Case study: State and local government
Organizational redesign positions county for strategic plan execution
Table of contents
A county government serving a rapidly growing region in Wisconsin had developed an ambitious strategic plan, but now faced the more complex challenge of executing it. To succeed, county leaders knew they needed to rethink the structure of the executive team to better support strategy delivery. The new structure needed to enable high-quality service delivery for all residents, advance the county’s long-term vision, drive operational efficiency, strengthen cross-department collaboration, and remain resilient through election cycles and leadership turnover.
To achieve the goal, the county partnered with Eagle Hill to lead a comprehensive redesign of its leadership structure in just eight weeks. Our team took a holistic organizational design approach, engaging key stakeholders, assessing current-state realities, and developing options that honored the county’s culture while enabling its future vision. Throughout the process, every decision was grounded in one foundational goal: improving service delivery for over a half million county residents.
To develop effective organizational design options, the county needed to incorporate perspectives from a wide range of stakeholders, including the executive team, elected officials, employees, and county residents. Meaningful engagement was essential to ensure these voices informed the new structure and were bought into the future state structure. At the same time, the work had to move forward on an aggressive timeline, requiring the team to balance speed with rigor and capture deep, actionable insight without slowing momentum.
The goal
- Redesign executive leadership structure to enable strategy execution
- Create a future-ready organization
The approach
- Engage stakeholders
- Design tailored future-state designs
- Transfer implementation and change management capabilities
The outcome
- Future-state structure ready for implementation in just 8 weeks
Developing an organizational design capable of delivering the county’s strategy
Eagle Hill’s organizational design experts followed a phased approach to assess the organization holistically and develop leadership structure options capable of delivering the county’s strategy. Each phase was grounded in the client’s culture, reflecting the belief that effective organizational design is as much about people and behaviors as it is about structure. To help the county design their future structure, we:
Conducted deep stakeholder engagement and sought ground-level insight to inform organizational design. Eagle Hill paired document and organizational analysis with extensive stakeholder engagement to understand how the county operated in practice. Our team interviewed leaders and facilitated focus groups with county leaders and residents, uncovering operational strengths, pain points, and opportunities that documentation alone could not reveal. These firsthand perspectives grounded our recommendations in day-to-day operational realities while incorporating the voices of leadership, staff, and the community.
Tailored organizational redesign informed by leading practices. Eagle Hill used insights from stakeholder engagement and operational analysis to evaluate the county’s proposed organizational structure and develop two additional leadership model options tailored to the county’s strategic priorities. Our team incorporated leading practices from peer governments and evaluated each option against guiding principles focused on feasibility, strategic alignment, leadership effectiveness, cross-agency collaboration, accountability, and the scale of organizational change required for successful adoption.
Incorporated implementation and change management considerations into the organizational redesign. Eagle Hill developed organizational design recommendations that accounted for implementation and change management considerations, helping county leaders understand the implications of each leadership structure option. Our recommendations outlined key organizational design elements and identified factors that would influence successful adoption, enabling county leaders to evaluate options with both organizational effectiveness and future implementation in mind.
Turning strategy into impact for more than 500,000 residents
At the start of this engagement, the county had a clear strategic vision and a strong commitment to delivering on it, but leaders recognized the need to evolve the organizational structure to fully enable that vision. In just eight weeks, Eagle Hill guided county leadership from assessment to leadership-ready design options. With a fully documented leadership structure ready for implementation, the county gained the foundation, governance, and clarity needed to turn strategy into action and deliver long-term impact for more than 500,000 residents.
