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The first weakness that was identified by us is the misalignment between the company considered to be a family business that values the long history of the family participating in the business and the new leader Randi Ricker. The store already exists for over a hundred years and was most of this time owned by the Zedros family. Five years ago, the family sold the flower shop to the current owner. However, two members of the family kept working in the store, also working in leadership positions. The new owner himself explained that he still considers his store to be a family owned business and sees himself just as a member of the team, though this current situation also leads to problems. First of all, is it rather difficult
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The third misalignment, we figured out, is between the structure of the organization and both the degree of specialization of work and the way of leading employees.
As mentioned above, Brattle Square Florist operates with a simple structure. This totally fits the business, since it’s size would not allow any other type of structure. However, organizations with simple structures usually show some other typical characteristics, which we could not identify for the flower shop. First, employees in these companies mostly perform rather broadly defined roles. The reason for this is, that the companies are not big enough to create very specialized jobs. Nevertheless, as we analyzed Brattle Square Florist, we it became clear very easily that the employees are assigned to highly specialized jobs. This even results in the separation of employees in different departments like design and delivery, which is usually not seen in organizations with simple structures. Moreover, we could also identify a misalignment concerning the simple structure and the how the company has determined their leadership roles. This does not affect the actual leadership style of the managers, but the fact that employees in an organization with a simple structure usually are only supervised by the owner, or at least by only one person. As we explained before, Brattle Square Florist practices shared leadership between the owner Randi Ricker, the Chief Operating Officer Stephen Zedros and Catherine Zedros, the head of sales and customer service. They all are in a management position and have their own field of operations which also makes them responsible for supervising a certain group of