In times of crisis or organizational change, leaders often resort to restructuring as a means of revitalizing an organization.

This usually involves tinkering with the boxes on the organizational chart to accommodate a few key personnel and then funneling the rest of the staff into various slots that may or may not provide a good fit. Sometimes the process results in greater productivity and efficiency. Sometimes it creates confusion and discontent.

Restructuring can be a useful and necessary step when your association's organizational chart no longer reflects its business activities, such as when merging functions to improve collaboration and efficiencies or when adding or sunsetting a business unit. Often, though, what's needed is not changing the organizational chart, but realigning staff into the right roles.

Employees who are hired to do one job often have the skills and experience to perform others as well. This is particularly true in associations, where individuals come from a variety of backgrounds and may have worked in a number of different positions or industries.

In addition, as they become more familiar with the organization and are given more responsibility, they may develop new interests and skills. The program subject matter expert may discover she has a knack for leading teams and would like more management opportunities. The web content administrator with that English degree is itching to improve the association's online content.

In larger organizations, it is not unusual for individuals in departments or divisions to take on interdepartmental duties that are already being served by another function or individual, leading to an unnecessary duplication of effort.

From time to time, departments, sections, even whole organizations need to realign staff roles to account for these shifts in skills, experience and function. I don't know Allison Rimm, but she has come up with an ingenious idea for managing this process. Writing for the Harvard Business Review blog, Rimm explains her method of using a task map to plot misalignments of staff and roles.

"A task map is a visual tool that allows you to see where skills are lacking or duplicated on a team," Rimm writes. "It can help you assign tasks that will take advantage of each person's abilities and interests."

Task maps often are used in complex projects to plot team roles, tasks and workflow. They may resemble organizational charts or flow charts. Rimm has taken that model and adapted it for human resource management to map abilities against job functions, roles and location in the organization — in essence, layering a task map over a knowledge map over an organizational chart.

This provides a more complete and accurate picture of current staff abilities and staffing deficiencies, based on actual experience and behavior, not job descriptions or titles. It quickly and dramatically highlights areas of misalignment and points out where and how staff can be better aligned with organizational needs.

Below is Rimm's chart outlining her eight-step process for creating a task map. Take a look and see if her process can benefit your organization. You may find that a little "out-of-the-[org chart] box" realignment will revitalize your staff and your association.