Re-Orgs
Re-orgs are painful for everyone involved, and so they frequently get a bad reputation. If you are on the receiving end, no doubt you find…
Re-orgs are painful for everyone involved, and so they frequently get a bad reputation. If you are on the receiving end, no doubt you find it frustrating that you’ve only just reached stride within a given system before the winds shift. If you are orchestrating the changes, then you are spending huge amounts of cycles on people’s feelings and finding good fits for everyone and trying to articulate why it is important to make these shifts instead of on the actual business. Everyone has an opinion, and rarely do all the parties agree in these sorts of situations.
Nonetheless, it is critical to regularly re-evaluate whether the business outcomes desired are actually being served by the organization structure. The most common and non-obvious way I’ve seen this boil off the rails is through the optimization of many small, autonomous units over the whole. As we increasingly empower smaller, nimbler units of people, an accidental bi-product is the creation of teams that are sometimes so self-sufficient that a large group ends up pursuing many small goals instead of a small set of huge ones.
Take the following abstract thought experiment: what is the most amazing thing a group of 100 people can accomplish versus what is the most amazing thing 10 groups of 10 people can accomplish assuming the 10 groups are relatively disconnected from each other? The latter always produces lower-order results by its nature since the 100 person group on its worst day can replicate the 10×10 and on its best it can pull together a wider set of skills and approach more complex outcomes (we assume that both examples require equivalent overhead in this example). The natural gravity of a group is toward less and less exciting sets of outcomes in modern management models since we tend to keep decision making decentralized and a team is generally incentivized to do the best it can do. So in part a re-org is a necessary element of hygiene to fight this tendency from time to time and to re-orient the group toward something higher.
Of course, beyond this evolution toward small units of work there are a myriad other reasons why re-orgs might be desired: changing business climate, changing skills of the team, change in focus, leaders and teams that aren’t working out, or leaders and teams that are and that we want to double down on, to name a few.
Originally published at http://adamjudelson.com on July 6, 2016.