Adjusting Organizations

Reorganizations happen.  They come in many shapes and sizes.  They are justified in myriad ways.  All are costly and disruptive.  They defocus the staff and make people generally nervous about their jobs.  There are good reasons to do reorganizations, however, and if you undertake a reorganization for good reasons and articulate those reasons well, the people impacted by the changes will move forward.  The enterprise is made stronger, your organization's effectiveness improves, and your credibility as a leader is maintained.

Organizations evolve organically over time.  Team charters that started out crisp begin to get blurry, fuzzy around the edges.  Perhaps it has become difficult to decide where a new project should fit.  Perhaps, one team has had to grow to get a big project (or set of projects) done, but this is changing, and that team is now going to need to bring its focus in tighter.  Employees that were busy and productive find themselves underutilized or stymied in their efforts to contribute.  Perhaps their interests have changed.  Perhaps they have learned new skills and are eager to apply those skills.  Perhaps the needs of the encompassing organization have changed.

Realignment of charter with functional structure and redistribution of staff to improve productivity are both good reasons for a reorganization.  Key to the success and smooth transition is the complete buy-in of your staff of managers.  This won't necessarily happen immediately.  

Sometimes good managers may need to lose projects so that the functional organization makes sense and inter-team dependencies are managed more efficiently.  Sometimes you and your staff will need to work hard to find the right fit for good staff members who are ready to move into new roles.  These changes can be emotionally charged and require trust to pull off.  Your management team must have learned, over time, to trust you.  They must have learned, over time, to believe that you are telling them everything that you can.  They must have learned that if you say, "I'm sorry, but I can't discuss that right now.  I'll elaborate on that as soon as I'm able," that it is for good reason and that you will let them in on whatever-it-is as soon as you are able.

So, above all, you must work every day to develop trust.  There is really only one way to do this.  You have to be honest and forthright in your communications.  Always.  If you have developed trust, your staff will go with you during difficult times.  If you have not developed trust, they won't.  It's really just about that simple.

Okay, so you have a staff that trusts you, but you still need to make some changes.  The first step is to get agreement on what the overall charter for the department is (or has become).  You need to articulate that charter and get agreement -- usually in a managers' meeting -- about it.  Depending on personalities, you may need to meet one-on-one with your staff members so that they feel comfortable describing their concerns about the charter as articulated.  

Once the charter has settled, you and your staff need to partition the charter in such a way that the work is divided up in an intelligent way.  Ideally, this will result in approximately equal amounts of work for each of your teams and each of your managers.  You should work hard to set up an equitable distribution of good projects.  This will be tempered by the interests and specialties of your various teams, but the more balanced the work, consistent with the needs of the organization, the better.

Partitioning the charter intelligently basically forces an organizational structure for your department.  This is a good thing because it reestablishes a crisp charter for each team.  Once your managers have understood and accepted this organizational structure, you all need to work together to adjust the details.  You will work together to enhance communication lines and make sure that inter-team dependencies are clarified and formalized.  You will work with your managers to anticipate the questions that your lower level managers and individual contributors will have and you will develop forthright answers to those questions.  You will work with your managers to develop roll-out presentations at all levels so that the story behind the changes is articulated well.  This is a lot of work, but it is important to the enterprise.  If you do it well, this can make the message compelling and motivating to your entire department.  Take your time and get it right.

Finally (and this will be hard for you) you must be willing to approach your peers (and your common manager) to propose that team members or even entire teams move into your peers' departments from your own if that makes sense for the encompassing organization.  In other words, you must be willing to do voluntarily what you are asking your staff to do.  Of course, you need to discuss manager and team reassignments privately, with the impacted staff, before announcing them to your overall management team or your department as a whole.

If you work in a good organization, a healthy organization in which the senior managers are really looking out for the health of the enterprise, staff, managers, and teams will move across department boundaries as it makes sense.  If your organization doesn't work that way, it would probably be good for you to look for one that does.

Once you've got all this done, you can tackle the mechanical aspects of the reorganization: co-location, infrastructure changes, paperwork, and so on.

Be sure to make note in the subsequent performance reviews of your staff members the contributions and sacrifices each made during this challenging process. 

So, to summarize:

1. You should undertake a structural reorganization for sound, structural reasons. 
2. You must bring your staff along with your reasoning and gain their acceptance -- not merely their acquiescence. 
3. You and your staff must roll this out clearly and crisply.  Then pause and allow the individual teams to percolate questions up.  Answer the questions forthrightly.
4. Take care of interdepartmental changes.
5. Handle the mechanics
6. Formally acknowledge the work in your staff members' subsequent performance reviews.

Reorganizations done this way will enhance management's credibility and make people understand that everyone's place in the organization is secured first and foremost by performance. Reorganizations done this way will help staff members see that management is looking out for the health of the enterprise while putting real effort into staff development.