Whoops — Don’t do that Again! Best Practices for your next Reorganization
“Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned” Frank Sonnenberg
Reorganization efforts have many moving parts. It is pretty easy to get lost in the details and inadvertently lose sight of the big picture, and the important lessons that create success for your initiative.
To that end, here is a short list of best practices to include in your reorganization efforts. Special thanks to Andrew Chandler, Joann Lime and Adrienne Donley who helped compile this list during our time working together. These are lessons learned in the field, based on learning from plans that went very well, and from mistakes made along the way.
Don’t just read these — think about them and use them. Incorporate these as rules into your reorganization efforts to ensure your initiative’s success. They are simple and straightforward, yet you might be surprised by the number of times these lessons are omitted from reorganization plans.
Best Practices
- Sponsorship matters — Active, engaged sponsorship from the leader over the duration of the change is essential to success
- Plan more time in the design phase allowing your team to thoroughly vet strategy, staff feedback and design options. This will pay dividends during implementation
- Invest in key roles of Organization Design, Communication, Change Management and Human Resources. Make these resources available full time to the reorganization effort
- Identify and test any assumptions made during the design phase. The later that disagreements on assumptions are surfaced, the higher the likelihood of impact to implementation and timelines
- Design the new organization with the involvement of the new leadership team. This improves the overall quality of decisions, minimizes resistance to and improves adoption of the changes.
- Establish measures to show progress to your target audience and to management
- Reinforce the change to provide motivation and demonstrate continued intent
These best practices are easy to implement. Some, such as sponsorship and involving the leadership team are done quite regularly.
The items that tend to get overlooked are establishing measures, setting aside more time in the design phase and investing in key roles. Perhaps this is because these activities seem to take up more time and resources. But putting more time in the design up front, resourcing your initiative appropriately and measuring and reporting on progress are vitally important and will save time and effort in the long run.
Building a recipe for success
Solid decision making for conducting the reorganization, committing to the right team and process for design and implementation, and incorporating the above best practices into your project creates a recipe for a very successful initiative.
This is the third in a four-part series on reorganizations. The first article, Is A Reorganization Your Right Solution? provides success rate data and discusses what is behind the decision to reorganize. The second, You’ve Made the Decision to Reorganize, Now What? covers key roles and process steps involved in a reorganization. The upcoming fourth installment discusses alternatives to reorganizing your staff. Each article is short and intended to provide you with information you can bring into your current thinking on your organization’s design and development.
