aaargh – Not Another Reorganisation!

Reorganisation or “Restructuring” – what can be done?

So they’ve just announced that your organization is going to be restructured.  Bad news if you’re a manager, in particular, because that’s where the savings usually come from.  If you have a technical skill then they’ll almost certainly still need you to keep doing that, whatever the structure, although it might be less enjoyable if you’re put in the wrong part of the new organisation.

‘Restructurings’ or ‘Reorganisations’ particularly annoy me because they are often lazy.  Often a new boss wants to be seen to be making a difference so despite the fact that there are good and bad parts to a company they reorganize the whole structure, maybe changing it from a tree to a matrix, or from regional division to functional division, or from centralized to decentralized – and often these changes are just moving from one imperfect solution to another and then in five years they’ll reorganize back the other way, from decentralised to centralised, or whatever it is.  So all that upheaval and cost is for nothing in the big cycle of things, it just results in the good people leaving each time, and the reason I think they are lazy is because they don’t measure which parts of the organisation are working well and which aren’t, and they don’t have the guts to tackle the bad parts – they just throw the WHOLE thing up in the air and hope that the pieces fall down in a better pattern.  When what they SHOULD do is target the problem areas.

Personally I think the only reorganisation that’s justifiable is in a case where there has been an environmental change – if the market really is different then OK, you might have to restructure yourself to deal with then new challenge.

Anyway, you’re having to live with this stupidity, and the question is which of the many change survival techniques would be best to use?  Well, I would suggest you choose from these seven:

First, be PEAR shaped – make sure that the new management set up are impressed by you, and since they are likely to be judging people on shallow behavioural factors – because they have nothing else to go on – you need to play the game and be positive, easy to work with, appear in control, and reliable in everything you deliver.

Second make the most of your internal network.  Keep in contact with everyone, be everyone’s friend, offer to help where you can, build up that emotional capital so that they’ll all be more likely to want you on their team. You don’t know who’s going to come out on top so it’s a good plan to be well thought of by all of them.

Third is don’t depend on your boss if a reorganisation is happening.  They might do well out of it, which is great for them and for you, but they might do badly, so you can’t depend on them, so don’t put all your efforts into being well in with your boss.

Fourth is to be proactive – get right in there and be part of the changes so that you get an inside track, even if you think the whole thing is unnecessary or badly run, get in and try to make it a bit better than it is – for you at least!

Fifth – be visible, volunteer for any project that’s coming along – keeping your head down and playing it safe will just make you more likely to be forgotten, more likely to be thought of as expendable.

Sixth is to have clear personal goals – what would you ideally like to get from this reorganisation?  Maybe you can get a big step up from it somehow?  Maybe you can get to work for a senior person who you admire and would like to learn from?  Perhaps you could go and see them and tell them this?  Or maybe you can take this opportunity to move to an area that you have wanted to move into but has been hard to get into, and all the stirring up has opened up some vacancies there?

And finally the seventh strategy is to make sure you’re t-shaped, so you have at least one area of deep technical expertise, so they can’t get rid of you, but also you’re not too vulnerable to that area being disposed of in the reorganisation so you also have general knowledge across lots of areas.  This isn’t a strategy that you can quickly bring into play – you need to start it now if you think reorganizations are generally on the horizon in your company.

So that’s reorganizations – pick at least one of this list and work on it so that you’re ready for the next time that everything gets thrown up in the air yet again…