What Restructuring Isn't

At some point every leader considers restructuring their organisation/their division or their team. Getting restructuring right is one of the biggest challenges of any leaders life (and if you are sitting there thinking ‘whys that, just give everyone a new organisational chart and its done’ then we need to talk). In this blog I will share a few quick comments on what restructuring isn't

A Panacea
Structure change isn’t a way of solving all of the organisations problems. It doesn’t dissolve inter-team conflict. It doesn’t improve communication between people or solve interpersonal issues.It doesn’t speed up work flow or improve efficiency. It doesn’t deliver better results, new ideas or new products. It doesn’t make poor performers good performers.
Structure is a just a way of grouping people together to deliver the purpose of the organisation. Each part of the structure should exist to deliver something that contributes to the overall purpose. For the structure to work everyone should be clear what the purpose of their little bit of the organisation is there for. Structure is just another tool in your process armoury. If you have inter-team conflict take a look at the leaders. If you have poor communication between people, take a look at your leader’s and your communication systems. If you have inefficiencies or work flow problems look at the processes that you use. Once you’ve improved processes you may find that your structure needs changed to reflect the change’s to the process. Improved work flow often means a change in purpose for an individual or a group. And that's a good reason for changing structure.

A Pay Grade
Structure should never be built around existing leaders to justify their salary or worst still their existence. I’ve seen many structure changes go wrong because a group of employees were added in to the reporting line of someone who ‘needed more to do’ or ‘needed protected from the owners’ etc. If you want to build a shared services area then do so, but understand what comes along with running shared services. But don’t make HR report to your finance director because they ‘need somewhere to live’ or because she only has three other reports. The purpose of a finance director isn’t often compatible with the purpose of HR (unless your people policies are all about compliance and risk). Where teams live in the structure tells them what you think about them. A Sales division is exactly that, a group of people whose role is to sell. Similarly Marketing, Manufacturing, Finance etc. Structure is just a way of grouping people with a common purpose. That commonality means something and to many people it is part of their sense of belonging. Move people to somewhere that they know does not have a shared purpose and it means that you did not care where they belong and watch the performance plummet.

Spring cleaning
Structure change isn’t a way of getting rid of people that are not performing. You have performance management systems for that. I cant tell you how many times I have been given a list of people ‘to go’ as part of a restructuring. These people have apparently been under-performing ‘for years’, but for some reason their annual appraisal says otherwise. All this means is that their manager doesn’t want to have the hard conversation with them or to coach them in the area they aren’t performing in or to follow the due process of performance management according to the company rules and national legislation. Makes you wonder why they get a managers pay doesn’t it!

Easy
Structure change isn’t easy. It isn’t about a new organisational chart being handed out and then everyone shuffling desks. You can’t just move people from an under-performing division to one that has been performing and hope that they catch the performance virus. Structure change isn’t something that will ‘sort itself out eventually’.
People need to understand ‘why’ the change. They need to understand that their purpose has changed and not just their boss. They need new expectations. If you don’t give them all this they will keep on doing what they were doing and that will produce the same result (at best) that you had before the structure change.
There are risks in structure change. Go in to one without a risk analysis at your peril.
You need a plan, for no other reason than for your people to see that you are in control of this, you do know what you are doing and you should be trusted to make decisions about them. You also need a plan so that you know where to turn to when there are hiccups (there will be).
You need good, solid, robust communication and feedback channels.
You need patience for the long haul. Structure change takes a while to bed in and to work.
You need empathy for the people whose lives you are throwing up in the air.


In my time I have seen organisational reputation improve as a result of structure change. I’ve seen employee engagement increase immediately after a structure change. I’ve seen increased business results after a structure change. These were nothing to do with the change, but the way the change was managed.

Restructure the right way for the right reasons and I hope that you too can get the right results.

Caught, Taught,Mandate or Free will part 2

In our last blog we talked about culture being caught or taught. In this follow on blog we explore the dilemma of mandating culture or allowing full freedom of choice.

Mandate or Free Will

One of the interesting things about culture is that it will always vary team to team, department to department, division to divisions and region to region.This is inevitable given the varying styles of leadership and the context that surrounds each team etc. The question when you are planning culture change is ‘how acceptable is that?’.
When it comes down to it you cannot mandate all aspects of culture at the individual level (unless you are a totalitarian state or a religion). People will always make their own choice, so lets put that aside and consider your approach to changing the culture you have today.

Some CEO’s gravitate to a mandating approach more than others. It will depend on their natural style or their previous experiences. Those who work in a shared service or business support environment often veer to the mandate because they are the ones who see and suffer from the variations between business units/regions etc. At the other end of the scale is a view that says ‘let each business unit choose’ but then the question is how far does Free will go? Division, department, team? At some point you have to draw a line and say ‘This is the way we do things around here’.

Once again the amount of mandate and where the line of choice is drawn depends on what your business needs and why you are trying to change the culture. If you need a consistent face when you go to market you may need to mandate how that is. If you are investing in a major IT upgrade you cannot afford people to choose whether they adopt or not.

Its the same with culture, look at the needs of the business and then look at the culture you are describing to meet those needs, the values that you are promoting and the behaviours you are looking for. The extent of mandate should be driven by how far away you are from that now, how big an imperative it is to be consistent and how destructive your existing culture is. If you let the business talk, rather than the personal preferences of you and your leaders, then it should tell you how you go about the culture change.

If you get it right, explain it well, demonstrate a need that all can see, help people align, make it easy to live by and get rid of the problems that the old culture had then caught, taught, mandate, free-will will not be a question that you need to ask because no-one in your organisation would want it any other way and they will say to new employees ‘Thats just the way we do things around here’

Caught, Taught, Mandate or Free-will?

The challenge of culture change and how to bring it about is a topic most CEO’s and GM’s will have to grapple with at some point in their career, if not for all of it. These days, your ability to change an organisations culture is a factor in rising through the ranks of ‘C’ level and GM roles.
It is no surprise that there are therefore many perspectives on the topic of culture change. One of the common ones is whether culture is caught or taught and another is whether you should mandate culture across the business or allow each division, department, team and individual to choose their culture. In this two part blog we will look at both of those perspectives, starting with caught versus taught.

Caught Versus Taught
Ultimately culture is caught. New employees are told ‘how things are around here’ by their colleagues and their team-leaders. But we are talking about culture change. If you are looking to change your culture it means that there is something unwanted about the current culture and that's the culture people are catching.
In culture change there is a phase where both cultures exist. One will be in reality and the other will be a concept. As a leader your job is to guide people to the culture you are looking for. Yes you can be an icon of the new culture and hope that people will catch it, but if you are in an organisation of hundreds or more you will find that a difficult prospect.
Some CEO’s subscribe to the ‘Build and they shall come’ approach to culture. This approach assumes that if the vision is so compelling and the values so motivating that people will adopt them. The problem with this view is that your existing culture has a life of its own and like all life-forms it doesn't want to die. It also exists in habits people don’t know they have, expectations that leaders won’t even realise are counter-cultural until they have to explore them, and practices and policies that have been around so long that they aren't in the manual any more.
I call this the culture buffer. Unless you are building a culture for a new business start-up you will be facing this, and the older and more established the business the tougher the buffer is.
So do I say taught over caught for culture change? Well it depends on what you mean by taught. I have seen programmes that seem more like indoctrination because the delivery has gone so far as to define the 24 expected behaviours and 32 competencies that every role is expected to adhere to in order to live the culture. This approach makes it impossible to be the unique person that your were actually employed to be so it is soon ignored as it just too hard.

In my view the amount of catching and the amount of teaching is a balancing act that depends on your existing culture (how entrenched it is, how far removed from the culture you need etc), the degree of change that is required to make it happen and then the stage that you are going through e.g. you will do more teaching in the early stages of rolling out a culture, but less when it is clear that influential people have caught the virus and are out there passing it round.
The teaching should be done in a way that allows people to align the best of themselves, guides them when choices are to be made and encourages them to strive on your behalf. Involvement is everything in the teaching phase. One session on one day will not be enough. You need multiple involvement activities, strong communication channels, managers that change processes to align them to the culture (so that culture truly becomes ‘how we do things around here’) and leaders that live it, integrate it in to every vision, business plan and strategic objective.
Teach it, involve in it, align to it and then you can rely on it being caught.