What are best practices for reorganizing a team?

When you’re the one in charge of an organization, sooner or later you’ll face the need for a major team overhaul. Any one of a number of factors could precipitate the need for change: flat or declining revenues, an acquisition, high turnover, a change in strategy, or the need for better efficiency.

You can’t just throw caution to the wind and move the boxes around on the org chart, of course. With large numbers of employees who have itchy trigger fingers on their resignation emails - and with replacements hard to come by - you have to take precision steps before, during, and after a transformational initiative.

Organization changes are, of course, a common way to reduce costs, boost performance, and pave the way for growth. For instance, Intel embarked on a major leadership change and reorganization in 2021 allowing it to focus on speed, efficiency and technology evolution.

MORE THAN 80% OF REORGANIZATIONS FAIL TO DELIVER THE DESIRED OUTCOME

However, a McKinsey survey found that more than 80% fail to deliver the desired outcomes in the time planned, and, even worse, at least 10% of the reorganizations actually caused damage to the company. Poor execution can lead to lost productivity, poor client outcomes, employee attrition, and a missed opportunity for momentum.

THE FIVE KEY STEPS TO TAKE BEFORE A SUCCESSFUL TEAM TRANSFORMATION

You can avoid the common pitfalls of team restructuring, however, with humility, transparency, and a solid pre-transformation approach.

1.   Be Honest About Your Own Ability to Lead Through Change

Change management stirs up lots of charged energy, and if you’re not rock-solid in your approach, the pushback from your team and your peers might be enough to create chaos instead of change.

Before you can change your team, you need to look closely at your own part in the change that needs to happen. Because you may encounter some mud-slinging as pushback during the reorganization, it’s good to make sure your own performance is up to par in the eyes of your own boss (or the board of directors, if you’re the CEO), so that you’re operating from a base of influence that will protect you from organizational drama.

You may find that you’ll need a ramp-up period prior to the change: a time period focused on building trust, collecting data, and proactively addressing any concerns that might exist about your leadership.

2.   Map Out Who’s Likely to Block You

You can plan a reorganization that benefits every stakeholder group, but if you’re lacking in support from even one key player or group—your direct reports, your boss, your peers, your customers—you’ll face possibly insurmountable resistance. If the Head of Sales, for example, will feel like your initiative is a land grab from you, you’re better off knowing that and planning ahead of time to bring them in to your vision early on.

Map out a plan so that everyone involved is on board to help facilitate your transformational efforts, but keep in mind that goodwill alone may not be enough. Pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, literally map out what—or who—will get in your way and what you’re going to do about it. Perform a 360 analysis of potential blockers to disruption, and find out what they’ll need to see from you in order to buy in to your vision.

3. Inspire Your Stakeholders With a Vision

Speaking of vision, to get everyone else on board with the transformation, you’ll need a bold vision — aligned with the future of your organization and industry — that’s bigger than the team. Otherwise, you’re saying “transformation” but what you’re really communicating is “cost reduction” or “power grab.” Your colleagues will feel that and hinder your efforts to disrupt.

 True buy-in for transformation comes when it springs from core values, such as customer satisfaction, employee happiness, transparency, or protecting the company for future growth. If you’re not yet at the place where you can tie your transformational plans to easily articulable customer or employee value and a big, bold vision, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board until you can. 

4. Validate Your Vision with Data

Any strategic initiative – and team transformation is no different – needs to be rooted in data and research. Collecting baseline data such as current team performance, employee engagement, customer KPIs, efficiency and functional metrics can help you sell your vision in the first place and then later assess whether or not you’ve been successful.

It’s not enough to understand your own company thoroughly. You’ll need to paint a current picture of what’s happening in your competitive space, with specific focus on trends that support the need for change. If, like most leaders, you’ve been heads-down or internally focused, pre-transformation is a great time to your head up and start scanning the horizon for competitive data, emerging innovation, and best practices outside your organization. Consider a stealth competitive exercise to suss out how your five closest competitors and your five best customers are organized, so that your transformation plans give you a competitive advantage.

5. Build, and Operate From, a Purposeful, Long Term Team Transformation Plan

You’re right to take a big-picture, transformational approach to your team, but it shouldn’t be a one-off exercise.

Many organizations go through a few scattered motions to reorganize their teams—for example, hiring a key external leader to make a splash internally, or shifting one smaller team into a new silo. These often serve as attempts to address broken processes, dysfunctional team dynamics, and/or herald upcoming technology changes that need a new leader. However, many of these micro-changes don’t go far enough or aren’t supported by enough team or process transformation to get the desired effect. Expecting one key hire or small-scale shuffle to bring fresh air to your organization is like building features one at a time onto a core product – it may add value to some users and reduce risk, but it’s not going to open up new possibility for growth.

Instead, whenever possible, having a purposeful team disruption on a regular basis can bring innovation and needed focus on best practices and team strength. If you can, instead of seeing this as a one-time ‘Hail Mary’ to get your team straightened out, try to get buy-in from the executive team for a multi-year people roadmap that aligns with the organization’s product/service roadmap and builds in iterative transformation both now and in the future. That way, regular transformations are part of the culture and you won’t need as much pre-work to get everyone to buy in to your initiative.

Takeaway

Many organizations shy away from truly bold transformation, but with the right focus and planning, you can usher in the comprehensive change necessary for long-term growth. Done poorly, it can confuse and alienate your team – but done thoughtfully, it can bolster employee engagement and stem the loss of key staff who hold critical organizational knowledge.

There is no way to completely remove the risk and discomfort of team transformation; your main goal should be to build trust, gain buy-in, and address pent-up team and process needs. If you can keep everyone working in tandem as you plan and execute a restructuring, you’ll have built a solid foundation for fresh ideas, customer alignment, and increased capacity to deliver business results.  By being humble, curious, and data-focused, you can lead your team through one of the 20% of reorganizations that succeed—with the full support of your newly formed and innovative team on the other side.