8

Bringing It All Together

If you have read through the whole book, many thanks for your attention. We hope that you now feel more confident about the success of your reorganization. If you have jumped to this chapter from the start, then welcome and we hope you will dip into some of the preceding chapters to get more of the detail.

We are not going to try to repeat every point from the book here. But we do want to reiterate the two most important messages we urge you to take away. First, a reorg is like any other business problem: you need to understand the benefits the reorganization may bring, the costs and risks you face, and the time and effort it will take to deliver.

Second, you are reorganizing people, and what you do affects their careers, incomes, job satisfaction, and well-being. As Rob Rosenberg, HR director of DHL Supply Chain, told us: “I am onstantly reminded about how important it is for the leader to walk the talk, and, when leading the reorganization, how microscopically you are viewed and the importance of verbal and nonverbal cues. You need to maintain an open mind to understand people’s problems. If we were to do this over again, we would have done more up front to acknowledge what individuals are going through personally.”; John Ferraro, the former COO of EY, echoes this: “Command and control increasingly does not work. You have to be inclusive in how you run things and how you reorganize. Leaders need empathy, humility, and a sense of purpose that everyone can rally around.”

So, in addition to delivering the business results, you need to design your approach to be as caring as possible to all your employees—both those who stay and those who leave. At the heart of this is the engagement that we talked about at the start. It is critical to communicate through this process because most employees hate these kind of changes, but they hate secrecy and uncertainty more. Even if all you can communicate is timelines, it is better to do that than not to communicate. Above all, don’t underestimate how distressing a reorganization can be, and for this reason, try to get it completed as quickly as you can so that people can move on and start making the new organization work. Fortunately, this is also the right outcome from a business point of view: by acting quickly, you will minimize the costs and risks and deliver the benefits sooner.

In this book, we have described five steps to go through during the process of the reorganization, together with the pitfalls and success factors (table 8-1). These steps are all critical: it is never right to skip a step, although in smaller, simpler reorganizations, you may be able to complete a step relatively quickly.

Both the pitfalls and the winning ways are based on our direct experience of leading over twenty-five major reorganizations and our involvement in many hundreds more. So, even if you think you would never fall into one of these pitfalls, do keep an eye out for them, as we know many very smart and capable executives who have run into these snags.

Reorganization is not easy. In fact, a common issue is that it is perceived as easier than it actually is: redrawing lines and boxes is simple, but implementing all the things we have discussed in this book is not. On the one hand, it is the difference between drawing a cartoon and designing a detailed engineering blueprint; on the other, it is the difference between sitting in a room with friendly collaborators to come up with a plan, and presenting a controversial plan to the organization. But we are confident that if you follow these steps and bear in mind the lessons from others who have successfully—and sometimes not so successfully—followed this path before, you will create a new organization that will both deliver the business value you were expecting and take into account the human needs of your staff.