Stop With the ReOrgs
--
If you can’t fix problems with the current hierarchy, you suck as a leader.
I’ve seen many things when it comes to organizational paradigms. From the “self-directed teams” in my 20’s to matrixed organizations of my 30’s, cross-functional teams of my 40’s and now these massive, cluster-fucky “everyone has 5 supervisor” Agile-ish teams of the early 21st century, they all promise to leaders what the leaders themselves cannot deliver: productivity.
Are we really any better off now that any given individual contributor has a plethora of “bosses, such as:
- Team Lead
- Scrum Master
- Project Owner
- Manager
- Project Manager (because why go “all in” on Agile?)
Or, was life simpler (and work easier to prioritize) when you had:
- Manager
- (who owned the Project Manager)?
The desired outcome of “butt-loads of communication” has been achieved, to the point that we have hired people to manage the management of managed workloads, while restricting actual productivity down to members making up only about half of any given team.
Ever since that first meeting back in ’92 when I was told we were now “empowered” (as a self-directed team) I’ve wondered:
- What are we empowered to do now that we weren’t before?
- Will this empowerment be taken away when the experiment fails?
- Will the subsequent organization have us “more empowered”, and why can’t we just start with THAT one?
- What problem are we trying to solve?
There’s a Dilbert comic strip where all of the pointy-haired bosses agree it’s time to reorg, because “I have some bodies to bury, too.”
Of course, in the process of searching for that strip, I found others which also address the problem of reorgs. Apparently, Scott Adams has found reorgs to be a consistent source of humor.
We are about to go balls-deep into a new organizational structure across the Technology department. This significant shift is deliberately designed to reduce efficiency at the expense of providing a better structure for work prioritization.
I bet that I could figure out how to increase our prioritization capabilities without moving a single headcount.
The consultant, however, disagrees. Go figure. Follow the money.
Unfortunately, even though I’m a senior leader in the company, I tend to have small teams. So while I avoid reorgs, the bodies fly all around me and still impact my team’s work.
To combat this, in the most passive-aggressive way I can, I have added the below quote to the end of all emails:
“You will accomplish more by the relationships you foster than any arbitrary organizational structure forced upon you.” -Me
There’s my phone. Looks like the boss calling.
Apparently I’m not a “team player.”
