Reorganisations are tempting. When results disappoint or the organisation feels slow, a new structure looks like decisive action. It is visible, it can be announced, and it gives everyone the sense that something is changing.
It is also one of the most disruptive things a leadership team can do. People spend months uncertain about their roles. Informal networks that made work happen are broken. Attention turns inwards just when it may be needed most on customers and delivery.
That does not mean reorganisations are wrong. Sometimes a structure has genuinely outlived its purpose. But the decision deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. Here are five questions we would ask any leadership team before they start.
1. What problem are we trying to solve?
Write the problem down in a few sentences, in plain language. "We need to become more customer-centric" is too vague to act on. "Customers who buy from two of our divisions deal with two account managers, two invoices and two support lines, and several have told us it is a reason to buy elsewhere" is a problem you can test a structure against.
If the leadership team cannot agree on the wording, stop here. A reorganisation started without a shared understanding of the problem will be judged by different people against different goals, and nobody will be satisfied.
2. Is structure really the cause?
Many problems that look structural are something else. Slow decisions may come from unclear decision rights, which can be fixed without moving a single box. Poor collaboration between two departments may come from conflicting targets, or from two managers who do not get on. Weak performance in a unit may be a leadership or capability issue.
A useful test is to ask: if we kept the current structure, what else could we change to solve this problem? Make a short list. If several of those options are cheaper and quicker, try them first. Structure is a powerful lever, but it is a heavy one.
3. What will get worse?
Every structure is a trade-off. Organising by customer segment brings you closer to customers but can duplicate specialist expertise. Organising by function builds depth but can slow cross-functional work. Centralising a service creates consistency and can reduce responsiveness locally.
Leaders tend to describe the benefits of a new design in detail and mention the costs briefly. Reverse this for a moment. Ask each member of the leadership team to list what the new structure will make harder, and for whom. Then decide how you will manage those weaknesses from the start. If nobody can name a downside, the analysis is not finished.
4. Who needs to be involved, and when?
In Scandinavian workplaces, involvement is more than good practice. Employee representatives and unions have formal rights to information and consultation, and those processes take time. Leaders who treat them as a formality tend to find that trust suffers and the change takes longer anyway.
There is also a practical reason to involve people early. The people doing the work usually know where the real handovers, bottlenecks and dependencies are. A design drawn by a small group in a meeting room will miss things that a team leader in operations would spot in five minutes.
A reasonable approach is to keep the decision on the overall direction with the leadership team, and to involve a wider group in the detailed design. Be clear with everyone about which questions are still open and which are settled.
5. How will we know it worked?
Decide before you start what success looks like and when you will check. Link it back to the problem in question one. If the problem was customers dealing with too many contact points, measure that. If it was slow product releases, measure release times.
Agree, too, how long you will give the new structure before judging it. Most reorganisations cause a dip in performance while people find their feet. Without an agreed timeframe, there is a risk of either abandoning a sound design too early or defending a weak one for too long.
A short checklist
Before a reorganisation is announced, the leadership team should be able to show:
- A written problem statement that everyone at the table agrees with
- The alternatives to restructuring that were considered, and why they were not enough
- A list of the expected downsides and how each will be handled
- A plan for involvement, including formal consultation
- Two or three measures of success, with a date for review
If any of these are missing, it is usually better to pause for a few weeks than to push ahead.
Closing thought
A good reorganisation solves a clearly defined problem at an acceptable cost, and the people affected understand why it is happening. That takes some patience at the start, which is often the hardest part for leaders under pressure to act. Taking the time to answer these five questions honestly is one of the most useful things a leadership team can do before changing the structure.