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The Reorg Broke in HR Systems · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:04
  Edwin, last episode we talked about operating model versus structure.
• 0:08
  Today I want to go somewhere less exciting but I think more consequential,
• 0:11
  the part of a reorg nobody wants to think about.
• 0:14
  The paperwork.
• 0:15
  The paperwork is where reorgs quietly die, Claire, and it's almost never covered in
• 0:20
  the strategy deck.
• 0:22
  Reorgs break in what the piece calls the "people plumbing."
• 0:25
  The structure changes on a Monday, and the systems underneath it,
• 0:29
  compensation, job descriptions, compliance, keep running on the old model for
• 0:34
  months.
• 0:34
  Let's start with compensation, because I think that's the one that does the most
• 0:38
  damage fastest.
• 0:39
  It does, because the math is simple and unforgiving.
• 0:42
  If someone's responsibilities expand but their compensation doesn't move with it,
• 0:47
  you get disengagement, quiet resistance, and eventually attrition,
• 0:50
  and specifically in the roles you just made more critical.
• 0:54
  You've taken your highest-leverage people and given them a reason to leave right
• 0:57
  when you need them most.
• 0:59
  So what does doing this properly actually look like, practically?
• 1:02
  A basic alignment pass, every time a role's scope changes.
• 1:06
  Did the role scope actually change.
• 1:08
  Did the decision scope change alongside it.
• 1:12
  What does market benchmarking show, where you have access to it.
• 1:16
  And an internal equity review, so you're not creating a new fairness problem while
• 1:20
  solving the org design problem.
• 1:22
  And job descriptions, I imagine, are the next domino, because if the JD doesn't
• 1:26
  reflect the new responsibilities, you're going to keep hiring for the old role.
• 1:30
  That's exactly the failure mode, and it's more common than people think.
• 1:35
  The company changes, but recruiting keeps selecting for the old model,
• 1:39
  because nobody updated the job description, the reporting lines,
• 1:42
  the performance measures, or the recruiting profile.
• 1:46
  Six months later you've filled the new role with someone shaped for the old one.
• 1:50
  Which undoes the entire point of the redesign.
• 1:52
  Quietly and completely.
• 1:54
  And then there's compliance, which is the one people actively avoid thinking about
• 1:59
  until legal gets involved.
• 2:01
  Role changes can brush up against local labor requirements.
• 2:06
  Material changes to role scope and reporting need documentation.
• 2:11
  Some jurisdictions have consultation requirements before you can even implement
• 2:15
  certain changes.
• 2:17
  And redundancy or redeployment processes need to be handled cleanly and
• 2:21
  consistently, not improvised region by region.
• 2:24
  That's clearly not something either of us should be giving specific legal advice on.
• 2:29
  Correct, that's local counsel's job, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
• 2:33
  But the principle HR and design leads need to hold onto is simpler,
• 2:38
  treat compliance checkpoints as part of the design process itself,
• 2:42
  not an afterthought you deal with once someone complains.
• 2:45
  Okay, so given how much can go wrong in the mechanics, I want to talk about the
• 2:49
  templates from the piece, because I think this is the most immediately usable part
• 2:53
  of this episode.
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  Four of them, and the point of all four is the same, stop improvising the same
• 2:59
  document from scratch every reorg.
• 3:01
  First, an operating model one-pager, value stream overview,
• 3:06
  key teams and interfaces, governance cadence, shared metrics,
• 3:10
  all on one page anyone can reference.
• 3:13
  Second, a decision rights matrix, the decisions that actually matter,
• 3:17
  who owns each one, who approves, who's consulted, who's informed,
• 3:23
  and the escalation rule if it stalls.
• 3:25
  That decision rights matrix alone would solve half the "who actually gets to decide
• 3:29
  this" arguments I've seen play out in real time.
• 3:31
  It would, because the argument usually isn't about the decision itself,
• 3:35
  it's about who has standing to make it, and that's exactly what the matrix makes
• 3:39
  explicit.
• 3:41
  Third, a role charter template, purpose, outcomes and performance measures,
• 3:46
  responsibilities and boundaries, key interfaces and handoffs.
• 3:51
  And fourth, a role-fit evaluation checklist, behavioral demands,
• 3:56
  decision load, stakeholder complexity, pace and ambiguity tolerance.
• 4:01
  And that fourth one connects right back to the behavioral piece we talked about last
• 4:04
  time, matching the actual person to what the role demands under pressure.
• 4:08
  It's the same discipline, applied at the template level instead of the case-study
• 4:13
  level.
• 4:14
  You're not improvising role fit in the moment, you have a standing checklist that
• 4:18
  forces the question every time a role gets created or changed.
• 4:22
  If you want that same behavioral rigor applied to your own team before your next
• 4:26
  reorg touches a single job description, OAD's free Top Performer Profile gives you
• 4:31
  that data in about seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours,
• 4:34
  no credit card.
• 4:35
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
• 4:38
  The strategy gets the attention.
• 4:40
  The plumbing decides whether it actually works.
• 4:42
  Perfect place to leave it.
• 4:43
  Thanks, Edwin.
• 4:44
  Always, Claire.