No Consulting Firm can override the Human Face of Organization Redesigns – So When Will Companies get the Memo?

Because I have been working on team effectiveness, I thought it wise to read the post by Meir Adler on Revolutionizing Organizational Design and Team Effectiveness. I had no idea that I would be treated to raw, real, revolutionary, radical honesty. Adler’s observations accurately described my experience on both sides of the consulting table. I was reminded of one of my favorite shows, House of Lies, and the reason I have resisted a return to consulting, preferring to be an executor rather than an executioner.

Meir, when talking about the new operating model for their client, the commercial leadership team of a Pharma sales organization, described the effort undertaken.

“Really focused on team structure, role types, required capabilities for the future, ways of working and governance as well as go to markets model change from geographic to customer type. The aim was to double sales,”

I felt like he was referring to my then company, Novartis. Especially when he described the decision process, “I just made things up. Everyone did. Intelligent things. That were very convincing and seemed to make sense. ‘If we shift everyone in the organization to be aligned around a customer type, they will know their customer better and therefore perform better.’”

Well, guess what. Customer-centricity is not an org design, it’s a mindset. I learned that at my last company, where Customer Obsession was a leadership principle, not an org structure. Yet even though Amazon is the highest quality, fastest-paced decision-making culture I’ve had the privilege to experience, they too can’t get the human suffering equation right. I recently responded to a post by a colleague announcing she had been impacted by the latest round of Amazon layoffs. She is an extraordinarily talented and hardworking people manager, so you know it's not personal. And, she had survived previous “right-sizing” efforts. Now the clock had run out.

There are few companies that have built their success on balancing the equations, a partnership model like the one described in the business manifesto, “Firms of Endearment,” This exploration of conscious capitalism which I highly recommend, talked about companies like the Container Store and Southwest Airlines, who managed through the “Great Recession” of 2009 without layoffs, but I’ve been afraid to look at how any of them have fared in the post-pandemic world faced with the ChatGPT pace of technological change.

I have experienced my first “transformation” in Europe, where governments demand social plans and garden leaves, versus the immediate dismissal of employees in the U.S. I cannot lie. It's a much softer experience. My own company’s strategy of having impacted employees compete for the remaining roles, surely intended as a compassionate solution to just being dumped, instead created an experience that felt like something from the Hunger Games, and on some days Squid Games. The opposite of the companies discussed in the Meir’s post where “Nobody was fired. No human suffering was created. And some opportunity was.”

At the end of the day the solution relies on human beings, not org charts. All one can do is hope for the best.

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