Musings at Altitude

I met with several peers from our operating companies this past week, and we used this time to think forward to an optimum structure and an optimum strategy for restructuring our organization.  We weren’t meeting because of big problems inside our companies or because of any particular survival instinct, but instead, we met in a proactive fashion to better structure our companies for accelerated growth and greater focus, both of which are expectations of our owners.

As we worked through our current structure and a proprosed new structure, the easy part was thinking about how to best move the puzzle pieces around to create a new picture with a potential to accelerate success from our operating company portfolio.  As with any change, the harder challenge was to think through the hurdles to overcome in the change process and to start the process of communications planning.

Proactive change very well may be a much tougher challenge than reactive change.  Reactive change is typically driven by a fear of survival that seems to be well understood and even accepted by the members of an organization.  Proactive change though is driven by a desire to take the success that has been made to date and adding to the team or restructuring the team to have even great success in the future.  Proactive change can be questioned big time by folks all across the organization.

In sports, we greatly admire dynasties – those teams that continue to excel even as they make both needed and not necessarily needed changes every year to stay on top.  Dynasties typically make changes to their team every year, and some of those changes can be quite dramatic as they shuffle their puzzle pieces and even add new pieces to the puzzle to continue to field a champion. 

In our business, we’re doing something very similar to the sports dynasties because we’re taking a good organization today and simplifying the structure and optimizing the focus to make an even better organization tomorrow.

One of the big challenges we have in this change process is effectively communicating our reasons for change to the 4,000 individuals who will be impacted in some way by the change process.  In any change process, team members will ask “why are we changing” and “how will it affect me?”  If the change is a reaction to adverse issues in the business or market, the “why” answer is very easy – to survive.  If the change is a proaction to accelerate growth or to better focus the organization, the “why” isn’t nearly as acceptable to the team of people that got us from where we were to where we are today.  In both cases, the “how it will affect me” is a critical early step in the dialogue so that the fear of change can be replaced with participation and acceptance of the change process.

I consider myself a change fanatic, but my acceptance of and desire to change is tempered in most cases by my overwhelming empathy for the affect of change on those who need stability and consistency in their lives.  Some of those folks are the most important team members that we have, and it’s critical to think through the affect change will have on those that are most important to our success coming out of the change process.

As we prepare our organization, our team members, and ourselves for the change process that will soon occur, I can only hope that we are decisive and expeditious in our change process.  Nothing good comes out of rethinking or delaying the change process.