Who hasn't been through a painful reorganization? It's the way business is done; how can you make it work for you? You've followed the recommendations, operationalizing your mission and using that process to determine the best alternate structure for your organization. Now it's time to figure out who belongs where...

Last edition I began a discussion on conducting reorganizations by talking about the "front end" of reorganizations -- or the structure side. I discussed the need to start with the mission by operationalizing it, breaking paradigms in the process to explore alternate structures, and then using the criteria you established to evaluate the alternate structures. I also indicated that your "best" option may combine elements of a couple of alternatives. Now that we have figured out the "what" it is time to establish a process to determine the "who". For the full article of Part 1, click here.

The first step in determining the "who" is that you have to know what skills you want each person to possess in each job. EASI Consult typically uses competencies to describe the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do a job. Competencies can be categorized into general or technical competencies. If you are reorganizing an entire department, then the Department Head and/or the management team should systematically articulate the general and technical competencies needed for each position. EASI Consult has done reorganizations for departments or groups of as many as 1,000 people; the process is the same regardless of the size of the group. You want one or more subject matter experts (SMEs) to tell you the most important skills for the jobs you are filling.

Once you know what skills you are looking for, then you need to determine the skill level each of your candidates possess. At a minimum you want the senior manager to assess each of the candidates against the competencies the senior manager has determined are important. One approach would be to use a scale of 1-5 to describe the level of competence the person possesses for each competency, with "1" representing low competence to "5" representing high competence. This will give you a profile of each person's competencies that you determined were important for that job. If you are working with a larger organization you may want to automate the assessment process and use multiple raters. Another option is self assessment; candidates rate their own level of competence for each of the competencies being assessed. Our experience is that while it makes the candidates feel good about being included in the process, the information obtained is not especially meaningful. Once you have gathered all the data on your candidates, it's decision time. Depending on the size of the reorganization, at this point in the process you may have over one million pieces of information. Therefore, you need to define a process to consolidate, compare and contrast data in order to make decisions.

The next step is to make decisions about who is going to go into what position. The basic criterion is "best fit." Which of the candidates currently possesses the most competence for the job you need to fill? In a few cases you will have candidates that fit the job 100%. In most cases your candidates will have some shortcomings and be less than 100% fit with the job requirements. Generally you will have more than one candidate, each of which will fit or not fit the job in varying degrees. Your challenge is to decide who the "best" fit is. (A sidebar... EASI·Consult advocates some process for soliciting candidate preferences. What we mean is, ask people what jobs they want. Asking candidates their preference doesn't mean that everyone is going to get their first choice. On the other hand, if you end up with two candidates for a position who are seen as having the same competence and one candidate has this position as their first choice and another has this job as their third choice, wouldn't you have a more motivated employee if you selected the candidate for whom the job was their first choice? It is also good public relations to be able to announce to a group how many folks got their first choice. What goes without saying is that they were also your first choice.)

Here is where it gets even more complicated. When you are reorganizing a Department or a Division, you are not talking about filling just one job; you are talking about filling a number of jobs. So, let's take a work group like a financial unit. You have several analysts reporting to a Manager of Finance. You can afford to place one or two people missing one or more competencies in a work group, if within that unit you have other analysts with that skill. Now you are not just making a decision about one individual, you are beginning to assemble work groups and your decisions need to reflect the collective competence of everyone involved.

One last thing to consider is your selection process. In this imperfect world compromises must be made regarding people who possess less competence than you need. One thing to consider is whether the shortfall is in the area of general or technical competence Technical competence can be trained or developed in a much shorter period of time than general competence. If someone needs to learn cost accounting, we can teach them that content a lot faster than we can teach that same person interpersonal skills. This may seem obvious, but let me say it anyway. If your reorganization consists of a group of more than two levels ( i.e. multiple individual contributors, reporting to a group of managers who report to a boss), the boss should select his or her managers and then involve the managers in the selection of the folks in the next level down. EASI Consult has also organized meetings where hundreds of selection decisions were made in a few days and the candidates could apply for positions outside their current organization. The placement meetings were also used as an opportunity to capture development needs for an organization-wide development process. While the massive size of a reorganization can be daunting, it is not something to fear; but it needs to be well planned and executed.

Now that your new organization has been selected, most people breathe a big sigh of relief and think, "I'm glad that this process is over with." The fact of the matter is that you have closed an important chapter in the process of managing a department or larger organization. But you've also opened a new chapter. Getting this new group of people to work together as a high performing team and attending to all those development needs you determined out of your placement process is a subject for another day.