Change management: why deadwood happens

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When an organisation is in financial trouble, there are a number of steps an organisation can take, but at some stage you’ll be asked to help identify costs that could be taken out without compromising business functionality.  This is looking for deadwood, and here is always more deadwood than you’d think. This might be a gross exaggeration, an oversimplification, a great injustice, but there is always deadwood. 

What is deadwood?

What do I mean by deadwood?  Deadwood on a tree is a branch that doesn’t flower or grow leaves; either it’s dead tissue that hasn’t broken off, is slowly dying, or is overshadowed by higher branches- either way its either drawing resources from the tree or weighting it down, and the tree would be better off without it.  Deadwood are resources we are supporting, that aren’t contributing.

In an organisation there isn’t often pure and obvious deadwood- people literally doing nothing. But there is often there are people, tasks, projects that when evaluated harshly, the organiation could survive without.  Sometimes an organisation is like a airplane trying to clear a mountain range- if we hang on to weight that isn’t entirely necessary, we could crash. 

It’s not their fault

Lets start with an assumption- they don’t know, didn’t intend to be, or do know, but hope they won’t be in the future- that they are deadwood. Very very few people aspire to be a parasite on others. So don’t get into the tarpit of blame- who’s fault it is, theirs or yours. Better to just accept it happens, not every risk pays off, not every move is a winning move.

So why does it happen?

Anticipated future needs didn’t happen

Very few plans survive engagement with the enemy; and even the best laid plans require a good dose of luck to come off.  No matter how well researched, rational, and well-meaning a business plan, external factors require them to come off, and sometimes this doesn’t happen.   Businesses need to plan for the future, and sometimes those plans are reliable on assumptions as simple as ‘if this growth continues the same’ or ‘if these sales remain stable’.  Failure to plan is planning to fail, but plans need to change.

For organisations considering having to reduce headcount, this means reviewing these plans, and the structures set up to meet a future need that either hasn’t happened, or is now looking unlikely to happen. 

Old structures that are no longer relevant

A similar but different scenario is the old, but no longer relevant structure.  Business structures are (or should be) reflective of the work the company needs to get done to provide its product or services to the market, but the market changes.  This change can be slow, gradual, and hard to see, but a common form of deadwood.  A common giveaway is when talking a person or department, the discussion shifts to the past tense- for example, when explaining a person’s role to a new person, you find yourself discussing how things used to be, customer’s prior demands. 

Projects don’t succeed

An interesting characteristic of any project is that it’s a gamble (this is different from project management).  Projects are side explorations of new products, systems, ideas, opportunities that are generally not business critical, not core business.  Sometimes these pay off, sometimes they don’t.  Often they go on too long, lose focus, or only partially succeed. 

People are moved sideways

To be unbelievably cruel and unfair, I’m always a bit suspicious of process improvement, business optimization, efficiency managers, training managers, especially if they moved sideways into those roles from core functions.  Too often these roles are created for people because they’ve either not succeeded, burnt out, or gotten bored of the core management role they used to do.  Often these are ‘sweetheart’ deals, where an old manager is ‘looked after’ with a cushier job.  Not to be too cruel, but when it comes to difficult financial times, and it’s a question of making someone redundant, we need to retain people for what they do do, not what they used to do.

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