Best Practices of Organizational Design, Part 3 - Communication
Reorganizations happen frequently in Technology companies. If you are reading this, there is a good chance you have been through at least one. If you were to tell me about your experience, how would you describe it? Did it go smooth? Were all of the communications clear? Did everybody understand their new roles? How well did the adoption of new processes go?
Redesigning and organization is a complex challenge. I’ve been in a reorganization that was done without a lot of warning, and I’ve planned a reorganization that didn’t prepare everyone for all the changes that were coming. This can be tough on both sides of the fence. You can’t plan for everything and not all aspects will be within your control. But you can learn best practices to help us both avoid common pitfalls and mitigate issues as they come up. In this post, I’ll share some of my strategies for communicating your Organizational Design across these areas:
- Make a change plan with Switch
- Where and how to communicate
- Build buy in and strengthen your design with feedback
Photo credit: Paul Van Slembrouck
Make a change plan with Switch
Everyone at one time or another has wanted to make a change in their personal life. For example: work out more often. Do you remember having difficulty getting change to stick or with procrastination? Did you find any good strategies for motivating yourself of to go?
Before I read Switch, I did not have a good opinion of Change Management. I thought it was just some overstuffed processes to implement organizational structures and processes. After reading it, I now think of Change Management to be much more about people, Sociology, and Psychology. Frameworks like Switch deal with organizational change using many of the principles that can use to make a change in your personal life.
The book uses a simple metaphor to explain how people handle change: A person riding an elephant down a path.
The rider represents our mind, the elephant our emotions, and the path our environment. The rider may want to do something, but can't force the elephant to do anything that it doesn't want to do. If the path has a lot of obstacles, then it will be much harder to convince the elephant to move. With these ideas in mind, there three things you must do to successfully implement any change:
- Direct the Rider: Give clear directions to reduce confusing and overthinking.
- Motivate the Elephant: Show an inspiring vision, remove fear, make it fun.
- Shape the Path: Make it easy to get to the goal and remove obstacles.
I love this metaphor for its clarity and brevity. When executing a change at work, you can think of each of these as a lever for you to make the change easier.
I used these concepts to create a template which I have used to plan a few changes. The questions for each step cause you think about how to talk about your plan. I will also weave concepts from the framework into the practices below. I highly recommend reading the full book - especially if you aren't already familiar with a Change Management framework. For a good primer, I recommend reading this summary.
Where and how to communicate
Earlier in this series, I introduced three stages to Organizational Design:
- Creation
- Communication
- Implementation
In truth, these stages overlap considerably in time and you visualize the breakdown of effort more like this:
Communication isn’t just a one time, one way announcement that you make after your design is complete, rather it is an ongoing part of a successful Change Management process. Let's talk more about what you are trying to achieve with these communications.
Goals of communication
We can directly apply our lessons from Switch to help us reason about the goals of communicating:
🤔 Increasing understanding. At the minimum, you want people to understand the design: The goal, the roadmap, team changes, how to execute, etc… in order to be effective. (You are providing directions to the Rider and removing uncertainty)
🤝 Increasing buy-in. One of the main reasons you are talking with others is to get alignment with others. While understanding and a good design are necessary, they are not sufficient. People need to understand the change, but more importantly need to believe in the vision and the reasoning behind the change. Listening and gathering feedback are key to getting people bought in. (You are motivating the Elephant and addressing fear)
💪 Strengthening the design. You shouldn't be just telling people about your design and expecting that they see how great it is. Incorporating the work and thoughts of others will help you improve many different aspects of the design. As a bonus, it will show that you are listening. (You are making the Path easier to walk by improving the plan)
Tools of Communication
| Tool | Use case |
|---|---|
| Collaboration space | A space to work with co-creators to develop ideas and share materials (Such as a ghost deck) |
| Executive summaries | Presentations of high level plans for various audiences |
| Deep dives for discussion and feedback | Materials that explore specific aspects and functional concerns created as needed |
| Progress dashboard | A dashboard with updated metrics, milestones, and timelines to show progress and performance |
| Documentation | Detailed materials processes, structures, policies, practices, templates, checklists, etc… used by teams to implement the design |
Which formats you use are a concern of your organizational culture. Rather than dig into specific documents, slides, etc… I think it is useful outline the various use cases you want to cover. I recommend using various decks, documents and visualizations to cover these five areas:
Although Strategy specific, Technology Strategy Patterns contains practical recommendations on formats that you can use with various stakeholders. I think these concepts are highly applicable outside of Strategy as well.
Methods of communication
Now that we know why you communicate, how do you go about doing it? You have 3 basic tools in your toolbox:
- Co-creating
- One-on-ones and small group discussions
- Group presentations and announcements
Co-creating
You rarely want to go it alone. You may not think of this part as communication, but your partners are the first test of your ideas. The act of working with others - namely your peers, your boss, and/or your direct reports - increases sense of ownership and distributes effort. They are a great source of fresh ideas and guard against your blindspots.
🟡 Warning! While this is a powerful way to get support, having “too many cooks in the kitchen" can dilute your work and slow down your progress. Add co-creators judiciously.
| Understanding | Those who create it will have the deepest understanding |
| Buy-in | Big contributors will be big supporters |
| Design | You will get different ideas from people with different perspectives |
One-on-ones and small group discussions
| Understanding | Your audience has time to deeply understand content an ask questions |
| Buy-in | You can hear concerns directly from people and address them on the spot or soon after. This is the most powerful tool you have for getting wide buy-in. |
| Design | It is in these meetings you can find leads, prior research, and obstacles you may not have known about. you can incorporate these as well as feedback into your designs. |
These are the first real tests of ideas and artifacts. In small groups you can get more open and relevant feedback. You may be looking for buy-in from a peer, or budget approval from your boss. You may even find a new co-creator in these sessions.
🟡 Warning! While this is the best place to gather feedback (more on that below), this is the most time intensive way to communicate.
Group presentations and announcements
| Understanding | Your audience has time to deeply understand content an ask questions |
| Buy-in | You can hear concerns directly from people and address them on the spot or soon after. This is the most powerful tool you have for getting wide buy-in. |
| Design | It is in these meetings you can find leads, prior research, and obstacles you may not have known about. you can incorporate these as well as feedback into your designs. |
This is probably what you think of most when considering "communication". Here you are trying to get out our message to a lot of people, efficiently. You can do these in-person, thorough email, Slack, pre-recorded video, and any other way you have to send messages to many people.
🟡 Warning! While this gets you the widest coverage, this is the least powerful way to get support.
When to use different communication methods
You will use the above three methods throughout the process in different amounts:
| Create | Communicate | Implement |
|---|---|---|
| A lot of co-creation | A lot of small groups | A lot of presentation |
| Some small groups | Some presentation | Some small groups |
| A little bit of presentation | A little co-creation | A little co-creation |
During Creation, you are keeping things small until you have an idea good enough to share. During Communication, you want to get the word out, but in ways that allow you to absorb feedback. During Implementation, you want to repeatedly say "this is happening" to prepare people and limit surprise.
Multiplying the power of your communication
It may not be obvious from the above, but you do not personally have to be the one always communicating the design to others. You can delegate this responsibility out to your co-creators, your team leaders, etc…
In fact, if you don't scale yourself out by leaning on others, you will likely just skip some communications as a time-saving measure. Usually the ones that get skipped are small group discussions, which is your best opportunity to generate buy-in.
Two tips for delegating:
- As a general rule, team leaders (Your peers, Team managers and senior individual contributors) should be the ones leading discussions with their teams. They have the trust of their people.
- However, NEVER delegate communication responsibilities to someone who is not bought in. This is a sure way to spread the lack of buy-in before you have a chance to make changes and respond to concerns.
Concentric circles of communication
The logical conclusion is that in order to multiply the power of your communication, you must first establish buy-in within your immediate circle - your co-creators. Then you must do the same with the next layer of the circle: your direct reports. After they understand the design, provide feedback and buy-into the plan - then, and only then you should ask them lead the next level of discussions, and so on… in concentric circles.
Build buy in and strengthen your design with feedback
Gathering, measuring and acting on feedback is the best way to both strengthening your design and building buy-in. On the flip side, Gathering feedback and doing nothing with it can lower trust in leadership. Don’t ask for it if can’t or won’t use.
Important: No matter how you receive feedback, be sure to let people know what you will do with it and when you will follow up.
Let’s dig in to the 3 parts to see how we can use feedback effectively.
Gathering feedback
You can collect feedback in a lot of different ways. I try to limit it to 3 medium-to-low friction methods:
- Real-time: Live "in person" feedback during small group interactions.
- Unstructured: Receiving ad hoc feedback with little or no guidance.
- Survey: Receiving structured feedback following a presentation or discussion with specific questions.
Each has different characteristics which make them useful at different times:
| Method | Turnaround | Friction* | Reach | Depth | Breadth | Buy-in |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time | Fast | Medium | Narrow | Deep | Narrow | Increases |
| Unstructured | Slow | Low | Narrow | Deep | Wide | Neutral |
| Survey | Slow | Medium | Wide | Shallow | Narrow | Neutral |
*Friction for the giver
Want to get a wide array of feedback fast? Send a survey! Want to dig deep into a specific aspect? Get real-time feedback during a discussion with a Subject Matter Expert (SME).
Note: Asking for feedback in real time is the only method of collecting feedback that helps increase buy-in. Your willingness to devote time to a person or small group shows your respect for their expertise and opinions in a way a survey cannot. Acting on the feedback, regardless of how you collected can still increase buy-in, more on this below.
I won't go into detail on collecting real time or unstructured feedback, they are highly context dependent and open ended, but let's talk a bit about surveys.
Survey says…
A simple, well-designed survey is a great tool to get an understanding of how people feel as you go through your process. My primary method of conducting surveys consists of using small number of questions with Likert scales, as well as some space for open feedback. You have probably seen Likert scale surveys before:
Having seven levels allows you to quantify and measure feedback (more on that below). This is a technique I picked up from Accelerate. As an example: Let's say I wanted to see how well we are doing on an aspect of our design - Strategy.
I could send a quick survey like the one to the right. The first question checks understanding (The rider), the second checks Buy-in (The elephant), and the third checks if the strategy is will make things easier for the reader (The path). The last question is for open feedback to catch anything we missed.
Short surveys like these can be done quickly which is important when you are sending requests to staff. Long surveys, sent too frequently, will garner less participation at a slower pace. I also like questions using like these which are helpful as you get closer to implementation time:
- My team's new responsibilities are clear to me
- I understand my role in achieving the strategy
If you are lucky enough to have a research team with survey experts, talk to them! They will be invaluable in helping you crafting good questions and avoiding "bad data".
Another use for Likert Scales: A rubric for your design
You can also use Likert Scales to build a rubric for your design. A rubric is just another name for a series of questions that define what a successful design should contain. The best tactic I have seen for this is co-creating your success criteria early in the process, and then, checking on your progress by individually filling out the rubric at key points. This exercise can spark discussion and show where people are interpreting progress differently.
Measuring feedback
If your design is strong enough, and people understand it, and they are aligned with its direction - you can move forward! …But how do you actually know when this happens and what do we mean by "good enough"?
One of my favorite thing about the 3 Communication Goals - Increasing understanding, Increasing buy-in, and Strengthening the design - is that they are each measurable. If you can measure something, you can improve it!
By using survey data with a Likert Scales, you can perform a quantitative analysis of your survey data and see how sentiment changes over time. This is useful to get an idea of when you have “enough” buy-in. There will still be a time where you have to make a call: 100% of people will never be 100% on board with 100% of the ideas. However, you can at least make the decision with data in your hand which will also prepare you for any issues you will need to mitigate.
A quick aside on quantifying survey data
I've heard people say that surveys can be gamed, or aren't accurate, or aren't based on real data, etc… I thought many of these things myself before reading Accelerate. The truth is any data you collect can be manipulated, whether it be a system measurement like "build time" or survey assessing "buy-in". In fact, Accelerate presents a convincing case that surveys are harder to game than metrics you gather from your systems. This is a whole topic in and of itself. If you are want to learn more, I suggest picking up Accelerate.
Acting on feedback
I try to do at least one of the following whenever I gather feedback:
- Integrate the feedback into the proposal
- Reference the feedback in the proposal
- Add documentation or change wording to answer questions
- Follow up with the person or group to gather more information
No matter how I act on it, I try to tell those who took time to provide feedback that I read and considered it. This doesn't mean I respond to each piece of feedback directly. You have to use your to judgment to decide how you group and respond the feedback that you receive. The only thing that people hate more than not being asked about something that affects them - is being asked, but feeling like their feedback was ignored.
Summary
Communication is incredibly important to getting the design right and preparing people for implementation. It is also the best way you can improve your design and win over your people. Most of us will have constraints that will prevent us from making all the communications we would like, but using practices from Change Management and being responsive to feedback will put you in a good position to succeed as you implement your design. I’ll discuss Implementation in the next and final post in this series.