The Reorg That Didn't Fix Anything
In the first decade of my career, I survived five reorganizations. Three in the same company. Each one was announced with the same energy: this is the change that’s going to fix our alignment issues, break down silos, improve collaboration, and position us for the next phase of growth. Each one reshuffled the boxes on the org chart, introduced new reporting lines, and consumed months of leadership bandwidth.
And each one, within about six months, produced an organization that had the same fundamental problems it had before — just arranged differently.
I’ve since led my own reorganizations. Some worked. Most of the ones I’ve seen — and a couple of the ones I’ve led — didn’t fix the thing they were supposed to fix. The pattern is so consistent that I’ve come to believe reorganizations are the organizational equivalent of rearranging furniture: you get a temporary sense of freshness, but you’re still in the same house.
Why leaders reach for the org chart
When something isn’t working — when teams aren’t collaborating, when decisions are slow, when accountability is unclear — the org chart is the easiest thing to change. It’s tangible. It’s visible. It produces an immediate sense of action. And it doesn’t require the leader to examine the more difficult questions about culture, behavior, or their own leadership.
I get the instinct. When I took over a support organization with chronic escalation problems, my first thought was structural. The teams were organized by product line, which meant a customer with multiple products had to deal with multiple support teams who didn’t talk to each other. The obvious fix was to reorganize around customer segments instead of product lines. Single point of contact. Unified experience. It made perfect sense on a whiteboard.
And it was the wrong move — or at least, it was the wrong first move.
The reason the teams weren’t collaborating had nothing to do with the org chart. It had to do with misaligned incentives (each team was measured on its own metrics, not shared outcomes), poor communication norms (no regular cross-team syncs, no shared documentation), and a culture that rewarded individual team performance over organizational performance. Changing the structure without changing those underlying dynamics would have just moved the silos from one shape to another.
So instead of reorganizing, I fixed the incentives first. Shared accountability metrics across teams. Regular cross-functional reviews. A unified escalation process with single ownership regardless of product line. Within a few months, the collaboration problems were significantly reduced — without changing a single reporting line.
The org chart wasn’t the disease. It was a symptom.
The pattern of failed reorgs
I’ve observed the same failure pattern in nearly every reorganization that doesn’t deliver its promised results:
The diagnosis is structural, but the problem is behavioral. Leaders look at the org chart and see misalignment. But the misalignment is caused by how people behave within the structure — how they communicate, how they make decisions, what they’re incentivized to do — not by the structure itself. Change the structure without changing the behaviors and you get the same dysfunctions in a new configuration.
The transition costs are underestimated. Every reorg has hidden costs: productivity drops during the transition, relationships are disrupted, institutional knowledge gets scattered, and the best people — the ones with options — sometimes decide it’s a good time to leave. I’ve seen organizations lose 15 to 20 percent of their senior talent in the twelve months following a reorganization, not because the new structure was bad, but because the disruption was the last straw for people who were already considering their options.
The reorg is treated as the solution, not a tool. When you announce a reorganization, there’s an implicit promise: things will be better on the other side. But a reorg is a tool — it changes who reports to whom and how resources are grouped. It doesn’t change how people treat each other, how decisions get made, or whether leadership is effective. If the expectation is that the reorg itself will fix things, the organization will be deeply disappointed when the new structure encounters the same old problems.
The reorg I got right
Not every reorganization is wrong. Some structural changes are genuinely necessary. The key is making sure you’ve addressed the behavioral and cultural issues first, so the structural change can actually take hold.
The best reorg I led was a tier redesign in a support organization. The team had been structured in a flat model — all analysts at the same level, handling everything from password resets to complex platform issues. This created two problems: experienced analysts were burned out from handling trivial issues, and complex issues were taking too long because they weren’t reaching the right people fast enough.
But before I restructured into tiers, I spent time fixing the foundational issues. We rebuilt the triage process so issues were categorized accurately from intake. We created knowledge documentation so tier one analysts could resolve more issues independently. We aligned the incentive structure so that tier two wasn’t seen as a promotion but as a specialization — preventing the toxic dynamic where people in the lower tier feel like second-class citizens.
Only then did we change the structure. And because the behavioral and process changes were already in place, the structural change stuck. Resolution times improved. Analyst satisfaction went up. Escalation volume went down. The reorg worked — because it was the last thing we did, not the first.
When the CEO orders a reorg
One of the most challenging situations I’ve been in was being on the receiving end of a top-down reorganization that I knew wasn’t going to work. The CEO had decided that the services and support functions should be merged under a single leader to “eliminate silos and improve the customer journey.” On paper, it made sense. In practice, the two functions had fundamentally different operating models, different customer touchpoints, and different success metrics. Merging them didn’t eliminate the silo — it just created a bigger one with more internal confusion.
I couldn’t stop the reorg. But I could influence how it was implemented. I pushed for clear delineation of responsibilities within the merged organization, separate metrics for the two functions (with shared escalation metrics as the connective tissue), and a transition plan that preserved the working relationships that existed across the old structure.
It wasn’t ideal. The merged org spent its first six months figuring out what it was supposed to be, which is exactly the productivity tax I’d predicted. But by being pragmatic about implementation rather than ideological about the structure, we minimized the damage and eventually found a model that worked.
The lesson: sometimes the reorg is going to happen whether you think it’s the right call or not. In those situations, focus your energy on making the implementation as smart as possible rather than fighting the decision.
The questions nobody asks
Before any reorganization, there are questions that should be asked and almost never are:
What behavior are we trying to change? If you can’t articulate the specific behavior that’s causing the problem, you can’t know whether a structural change will fix it. “Teams aren’t collaborating” is a behavior. But changing the org chart only fixes it if the lack of collaboration is caused by the structure — which it usually isn’t.
Have we tried fixing the problem within the current structure? This is the question that gets skipped most often. The assumption is that the current structure can’t support the desired outcome. But have you actually tried? Have you changed the incentives, the communication norms, the decision-making authority? In my experience, most problems that seem structural can be addressed within the existing structure — if leadership is willing to do the harder work of changing culture and behavior.
What’s the cost of the transition, and is it worth it? Every reorg costs six to twelve months of reduced productivity while people adjust to new relationships, new processes, and new expectations. That’s not a small price. If the expected benefit doesn’t clearly outweigh that cost, the reorg is a net negative even if the new structure is objectively better.
What happens to the people? Not the boxes on the chart — the actual human beings whose daily experience is about to change. Where will their institutional knowledge go? How will their relationships with customers and colleagues be affected? Who’s going to leave, and can we afford to lose them? These questions are treated as secondary to the strategic rationale, but they’re often the deciding factor in whether the reorg succeeds or fails.
What I tell leaders now
I tell them: exhaust every other option before reorganizing. Fix the incentives. Fix the communication. Fix the decision-making process. Change the leadership if the leadership is the problem. And if, after all of that, the structure is genuinely preventing the organization from functioning — then reorganize, but do it with clear eyes about what the reorg can and can’t do.
A reorganization can change who reports to whom. It can change how resources are grouped. It can create new adjacencies and break old ones. What it can’t do is make people trust each other, communicate effectively, or lead well. Those things require a different kind of work — harder work, less visible work, work that doesn’t produce a clean slide deck.
The reorg that fixes everything is a myth. The reorg that makes structural changes to support behavioral and cultural changes that are already underway — that’s the one that works.
— Bruno