Charmain Bogue | When Organizations Need a Restructure vs. a Culture Change
The two are often confused, and choosing the wrong intervention wastes time and credibility. An executive team spends six months designing a restructure: new reporting lines, a consolidated division, a freshened-up org chart. They announce it with genuine optimism. Twelve months later, the problems they were trying to solve have mostly reassembled themselves in the new structure. They're now asking whether they should restructure again. What they usually needed, and what Charmain Bogue of Washington, D.C. has helped many organizations recognize, was a culture change rather than a structure change. The two problems can look similar from the outside because both show up as dysfunction, conflict, poor performance, and low trust. But the causes are different, and the interventions that fix one don't fix the other. How to Tell the Difference Structural problems show up when the wrong people are connected to the wrong functions, when decision rights are misallocated, or when the acc...