The Reorg Broke in HR Systems

Claire Monroe

Welcome back to Science of Leading, I'm Claire Monroe with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, last episode we talked about operating model versus structure. Today I want to go somewhere less exciting but I think more consequential, the part of a reorg nobody wants to think about. The paperwork.

Edwin Carrington

The paperwork is where reorgs quietly die, Claire, and it's almost never covered in the strategy deck. Reorgs break in what the piece calls the "people plumbing." The structure changes on a Monday, and the systems underneath it, compensation, job descriptions, compliance, keep running on the old model for months.

Claire Monroe

Let's start with compensation, because I think that's the one that does the most damage fastest.

Edwin Carrington

It does, because the math is simple and unforgiving. If someone's responsibilities expand but their compensation doesn't move with it, you get disengagement, quiet resistance, and eventually attrition, and specifically in the roles you just made more critical. You've taken your highest-leverage people and given them a reason to leave right when you need them most.

Claire Monroe

So what does doing this properly actually look like, practically?

Edwin Carrington

A basic alignment pass, every time a role's scope changes. Did the role scope actually change. Did the decision scope change alongside it. What does market benchmarking show, where you have access to it. And an internal equity review, so you're not creating a new fairness problem while solving the org design problem.

Claire Monroe

And job descriptions, I imagine, are the next domino, because if the JD doesn't reflect the new responsibilities, you're going to keep hiring for the old role.

Edwin Carrington

That's exactly the failure mode, and it's more common than people think. The company changes, but recruiting keeps selecting for the old model, because nobody updated the job description, the reporting lines, the performance measures, or the recruiting profile. Six months later you've filled the new role with someone shaped for the old one.

Claire Monroe

Which undoes the entire point of the redesign.

Edwin Carrington

Quietly and completely. And then there's compliance, which is the one people actively avoid thinking about until legal gets involved. Role changes can brush up against local labor requirements. Material changes to role scope and reporting need documentation. Some jurisdictions have consultation requirements before you can even implement certain changes. And redundancy or redeployment processes need to be handled cleanly and consistently, not improvised region by region.

Claire Monroe

That's clearly not something either of us should be giving specific legal advice on.

Edwin Carrington

Correct, that's local counsel's job, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. But the principle HR and design leads need to hold onto is simpler, treat compliance checkpoints as part of the design process itself, not an afterthought you deal with once someone complains.

Claire Monroe

Okay, so given how much can go wrong in the mechanics, I want to talk about the templates from the piece, because I think this is the most immediately usable part of this episode.

Edwin Carrington

Four of them, and the point of all four is the same, stop improvising the same document from scratch every reorg. First, an operating model one-pager, value stream overview, key teams and interfaces, governance cadence, shared metrics, all on one page anyone can reference. Second, a decision rights matrix, the decisions that actually matter, who owns each one, who approves, who's consulted, who's informed, and the escalation rule if it stalls.

Claire Monroe

That decision rights matrix alone would solve half the "who actually gets to decide this" arguments I've seen play out in real time.

Edwin Carrington

It would, because the argument usually isn't about the decision itself, it's about who has standing to make it, and that's exactly what the matrix makes explicit. Third, a role charter template, purpose, outcomes and performance measures, responsibilities and boundaries, key interfaces and handoffs. And fourth, a role-fit evaluation checklist, behavioral demands, decision load, stakeholder complexity, pace and ambiguity tolerance.

Claire Monroe

And that fourth one connects right back to the behavioral piece we talked about last time, matching the actual person to what the role demands under pressure.

Edwin Carrington

It's the same discipline, applied at the template level instead of the case-study level. You're not improvising role fit in the moment, you have a standing checklist that forces the question every time a role gets created or changed.

Claire Monroe

If you want that same behavioral rigor applied to your own team before your next reorg touches a single job description, OAD's free Top Performer Profile gives you that data in about seven minutes, results in twenty-four hours, no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

The strategy gets the attention. The plumbing decides whether it actually works.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to leave it. Thanks, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always, Claire.