Big restructures grab the spotlight, but the small shifts quietly do the damage.
When people talk about organizational change, they usually think of large-scale transformation projects. These are typically driven by strategic shifts, mergers and acquisitions, or significant market changes, and they often require a dedicated team to manage the process.
But organizations don’t stand still between major transformations.
They constantly evolve in response to a wide range of issues affecting different departments, such as the incorporation of additional scope, staff turnover, performance issues, or the need for targeted improvements in specific areas following a major transformation.
Between major transformations, it’s the small organizational changes that quietly shape — or break — your company
Department leaders often request changes ranging from creating new roles that report to them, to increasing the seniority of existing positions — often accompanied by a redistribution of responsibilities that affects overall workflow.
While they may seem minor, these changes often have cascading effects that ripple across teams, workflows, and accountability structures.
How a company handles frequent, small-scale changes is critical to its long-term competitiveness. When poorly managed, these small changes create hidden complexity, dilute accountability, and chip away at engagement and productivity.
Over time, this leads to misaligned structures, slower execution, and higher risk of attrition—especially among top performers affected by unclear roles.
Small problems compound, and organizations lose speed, clarity, and talent
Yet, in our experience, companies across industries often struggle to manage them effectively.
This isn’t surprising. These changes occur regularly and across the organization, but the people involved often lack the tools, skills, or time to manage them thoughtfully. As a result, the necessary analysis and conversations rarely happen.
Business leaders proposing these changes are typically stretched thin with daily demands. They tend to jump to quick solutions without taking the time to assess underlying issues or explore alternative approaches.
HR Business Partners are usually brought in, but they often struggle to play an effective role. Competing priorities and the absence of a structured approach limit their ability to analyze and improve the proposals put forward by leaders.
Companies need a practical approach—one that helps leaders align team design with strategy, avoid structural drift, and reduce the cost of poor decisions.
When structure is treated as an afterthought, even well-meaning changes can trigger budget creep, blurred responsibilities, and cross-functional friction.
The approach should be grounded in consistent logic while still recognizing the uniqueness of each case — one that avoids unnecessary bureaucracy and focuses on what truly matters.
A different approach to managing small-scale changes
Establishing a simple yet robust process to improve how companies manage frequent, small-scale organizational changes is essential. This process should be supported by practical tools and clear guidelines that help decentralized changes evolve in ways that benefit the business.
Each request to adjust the organizational structure—regardless of the department or organizational level—should follow five clear steps:
- Step 1: Clarify what problem we’re trying to solve in the current structure
- Step 2: Explore different structural options
- Step 3: Assess options using key design principles
- Step 4: Define the structural change
- Step 5: Implement the structural change
Roles and responsibilities should be clear at each step. A simple governance process should track all cases to help remove roadblocks, capture and share learnings, and continuously improve the approach based on real-world cases and outcomes.
Step 1. Clarify what problem we’re trying to solve in the current structure
It may seem obvious, but this step is almost always done poorly—or skipped altogether. Department leaders need to start the process by doing two interconnected things: articulating how the current structure works and clarifying which issues they’re trying to solve, clearly linking them to the existing setup.
Instead, leaders often jump straight to proposing a new or adjusted structure they believe is needed—without first unpacking what’s not working today.
The problems with skipping Step 1 are numerous. First and foremost, framing the problem correctly is essential to finding the right solution. It’s important to clearly outline the issue to be solved, the consequences of that issue, and — most importantly — its root causes.
A common source of confusion is whether the problem is one of design or talent. Leaders often conflate poor role clarity with poor performance. It’s essential to separate structural flaws from capability gaps.
Therefore, a clear articulation of the current model should be the starting point, along with an explanation of the issues at hand and how they are connected to that model.
Secondly, structural changes typically involve discussions with other stakeholders, including the HR liaison for that department. This initial articulation is essential to align everyone on how things currently operate and what exactly needs to be addressed.
You can’t fix a structure you haven’t taken time to understand
A simple one-pager of the current structure helps align everyone quickly—even if the leader thinks it’s already clear.
At this stage, it’s not about proposing solutions. It’s about clearly defining the problem and understanding how the current model is contributing to it.
This mindset shift—from “what do we want to build” to “what problem are we solving”—raises the quality of every decision that follows.
Maybe the scope of work has shifted, and the structure no longer fits. Or perhaps the workload in a particular area has suddenly surged, and the person responsible is simply overwhelmed.
Whatever the issue, the root causes and their connection to the current design must be clearly articulated as a first step.
This analysis creates the right conditions to explore and evaluate potential design options. It improves the quality of proposals while also making the overall process more efficient. It’s a mandatory step.
Step 2: Explore Different Structural Options
Once you understand the issues, you’re ready to explore potential solutions. The best approach here is to map out possible structural options and assess them against practical design principles.
Start by considering various levers and arrangements. For instance, if the scope of work has increased, don’t immediately assume a new role is needed or that an existing leader must be upgraded. Instead, ask:
- Can the work be broken down into smaller, more manageable modules?
- Are there existing teams or areas that could take on parts of the expanded scope, potentially improving efficiency and reducing overload?
This isn’t just an org chart adjustment—it’s a design challenge. Look systemically. Look broadly.
Think beyond the immediate team or role and consider the broader organizational landscape.
A local intervention might impact (or be influenced by) adjacent teams, layers, or processes—so keep the big picture in mind.
There are always a few solid alternatives—don’t lock in the first idea. Better, more sustainable options often emerge with a bit of exploration.
Step 3: Assess Options Using Key Design Principles
Once alternatives are on the table, evaluate them using a relevant and practical set of criteria. Four key dimensions to consider are:
- Clarity of roles and responsibilities – Are roles well-defined, with minimal redundancy or overlap?
- Consistency and focus – Do roles combine coherent and related responsibilities, rather than grouping together unrelated tasks?
- Reinforcement at the right layer – Is the structure being strengthened at the appropriate organizational level—not too low, not too high?
- Simplicity in collaboration – Does the design reduce complexity in how teams interact with others across the organization?
Sometimes, you’ll find a clear winner—an option that scores well across all dimensions. But often, there will be trade-offs, and it’s important to lay those out to make informed decisions.
If the process hasn’t been appropriately followed, and only one solution has been considered, this is a critical checkpoint.
It’s an opportunity to show the value of exploring alternatives, especially if the current solution performs poorly in one or two of the criteria above. That’s a strong signal that generating additional options is worth it.
To be honest, these design principles are useful not just for evaluating options—they can also help generate better ones. They prompt us to think more creatively and systemically about solutions that will perform well across all the key questions.
Step 4: Define the Structural Change
Once relevant options have been identified and assessed, the business leader can decide on the structural change.
The more closely the process adheres to this logic, the greater the likelihood of achieving a high-quality outcome for the organization. However, this ideal is not always realized in practice.
Business leaders often rush to solutions prematurely, while the HR team may not fully engage or contribute as effectively to the decision-making process as it potentially could.
Although structure and people are closely connected, it is important to distinguish between defining the structure and assigning individuals to specific roles. This distinction is often straightforward in small-scale changes, but it remains a critical principle in all cases.
While the right people for each role may be clear by the end of the structural design process, there will be situations where identifying or selecting individuals is a separate effort, carried out during the implementation phase.
The design process should be a joint effort between organizational leaders and HR. Ideally, leaders follow a clear framework through the previous steps, using examples and guidelines.
HR then adds value by identifying any gaps, ensuring a broad range of options were explored, and helping select the most effective solution.
They become a thinking partner—not just a sign-off function.
Leaders often skip the initial steps and jump straight to a preferred solution without exploring alternatives.
When HR does get involved, they’re often brought in late, and it becomes challenging to influence the outcome meaningfully. Rewinding the process drains resources, delays outcomes, and frustrates stakeholders.
The result is not just a weaker structure—it’s slower delivery, unclear accountability, and lost confidence in HR’s ability to add value.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With the proper process and approach, better structure and outcomes are achievable.
Step 5: Implement the Structural Change
Once the structural change has been decided, it is essential to implement it effectively. This means avoiding unnecessary delays and bureaucracy, while ensuring the core elements are executed correctly.
A critical aspect of any structural change is identifying all individuals who will be affected. Clear communication is key: it’s important to explain what is changing, why the change is being made, and how it may impact their work.
Failing to communicate clearly—including the rationale behind the changes—can lead to confusion, resistance, and avoidable issues during implementation.
The same slides used to evaluate options can double as clear communication tools for those impacted.
People will appreciate seeing that there was a thoughtful process behind the decisions and that the changes were not made arbitrarily.
This also increases transparency, which helps build trust in the process.
Last but not least, it is common to encounter unnecessary additional steps when implementing the desired changes. Therefore, it’s important at this stage to rethink how things are done within the organization and ensure that a simple, logical, and efficient process is in place.
How to establish this process in your company
There are different ways to establish this process in a company, but I particularly like one approach. A good way to change how your organization handles small and frequent structural changes is to start small and treat it as an experiment. Begin by pitching the idea within the HR team—especially HR Business Partners—asking if some of them would be interested in participating in a pilot.
This helps you work with people who are open to doing things differently and recognize the need to improve the management of structural changes.
Start small, treat it like an experiment, and let real cases guide your change process
Once you have this small HR team engaged, you’ll gain access to real cases of structural change they’re dealing with. You can use these cases to help the HR team (and the business leaders involved) walk through the steps described earlier.
This is also the time to create or adapt simple templates and guidelines to support meaningful discussions and ensure the process runs smoothly.
As the process unfolds, you’ll be able to collect feedback from business leaders and see how open they are to this new approach. If you focus on the key elements and communicate well, they’ll likely embrace the new way—especially as it makes their lives easier.
The insights from these initial cases will help refine the approach for your company. Ideally, the positive feedback from participants will make it easier to expand the experiment and engage a larger group.
It’s common for people who hear about the experiment—but aren’t involved at first—to eventually ask to join once they see it’s generating good results.
Once the pilot has engaged all key stakeholders, it’s important to consolidate the governance of the model. Tracking how the initiatives are progressing, capturing lessons learned, and following up on results will help embed this way of working into the organization and allow the process to evolve positively.
It’s important to recognize that not all localized structural changes have the same level of complexity, and not everyone will have the same ability to navigate the process. HR should be aware of this and adjust the level of support accordingly.
For example, some business leaders might need more help with steps 1 and 2, while others may face more complex changes that tie into broader business issues. This is normal and should be addressed with flexibility.
Companies can achieve significantly better results by developing a collective capability to manage changes like these
The organization can evolve in a more natural and logical way, people will be more engaged—working in setups that were thoughtfully designed—and the likelihood of success increases significantly.
It’s a quiet capability, but a powerful one. Most companies don’t invest in it until problems surface.
Helping companies better manage ongoing small-scale organizational changes is a valuable opportunity that many businesses overlook.
If you care about agility, clarity, and performance, this is the muscle to build. Start with one pilot—and let the results speak for themselves.
In case you require further assistance, here are two ways we can support you:
- Consulting: We can tailor our methodologies to meet your needs if you lack the bandwidth or need external expertise and support. We aim to assist you and your company enhance organizational effectiveness through customized solutions.
- Advisory: This approach offers expert guidance to teams engaged in organization design projects. While your internal team executes the work, our external advisory services ensure the project is well-structured and progresses in the right direction.
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