“Dr George is a very well known leader in the industry and the organization is keen to hire him as the Business Head. If he accepts the invitation to join, he will certainly make a tremendous difference to the business through his contacts and ability to drive growth globally. However, Dr George offers a conditional consent to join; he wants more corporate departments to report to him which are today reporting to a few other leaders.
By expanding the span of his control beyond the immediate business role, perhaps, Dr George wishes to get closer to the role of a future CEO. Do you see any practical issue to concede to his request? How will impact the organizational performance?”
One of the many possible solutions:
From the description, it looks like Dr George is very important for the organization to achieve superior business performance. By on boarding Dr George, there is a clear value to gain. The critical thing to evaluate is: what should be the price that the organization is likely to pay to get the potential value that Dr George will bring to the business?
To address the expectation of Dr George to have a bigger than Business Head role, we need to change the organization structure by realigning some departments’ reporting structure. Questions to ponder are:
· How does Dr George’s leadership profile compare with the other leaders in the organization?
· Do we see Dr George as the potential CEO for future?
· What is his prior experience in handling such wider responsibility?
· How will impact the career path of the other leaders? Do they feel less utilized in the system? Or are there other responsibilities that I can assign to them while we remove the reporting departments from them?
· Will it create excessively centralized organization under Dr George?
· What if there is resentment among the departments to work with Dr George? Will it hamper the departmental performance?
· What if this redesign – changing reporting to Dr George – fails? How easy it is to go back to the earlier structure?
· Should we negotiate with Dr George to come over, settle in and then gradually we bring more departments under his wings?
This situation was my real experience; names changed to respect privacy. The purpose is to reflect on the problem and how to approach the same; I tried one solution, but I strongly believe that there are many other or even better solutions. This blog is meant to share my experience and invite your views. Together, we can learn more!
Author
Dr raj,
