Seven Highly Effective Strategies for Reorganizing or Downsizing

By Mark Gorkin, LICSW
"The Stress Doc"™

Warning: This article may be hazardous to the ironically impaired!

In this era of organizational restructuring or downsizing, or better still, what I call "fright-sizing," the challenge for top management is having the savvy and courage to gut much of your workforce while maintaining survivor productivity and team morale - that "esprit de corpse." How do you achieve this higher standard of reorganization?

To create a "lean-and-MEAN" working machine requires a visionary management team capable of jolting a downtrodden, demotivated workforce while being "hands on" role models. (In these hypersensitive, politically correct times, just be careful where you place those hands.)

Here are your cutting edge commandments. Go for it!

1. Keep Employees Grateful and Humble
   Continuously remind employee survivors they should be thankful to have a job. By not filling those vacant positions there's less competition for eventual promotions. For cynical, insufficiently grateful employees, some cheerfully designed signs - THANK YOU FOR NOT WHINING and BEWARE THE EFFECTS OF SECOND-HAND WHINING - may be displayed around the office.
2. Avoid Negative Feelings through Positive Motivation
   Hire a hot shot outplacement team to motivate people to ignore their feelings of betrayal, fear and rage and to generate positive thinking about updating the resume and applying for an out of state position. Reassure vulnerable employees that they probably needed a new learning curve, anyway.
3. Separate the Transitionally Displaced
   Create a transition center to sharpen career path focus for the dispirited that no longer have a job, but are still on payroll. While isolated from company personnel, this center is not a leper colony; the displaced are not contagious.)
4. Beware the Group "Blame Game"
   Refuse to have management-employee team building/group grieving sessions; open expression of feelings just makes management the target of "another petty gripe session."

   If absolutely necessary, allow a small matrix group to meet sporadically to provide only positive ideas and buy-in for your ever evolving company vision (or is it hallucination?; so often it's such a fine line). In any event, retire the group with gilded, framed team building certificates.

5. Don't Be Predictable
   Keep information about the restructuring as vague and inconsistent as possible. In fact, the more disinformation the better. Uncertainty heightens group competition and, hopefully, will disorient your best people and/or intimidate them from leaving.

   Simultaneously, rapidly fill some slots of the departed, well-respected managers. People don't need to dwell morbidly on the past. This transition-transfusion provides some new blood, figuratively speaking, hopefully.

6. Instill the Spirit of Overload and Accommodation
   Middle managers and supervisors must appear to accept cheerfully all new work assignments, even if their employees are at the breaking point. Low morale, heightened staff tension and anger or stress-induced illness are not sufficient counterindicators to "sucking it up." (Cardiac arrest, however, continues to be grounds for excused leave.)

   Remember, a manager, who selflessly takes on an ever-expanding workload without renegotiating priorities and time frames is an icon of company loyalty.

7. Retreat Reorganizationally from Reality
   Avoid a sustained relationship with a consultant trained in reorganizational crisis, conflict, loss and grief work as this intervention always gets so touchy-feely. (People might then want to hug one another. Ugh!)

   However, do hire a dynamic, "let it all hang out" group leader who guarantees to resolve all your work-relations problems on a weekend retreat. Still, if you dismiss the retreat approach, there is a safe, effective image enhancing option: send a couple of key personnel on a 3-day "team building" workshop. Then you can answer "affirmative" if anyone asks whether yours is a team-based operation.

In conclusion, if you or your management team has the courage and foresight to enact one or more of these cutting edge strategies, please let me know. As a reorganizational consultant, I aspire to work with such a visionary, progressively "lean-and-mean" upper management team. I understand loneliness at the top. And believe me, you'll need all the help you can get!

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Mark Gorkin, LICSW, "The Stress Doc,"™ is the Internet's and America Online's "Online Psychohumorist"™. An experienced psychotherapist, "The Doc" is a nationally recognized speaker, and training and OD consultant specializing in Stress, Anger Management, Reorganizational Change, Team Building and HUMOR! An expert advisor for www.AdviceZone.com and iVillage/allHealth, his writings are syndicated by iSyndicate.com and appear in a wide variety of online and offline forums and publications, including AOL/Online Psych and Business Know How, Mental Health Net, 4Therapy.com, HRHub.com, SelfhelpMagazine.com, Financial Services Journal Online, OpportunityWorld and Counseling Today.

Recently, he has been quoted and/or featured in such publications as Cosmopolitan Magazine, Bloomberg Report/News, Forbes Magazine, FoxNews.com, Dallas Morning News and The Washington Flyer. The Doc also leads his national "Shrink Rap and Group Chat" for AOL/Digital City and WebMD.com. Check out his USA Today Online "Hotsite" Website at www.stressdoc.com. For info on his workshops or for his free newsletter, email stressdocaol.com or call 202-232-8662.