Why the restructure is almost always the wrong first move
When a scaling business is stuck, the restructure is almost always the first tool a founder reaches for. Boxes get redrawn on the org chart. Reporting lines change. Titles shift. A leadership team goes into a room for a weekend and comes out with a new design. Everyone feels briefly optimistic. Six months later the same problems are back, and nobody can quite explain why.
I’ve been on every side of this. I’ve led restructures that worked. I’ve led restructures that didn’t. And early in my managerial career – before I ran Deeson or joined TPXimpact as Group COO – I leaned on restructuring far more than I should have, because it’s a tool that makes a leader feel in control while the harder, slower work goes undone. Restructuring a scaling business is a real and important intervention. It is also, more often than not, the wrong answer to the question the founder is actually trying to solve.
Why reorganisations are so tempting (and so often wrong)
Restructures are attractive because they are visible, decisive and feel like progress. A founder who is worried about pace, underperformance or a misfiring team can stand in front of the business and announce a change, and for a week or two it looks like they’ve done something big. That’s appealing when the alternative – slower, quieter work on how people think, decide and operate – is uncertain and doesn’t produce a satisfying single moment of action.
But most of the problems restructures are reached for aren’t structural. They’re behavioural, cultural, or systems problems wearing a structural mask. If a team isn’t collaborating well, moving them into the same reporting line won’t make them collaborate. If decisions are slow, renaming the committee won’t speed them up. If a leader isn’t performing, a new title won’t fix it. In each case the restructure looks like a solution, but the underlying dynamic is untouched – and you now have the additional cost of months of disruption, lost institutional knowledge and the anxiety that every reorganisation creates.
The hard question to ask before any restructure is: if we were to wave a wand and put the new org chart in place tomorrow, exactly what problems would it solve – and which of our current problems would still be there? If the honest answer is “most of them would still be there”, the restructure isn’t the right intervention. You’ve got a ways-of-working problem, a leadership problem or an organisational debt problem, and the restructure is going to hide it for a few months, not fix it.
When a restructure is the right call
There are genuinely times when structural change is the right intervention. In my experience, the clearest cases are:
- The structure is genuinely misaligned with the value stream. The work flows horizontally and the org is cut vertically in a way that creates friction at every handover. No amount of culture work fixes geometry.
- Spans of control have become absurd. Someone has 14 direct reports because a growth spurt was never followed by a rethink of management layers. No individual coaching can recover that.
- Two functions that need to operate as one are permanently at odds. Often sales and delivery, or product and engineering, or commercial and operations. Sometimes the only honest fix is to put them under the same leader.
- A new strategic chapter genuinely requires a new shape. A major shift in commercial model, customer segment or geography can make the current structure incompatible with the next stage. This is real, but rarer than it’s claimed.
- The leadership team is structurally wrong. Usually too small, too senior-light, or missing a critical function at the top table. Fixing the top is a legitimate, high-impact restructure.
If one of these is clearly in play, structural change belongs in the conversation. If none of them is, you’re probably reaching for the wrong tool.
“Simon’s instinct was to slow us down before we leapt at a reorganisation. It turned out the thing we thought was a structure problem was actually a decision rights problem – and he helped us fix it without any of the disruption.”
Peter O’Brien, Managing Director, Hidden Creative
Seven principles for doing it without breaking the business
1. Start from the work, not the org chart
Map the actual value streams before you draw a single box. How does a customer request flow through the business from first conversation to repeat purchase? Where does the work get stuck, double-handled, or dropped? The best structural designs are the ones that make the real work easier, not the ones that look neatest on a slide. If you skip this step you will optimise for a picture instead of a system.
2. Name the problems you’re trying to solve – and the ones you aren’t
Write down, in one page, the specific problems this restructure is meant to solve and the problems it explicitly isn’t solving. Share it with the leadership team. This stops the restructure becoming a dumping ground for every frustration in the business – a trap I’ve watched play out repeatedly. A focused restructure that solves three named problems well is far more valuable than a sprawling one that nibbles at fifteen.
3. Use it as part of a mix, not the whole answer
Restructures work best when they’re one of several concurrent changes, not the entire intervention. A new structure, paired with a rethink of decision rights, a new operating cadence, a fresh clarity on who owns what, and a deliberate conversation about behaviours – that combination compounds. A structural change on its own, dropped into an otherwise unchanged operating model, rarely sticks.
4. Be honest with the people it affects
Restructures create real anxiety for real people. The single biggest determinant of whether a restructure lands well is whether the founder and leadership team are willing to have honest, human conversations with the people affected – early, directly, and without hiding behind HR language. Sanitised all-hands announcements are the enemy of trust in this work. So is drip-feeding information over weeks because nobody wants to have the hard conversation in one go.
5. Protect institutional knowledge in the move
Restructures are where institutional knowledge goes to die. Someone leaves or changes role and nobody thinks to extract what they knew. Three months later the business is rediscovering problems they’d already solved. Build knowledge transfer into the restructure plan explicitly – handover documents, shadowing periods, protected time with the person leaving the role. This is boring, unglamorous, and absolutely critical.
6. Resist the temptation to do too much at once
Every restructure I’ve seen go badly tried to change too many variables simultaneously. New structure and new leadership and new strategy and a new operating model all at once leaves nobody with a stable platform to operate from. If you have to sequence them, the order that usually works is: clarify strategy first, then make the smallest structural change that lets you execute it, then evolve the operating model around the new shape. Not the other way round.
7. Give it twelve months before you judge it
Restructures create a short-term productivity dip while people find their feet. That dip is normal and doesn’t mean the restructure failed. But I’ve watched founders panic at week eight, reach for another change, and compound the disruption until nothing can settle. Commit to the new shape for at least a year before you consider another structural change. If something is genuinely broken, fix it inside the current structure rather than redraw the boxes again.
The consultant COO shape of this work
A structural restructure is one of the cleaner use cases for consultant COO engagement. It has a defined scope (design the new structure), a defined outcome (the new shape is in place and running), and a defined time frame (usually three to six months from diagnosis to go-live, plus a twelve-month embedding period). That makes it a good fit for a project engagement rather than an ongoing fractional COO relationship.
The value of bringing in an external operator is mostly about honesty and pattern recognition. Someone who has done this work inside other scaling businesses can tell you whether your problem is actually structural. They can challenge the designs you’ve already half-committed to. They can have the hard conversations with the leadership team that you can’t, because they aren’t going to be around next year. And they can sit inside the delivery rather than hand you a deck and leave.
Next step. If you’re looking at a restructure and not sure whether it’s the right call, that conversation is worth having before you commit. The consultant COO guide sets out the broader picture, and book a call with Simon if you want to scope a project.
