Reorganizations often fail to improve productivity
Reorganization is one of the most overused strategies in enterprise management. On paper, it looks like a bold move, a reconfiguration of teams and reporting lines meant to solve inefficiencies or accelerate output. But most of the time, it doesn’t change anything meaningful. Productivity doesn’t come from who you report to, it comes from how work is being done. If the systems and processes are broken, shuffling organization charts won’t fix them.
The actual risk is deeper. Every time you restructure, unspoken rules and informal workflows, how things actually get done, are disrupted. You create friction. People spend time figuring out who owns what, building new relationships, and navigating unfamiliar territory. Momentum stalls. Deadlines push out. The real problems stay in place, just under different management.
Many executives go this route because it’s the path of least resistance. It avoids direct conversations with underperforming managers. A poor performer can be quietly moved under a different layer, sidestepping accountability.
A better approach is to keep your structure stable while identifying and eliminating inefficiencies in how people get work done. Surface misaligned incentives. Fix broken feedback loops. Empower your teams to challenge the way things are done, without reshuffling the entire structure every quarter.
Multitasking reduces overall employee efficiency
The push to multitask is a productivity illusion. It feels efficient. It looks like progress. In reality, it grinds performance down.
Here’s the core issue: workers don’t transition instantly between tasks. Every shift, even between related projects, has a cognitive overhead. Time is burned thinking, “What was I doing again?” Multiply that by four or five simultaneous efforts, and you’re paying a heavy tax on productivity. People are slower because their focus is constantly being interrupted.
Multitasking also protects a few flawed metrics. One of the most common is employee utilization, the idea that everyone should be 100% busy. But 100% busy doesn’t equal 100% effective. It masks the absence of prioritization and guarantees bottlenecks when an initiative actually matters.
Saying yes to everything creates real risk. When everything’s a priority, nothing is. It turns technology teams into backlog managers, not value creators.
The solution here isn’t to eliminate multitasking completely, that’s not realistic. Resources are limited. But you can shift the pressure by setting clear boundaries: not everything gets done, and not everything is free.
Block time for uninterrupted work. Kill unnecessary context switching. Push back on requests without defined ROI. Enforce work-in-progress limits across your teams. These aren’t process overheads, they’re multipliers on deep work.
Poorly defined processes hinder consistent performance
When there’s no process, there’s no repeatability. If every team member handles tasks based on personal preference or memory, you’re not operating efficiently, you’re just improvising. And improvisation doesn’t scale.
This isn’t about adding layers of unnecessary bureaucracy. It’s about eliminating guesswork. Without standard workflows, teams waste time rediscovering what already works. New hires take longer to ramp up. Cross-functional alignment deteriorates. You also create risk, handovers turn into friction points, and quality varies based on who happens to be doing the work.
Most organizations avoid documenting processes because it’s slow, unpopular, and seems like a low priority during busy quarters. Some managers believe it will bog down teams or create too many rules. In reality, a lack of defined processes is what slows progress down. You’re constantly solving the same problems at the individual level instead of fixing them systemically.
Leaders should make it normal for teams to define how they get things done. Document it. Test it. Refine it. Process doesn’t replace innovation, it frees up your best people from wasting time on operational ambiguity.
And remember: consistency is a productivity force multiplier. When every problem doesn’t require reinvention, your team scales faster, and delivers better results.
Misusing accountability damages problem-solving and morale
The phrase “hold people accountable” often ends discussions. But if all it means is assigning blame when something fails, it’s being used wrong. Most failures in IT and business happen because of weak systems, insufficient processes, or unclear expectations, not because one individual didn’t try hard enough.
Corrective action should target the root cause, not just the visible error. Systems fail more often than people do. But in many organizations, accountability becomes a fallback. Something breaks, leadership asks what happened, and a name gets attached. The process problem remains in place.
This habit creates a toxic loop. Teams become defensive. Mistakes are hidden. Nobody takes ownership of risk without guaranteed cover. And most importantly, the business doesn’t improve. Problems just get buried deeper.
A more valuable use of accountability is continuous system improvement. When something fails, fix what failed first. Then ask why the failure wasn’t caught earlier. What process was missing? What visibility was lacking? Use failures to strengthen infrastructure.
If you find that someone truly made a mistake, your response should still be constructive. Is it a knowledge gap? A training issue? A pattern of poor judgment? Not every mistake justifies discipline, but every mistake is a chance to upgrade your team, your systems, or both.
Real accountability doesn’t punish, it ensures evolution. The goal isn’t blame. It’s better outcomes. Leaders should design systems that encourage intelligent risk-taking, honest reporting, and fast course correction. That’s what moves the organization forward.
Overprioritizing visibility delays problem resolution
When something breaks, the first move should be to fix it. Not to escalate. Not to brief management. Not to wait for permission. Just fix the problem.
Many organizations struggle here. The culture demands that nothing reach leadership as a surprise. This intent is understandable, executives don’t want to be blindsided. But when teams internalize that visibility comes before action, they slow their response. They worry more about communication protocols than solving the actual issue. That’s not operational discipline, it’s operational drag.
Insisting on being updated first can block momentum. It can also disempower the people closest to the issue, the ones best positioned to respond quickly. If you show them, through your actions, that covering you is more important than resolving problems, they’ll stop fixing, and start managing upward.
The better approach is direct: problem-solving first, updates second. Create a culture where initiative matters more than optics. Make it clear that teams are trusted to act. Then set expectations for follow-up reporting after the immediate risk is contained.
This doesn’t mean sacrificing visibility. It means placing it where it belongs, informed by facts and action, not used as a gatekeeper for resolution. Problems get handled faster this way. And trust up and down the organization improves.
Lead by reinforcing priorities: execution first, communication second. When people stop hesitating, progress accelerates.
Promoting project managers into line management dilutes change expertise
Project managers drive intentional change. Line managers ensure consistent execution. These are different jobs. When companies confuse them and move top project managers into permanent line roles, they weaken one of their most critical capabilities, transformation.
Project management requires skills in coordination, stakeholder alignment, risk navigation, and delivery under uncertainty. People good at it tend to challenge the status quo and push organizations past inertia. But when they’re promoted into operational roles, their talents go unused. They become responsible for maintenance when they were built for momentum. You lose strategic adaptability.
Worse, many companies don’t replace these high-performing project leaders with equivalent talent. There’s no succession pipeline. There’s no attractive path for future project leaders to grow their career without switching disciplines. This weakens your ability to drive change at scale over time.
The fix is structural and cultural. Create a dedicated career track for project managers that doesn’t require conversion into line leadership. Make sure it’s well-compensated, politically supported, and tied to strategic influence. Keep your top transformation talent working on transformation, not managing status reports and recurring tasks.
Organizations that mature their change management muscle outperform ones that constantly shift talented people into roles they didn’t sign up for. The future doesn’t respond to maintenance, it responds to smart, well-executed change.
If you want to accelerate forward, don’t drain the team that’s built to move everything forward. Strengthen their path. Give them leverage. Let them lead the next wave.
Gathering anonymous employee feedback enhances IT management practices
If you want systems to improve, you need accurate input from the people inside them. Most organizations rely on filtered reports, status meetings, and mid-tier summaries. That’s noise. Unfiltered, real-time feedback from the people doing the work gives you signal, and signal is what drives real performance change.
One effective way to get that signal is through structured, anonymous feedback. Keep it simple. One question: “What are we in IT management doing that interferes with your ability to do your work?” Open that up to everyone. No branding, no multiple-choice optics exercise, just space for direct truth.
This is where most leadership teams are exposed. Not because employees don’t have insights, they always do, but because too many leaders operate with feedback loops that are filtered, incomplete, or worse, performative. When anonymized answers surprise you, it means your organization isn’t listening well enough. That’s fixable, but only if you’re willing to treat feedback as engineering input, not opinion.
Act on what you hear. Publicize the most common responses. Close the loop. Implement changes you can defend and explain the ones you can’t. Do this regularly, not once. Quarterly cadence is fast enough not to lose momentum and slow enough to process changes properly.
This isn’t just about culture. It’s a systems improvement tool with high ROI. And it’s brutally efficient. You can’t fix what you don’t see. When you ask the right questions and force direct answers, you end up with a faster, sharper, more functional IT organization. One that doesn’t wait to find out what’s broken. One that already knows.
Concluding thoughts
You don’t fix IT performance by pushing harder. You fix it by removing the friction you put there in the first place. Most productivity problems aren’t technical, they’re rooted in outdated management habits that reward optics, punish risk, and ignore how real work happens.
Reorganizations, forced multitasking, vague processes, blame-based accountability, over-managed communication chains, and misused talent, these are self-inflicted. And they’re expensive.
Business leaders need to stop managing by inertia. The organizations that move faster and build better systems aren’t doing more, they’re doing fewer things that get in the way of progress. That means letting go of outdated playbooks, trusting competent people to solve problems, and structuring around outcomes instead of appearances.
Make your systems smarter. Make your teams frictionless. That’s where velocity comes from.
