Organizational Redesign -- Transferable Skills

Organizational Redesign -- Transferable Skills

Managing organizational change in general and implementing organizational redesign in particular present serious challenges for organizations. Doing so successfully generally requires effective management and specific technical, communication, client relations, and detail-management skills at many different levels. Technical skills must match the needs of the new direction of the organization. Communication skills are crucial from the boardroom to front-line operations and at every level in between. Client relations and customer service skills can make or break a commercial organization largely independent of other important factors. Finally, detail-management skills are also capable of contributing substantially to success or failure at every level of the organization.

Specific Skills and Organizational Redesign

Technical skills are crucial to organizational success but they are not necessarily the highest in importance with specific respect to organizational redesign. That is primarily because issues in relation to technical skills are generally addressed by executive and managerial decisions rather than by decisions or circumstances at the operational level (George & Jones, 2008). Similarly, client-relations skills and detail-management skills are also extremely important in organizational redesign, but issues in those areas also are addressed by executive and managerial decisions. In the case of all three skill areas, organizational leaders may institute changes in specific requirements, policies, procedures, and protocols, but their successful implementation is more a matter of good hiring, effective training (or retraining) programs, and appropriate business-unit and personnel assignments (George & Jones, 2008).

The Comparative Importance of Communication Skills

If one particular area or skill set is most important to organizational success in general and to successful organizational redesign in particular, it would be communications. At the highest levels of executive leadership and planning, effective communication of strategic visions is of paramount importance within the inner sphere of executive leadership (Maxwell, 2007). At the intersection between the executive and upper managerial levels, effective communication is equally important to implement executive decisions, as it is at the middle management and operational levels where most executive decisions with respect to strategic visions of organizational redesign must be executed to accomplish organizational goals (Maxwell, 2007).

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