by Serguey Shinder
In March 2023 our managing director announced that IT would report to the finance director instead of to him. It came as part of a reorganisation that moved four departments, in an email with a new chart attached, and I read it at my desk and felt my face go hot. For six years I had sat in the managing director's meetings. Now I would sit in hers, as one of five people reporting to somebody whose job, as I understood it, was to spend less money.
I did not complain. I was more careful than that. I simply changed how I worked, without ever deciding to. I stopped bringing ideas that would cost anything. Every proposal I sent her came wrapped in a defence: three options, the cheapest first, a payback period for everything, and a paragraph explaining why we could not cut further. I stopped mentioning what I thought we should be doing in two years, because I assumed she would only hear the bill. When she asked questions, I heard challenges and answered them as challenges.
In August she asked me, in a one to one, why IT had stopped suggesting anything. She had read the minutes of the managing director's meetings from before the change, and she said I had been one of the few people who turned up with a view of where the business ought to go. She had been looking forward to that. For five months she had been receiving a series of carefully priced apologies.
So I asked the question I should have asked in March, which was what the change was for. The managing director had eleven people reporting to him and was making most decisions in corridors. IT, finance and purchasing between them signed most of the company's contracts, and he wanted them working from one budget rather than competing for his attention. Nothing about it was a verdict on me. I had written that verdict myself, in about four seconds, from the shape of a chart, and then spent five months behaving in a way that would have deserved it.
What I had wrong was reading a reporting line as a statement about status. It is a statement about who needs to be in which conversation, and I had answered it by quietly leaving the conversation.
I keep one rule now for any change to the structure around me. Before I decide what it means, I ask the person who made it what problem it solves, in the first week, in those words. The answer is usually duller than the story I have already started telling myself.
She and I wrote the next three year technology plan together, and it was funded in full, which had not happened once in the six years I sat beside the managing director.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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