Creating a New Future for a Downsizing Organization

Summary

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Many local governments across the US have been forced to downsize in response to the ongoing recession, reduced revenues, and skyrocketing health care and other employee-benefit costs. Benest suggests that an organization must have a large doses of thoughtful, visible, and strategic leadership, in order to create a new future and the added capacity to fulfill its goals and aspirations. A multiphase strategic approach to overcome productivity paradox and achieve greater organizational capacity, and interrelated strategies to achieve them are presented.

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Creating a New Future for a Downsizing Organization

Many local governments across the United States have been forced to downsize m response to tne ongoing recession, reduced revenues, and skyrocketing health care and other employee-benefit costs. To aggravate matters, some states have shifted money away from local governments to solve their own budgetary problems. Whatever the reasons, local government executives face more than a financial challenge in cutting budgets. An even bigger dilemma for executives is the leadership challenge of Grafting a new and vital future for the downsizing organization.

THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

An organization faces a structural budget problem when ongoing projected expenditures outpace ongoing anticipated revenues over the middle to long term. Simply reducing non-personnel-related costs will not be enough. Usually, local governments cannot wait for new economic development efforts to produce additional revenues. Such efforts may also be insufficient. Hoping for the general economy to improve or for the federal or state government to bail us out tends to be "magical thinking." Often, the only immediate structural solution, unfortunately, is cutting services and staffing.

Organizations being downsized are confronted...

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