One of the best ways to assert your dominance in an organisation – as long as you are far enough up the hierarchy – is to have a reorganisation in which you make perfectly competent and able people reapply for the jobs they are currently doing spectacularly well.
The more integral and essential they are to their department, or indeed the organisation, the more disruptive the reapplication process is. This is a good thing because it lets people know you are in charge. If you can make the best people in the place reapply for their jobs, that is bound to shake up everybody and let them know they are on notice. And, a little bit of demoralisation does help keep people on their toes.

You must make sure that you use an external organisation to do the interviews. Ideally, the interviewers will have the following qualifications:

• they will know nothing about the industry of the people they are interviewing
• they will know nothing much about anything really as they will have been working in HR or marketing since they left university
• they will be one-half or one-third of the age of the people they are interviewing
• they will have a ferocious disdain of anyone over the age of 40
• they will count workplace experience and achievements to be of far less worth than the person’s ability to “sell” themselves
• they will not take the time to come on site to actually see and hear what people do in their jobs: it’s so much more efficient to simply work from stereotypes and unfounded assumptions
• they will focus on the interviewees’ self-promotion and self marketing skills rather than actual facts: as long as interviewees use the latest buzzwords and spin, they will be deemed acceptable.

You also need to:

• ask applicants to complete timed assessment tasks as part of the application process
• notify people of interviews at 4:30 pm the day before the interviews
• (for those not high enough on the management ladder) structure the interview so that a series of questions is flashed on a screen and have the interviewee talk to a camera instead of a person.
• make applicants go through police checks again even though they have a current clearance.

If people who lose their jobs are considered by their peers to be essential to the organisation and to be people who are committed to quality in their work this is a good thing. It reminds that no one is indispensable (except you, of course) and that all must be agile, innovative, creative, and – above all – adaptive to new circumstances.

Use words/phrases of comfort such as: time of great change; the only constant is change; move with the times … you get the idea. That should do it for them.