Executives and people managers
How do you lead a team through a restructure or redundancies?
Lead with honesty and move faster than feels comfortable. The most damaging thing in any restructure is the period of uncertainty where people know something is happening but don’t know what. That uncertainty costs you more than the announcement will. When you know what’s changing, tell people, even if the picture isn’t complete.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: Care, Context, Clarity
Be direct about what you know and what you don’t
“We’re making changes to the structure. I know X. I don’t yet know Y. Here’s when I expect to be able to tell you more.” That’s a harder message to give than a reassuring one, and it’s the right one. People can handle difficult truths. They find it much harder to handle a manager who clearly knows more than they’re saying.
Treat every individual conversation with care
The announcement is one thing. The individual conversation with each affected person is something else entirely. In those conversations, slow down. Listen before you explain. Ask how they’re doing. The business logic of the restructure matters far less to that person in that moment than whether they feel treated with dignity.
Give the people staying a reason to recommit
This part gets underestimated. After a restructure, the people who leave get significant attention and care. The people who stay — often with heavier workloads, sometimes with survivor guilt, frequently with reduced confidence in the organisation — get less. They need Context more than they needed it before. Why are we doing this, what are we building toward, and why does what you’re doing now matter? Answer those questions explicitly. Don’t assume the business case is obvious to the people living inside it.
Acknowledge the loss
When good people leave — whether they were let go or chose to go — name what they contributed. Publicly. A team that watches leadership pretend the people who left didn’t matter draws the correct conclusion about how they’ll be treated if their own time comes. Acknowledging loss is not weakness. It’s what integrity looks like in a hard situation.
Where judgment matters
There is no restructure that doesn’t hurt. The goal is not to make it painless but to handle it with honesty, care, and speed. The leaders I’ve seen damage teams most in restructures are usually the ones who moved slowly to protect themselves from the difficulty of the conversations.
After your last organisational change, did the people who stayed understand clearly what they were being asked to build — or were they left to interpret it themselves?
Start with the book
The Leadership Star sets out all five practices in full, with the reasoning behind each one.