Very few organizations do reorganizations well.

In these situations, even the warmest of management teams can turn cold. The process of looking at the people who work with them as numbers, as boxes to be moved around an org chart, removes empathy and common sense from the process.

People lose their minds when change happens. Humanistic leaders forget what it is like to be on the receiving end of change. Change is frightening and, like voting or preparing your taxes, people tend to approach the task of communicating about the change grimly. Most people fear the unexpected, and managers – despite what you may think – are people, too. Fear makes us make mistakes, like communicating only the essential information without explaining the Why – or with some made-up buzz-phrase Why scripted by HR to protect the company and without human empathy.¹

Even reorgs that don’t involve layoffs – just a game a musical chairs – are often handled badly. I’ve survived dozens of reorgs across the organizations where I’ve worked and they’ve never been communicated well. I woke up this morning remembering a minor change from many years ago that still haunts me.²

Following a large reorg, I had carved out a niche for myself leveraging a budding technology that allowed non-IT employees to reduce the administrative time needed to perform routine tasks, sort of like AI promises to do now. At first, I was building out this technology alone but, as my new boss began to see the results I was getting, he decided to reallocate someone from another team to help me out.

There were two possibilities: a young woman I had worked with previously, who loved working with this technology and hated the job she had ended up with after the reorg; and a young man from another team, who I didn’t know very well but who had also been dabbling in this tech with some promising results.

So, of course without consulting me, they told me one day that they had transferred the young man to work for me. Excited to have another pair of hands and always happy to work with someone I hadn’t worked with before, I asked him to come meet with me and dove into the work with him.³

That was a mistake.

I should have started by asking him what he had been told about the transfer.

It turns out, he hadn’t been told anything other than, from now on you’ll be reporting to her. He hadn’t been told that he had been selected for his promising skills; he hadn’t been told that our management team had decided to invest in growing this capability because they could see the potential for administrative efficiency. He had just been told he would be working for that woman who, after the last reorg, spent all her time sitting alone in her office doing something on her computer that nobody understood.

The relationship between my new employee and me was brief and unproductive. I would explain what we were working on next and why, invite his input, align on next steps, check in with him later, and discover that nothing had been done. He began to call out a lot. When he was in the office, he moped.

I sat down with him and asked what was going on and the truth emerged. Having not received the context for his involuntary transfer, he had made up a story of his own: for some reason, his previous manager must dislike him⁴; or perhaps he hadn’t realized he had been performing his old job – a job he loved because he got to talk to people all day – badly, so badly that his old team didn’t want him around anymore. And so, in his mind, he had been banished to Siberia, a member of the walking dead, just waiting around to be terminated.

I realized then that I had made a terrible mistake. I had assumed his previous manager had communicated Why he was being transferred.⁵ I had dropped the ball and he had suffered an emotional injury, akin to a child whose parents make the decision to move from Minnesota to San Francisco. A child is not consulted when the parents decide to move the family; the decision is made for reasons that the parents appreciate – an opportunity, an escape, an obligation – but that children would not understand in the context of the losses they will suffer: friendships, belonging, stability, a world they understand and know how to navigate.

This young man had suffered this same sense of disorienting loss.

I quickly set out to reframe for him, but it was too late. The moping, the call-outs, the lack of results continued. When porn was found on his work PC, I had to recognize that I had lost him, and that was the end.⁶

So, what can you do in this situation?

In my professional life, I’ve at numerous times been the manager or the employee, the person who ended up unexpectedly with a new team member, or the one who had been transferred to a role they weren’t expecting and didn’t really want.

What I’ve Learned When I was the Manager

When you are the manager, never assume that contextual conversations have occurred.

• Start as if you are the first one to speak with the person who has been transferred to your area.
• Explain the Why, not just for Why they were transferred but the Why for your department and Why they were selected.
• Discuss your expectations, the skills that will make them successful working for you, how you like to work together. Invite their input.
• Ask about their feelings. Unhappiness is allowed – it accompanies the sense of loss that occurs when one door closes and another opens.
• Ask about what they want, whether this job fits into their desired career path.
• If it doesn’t, help them identify skills they could develop in this role to support that path.

It’s perfectly fine if someone says that they don’t want to work in that role. Just like if you get your dream job and then discover that the commute or the pay or the nature of the work isn’t really what you wanted – sometimes you’re not going to get a good fit and that’s okay. There’s no reason to get mad at each other; just negotiate a timeline for next steps and move on.

What I’ve Learned When I Was the Employee

If you’re the one who has been involuntarily transferred, don’t assume your new manager was in on the whole thing, machinating against you – or even that they know what you’ve been told. ⁷

• Take agency over the things you can control.
• If you want to know the context for your new role or the department – or your new manager’s definition of success – ask. Not every person with a manager title is a good communicator; sometimes the only way to get what you need is by asking.
• If you’re finding the job isn’t working out for you, don’t just sit in your cubicle, watching porn, look for a new job and go. And, while you’re looking, do the job you have – who knows, you may learn something useful.
• If you’re going to stay – even for a little while, just to see whether you like this new role – demonstrate commitment by figuring out what you need to learn and learning it.

In an ideal world, you think, you’d get more control over what happens to you in your career. But sometimes you learn most from the changes you don’t have control over.

Involuntary Change Happens

Look, involuntary change is going to happen at work. Being the manager is uncomfortable and uncertain. Being the employee in this situation sucks. But, if you choose to work for an organization, large or small, this is often a price you pay, especially right now with all the disruption in the world.

Alleviating the pain that change causes for those who aren’t expecting it is one of the reasons that I chose a career in organizational change management. And that still doesn’t make it any easier for me.

What do you think? Have you had to navigate reorgs as a person who does them or a person who has been done to? Share your survival tips in the Comments.

1. Say it quickly and move along, hope the terminated doesn’t sue or come back and exercise their second amendment rights. ↩︎
2. The greatest learning opportunities are the ones that haunt your dreams. ↩︎
3. Okay, I was a little disappointed that they hadn’t transferred the young woman. I even asked if it could be her instead and was firmly told it was too late: they had already notified him. ↩︎
4. Maybe because he was different from her. ↩︎
5. I started to write a next sentence here that started with “in my defense” but, really, there is no defense. ↩︎
6. Meanwhile, the young woman who would have flourished had also left the company, finding another job that would allow her to do what she loved, instead of the job that the company had seemingly randomly assigned her. ↩︎
7. Managers are often not given much control over how things will shake out. One day they’re told that their team will be cut by X people, or that someone is being transferred to their area. They are probably, like you, just trying to get by, to survive the day and live another day to fight the good battle again. And they are, like all other humans, trapped in their own contextual bubble, easily making misassumptions about what’s going on around them. ↩︎