How to Lead Through a Reorg
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
I want to tell you about a leader I coached through one of the more turbulent reorganizations I’ve seen. Let’s call him Marcus.
Marcus was a VP of operations at a mid-size tech company. He’d been in the role for three years and had built a strong team. Then the company brought in a new CEO, and within sixty days, a major restructuring was announced. Marcus’s division was directly affected. His scope was being reduced. Two of his direct reports were moving to different leaders. And the new structure hadn’t been finalized — meaning he was leading a team through uncertainty without knowing exactly what his own role would look like on the other side.
When we talked, Marcus was spending most of his mental energy on the outer ring of what I call the Three Circles. He was focused on the structure he couldn’t change, the decisions he hadn’t been part of, the uncertainty that had no timeline. He was doing what most leaders do in a reorg — trying to control the uncontrollable.
I introduced him to the Three Circles framework. Here’s how it works.
The innermost circle is what you actually control. In a reorg, this is smaller than it feels. Your behavior. How you communicate with your team. Whether you show up as a steady presence or a distracted one. The quality of the work you continue to do. These are yours.
The middle circle is what you can influence. Your relationships with the people making decisions. The narrative they have about your work and your value. Your team’s confidence that they have a leader. These you can shape, but you can’t determine.
The outer circle is what you have to accept. The structure. The timeline. The decisions that have already been made at levels above yours. You have no leverage here. The energy you spend in this circle is energy that’s not available for the circles that actually matter.
When I asked Marcus to audit where his mental energy was going, he immediately recognized the problem. Ninety percent of his thinking was in the outer circle.
We shifted the work. What’s actually in your control right now? His team. His communication with them. His relationships with the incoming leadership. His track record on the current deliverables. He started there.
The second thing we worked on was what I call the Over-Communication Principle. In the absence of information, people don’t assume everything is fine. They assume the worst. During a reorg, your team is generating its own narrative in every moment you’re not providing one. And that narrative is almost never optimistic.
The principle is simple: tell your team what you know, what you don’t know, and what you’re doing about the uncertainty. Not every day — but more often than feels comfortable. Because the moment it feels like you’re saying too much is usually the moment your team is starting to hear enough.
Marcus started doing brief weekly team updates. Not reassurance — not ‘everything is going to be fine.’ Just honest, specific communication about where things stood. The anxiety in his team dropped noticeably within two weeks.
Here’s what I want you to take from this. Reorgs don’t reveal character. They accelerate it. The leader you are in the uncertainty — how you handle the ambiguity, how you show up for your team, what you choose to focus on — that is the leader your team will remember when the structure is settled.
Two questions for you: What circle are you spending most of your energy in right now? And how often are you communicating with your team about the uncertainty — and is it enough?
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