Restructuring is a sink or swim moment. The difference is your attitude.
The first attitude is anxious and resentful:
Restructurings are deeply unsettling. Much loved people are let go, and it can be easy to spin out about how you're going to pay the mortgage if you're next.
You're under immense pressure to up-level your performance with slashed budgets. You doubt if you can do it. Restructurings activate our worst impressions about the cold realities of business, and the leaders that administrate them.
Psychological safety is severely eroded: everyone stays quiet for fear that anything they say will be used against them. Teams bond with gallows humour and a subtle passive opposition forms against the change agenda.
The second attitude is open and curious:
You learn to manage your anxiety, and take responsibility for your resentment by limiting gossiping. You learn to accept the new reality: It's not nice but this is what happens in a corporate organisation that is under performing.
You then find an empowering reframe: restructurings are a right of passage, and an important career experience. Whether I stay with this company or move on, it's important for me to learn how to navigate it. It's a great story to tell.
This is a character test: if we rise to the occasion, we will feel an immense feeling of pride and new levels of camaraderie. There's a perverse enjoyment of being in a difficult moment and positive sense of expectation. You learn to hold the pressure lightly.
This is what leaders need to encourage, and we can't get there without honouring the first response. It's akin to a therapeutic journey. You need to double down on psychological safety, creating 1:1 and group spaces for employees to openly acknowledge their resentment and fears. They need to get it out of their system.
You then need to have team leaders role model the attitude shift and coach people to embrace the hidden possibilities that are latent in disruption. The pain of today will make the satisfaction sweeter tomorrow.
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