Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Lead a Team Through a Reorganisation
Transcript
- Lucas: If you manage people long enough, you will eventually get the email that starts with 'as part of our ongoing alignment initiative' — and you know exactly what that means. A reorganisation is coming. Luna: And for a new manager, that email can feel like a personal failure, even when it has nothing to do with your performance. Lucas: Right. Today we're going to walk through a specific case. A woman named Priya — she's a product manager at a mid-size B2B SaaS company, been a manager for about six months. Her team of five was doing well. Good velocity, solid morale. Then her VP calls her in and says the company is restructuring. Her team will be folded into a larger group led by someone else. Two of her five roles are being eliminated. Luna: So she's not just losing two people — she's losing her team structure entirely, and she has to report to a new boss. Lucas: Exactly. And she's still new enough that she doesn't have deep political capital or a track record to lean on. So what did she do? First thing: she did not panic in the room. She asked three questions: What is the timeline? What is the official communication plan? And what can I say to my team before the company-wide announcement? Luna: That last question is key. Because the worst thing that can happen is your team hears about their own jobs from a company email. Lucas: Her VP told her the all-hands was in 48 hours. Priya asked if she could meet with her team one-on-one the day before, under the guise of normal check-ins. The VP agreed. So she spent those 48 hours gathering information — not just the official rationale, but understanding why her team was being absorbed, what skills the new group needed, and whether there was any flexibility on the two eliminated roles. Luna: Did she try to save the roles? Lucas: She did. She went back to her VP and said, 'If we eliminate these two roles, we lose our entire data engineering capability. Can we keep one of them and shift it into the new group?' The VP said no — the decision was final. But Priya got something else. She asked for severance packages to be improved for those two people, and she asked to be the one to deliver the news to them directly, not HR. Luna: That's a big ask. Most companies want HR to handle that for legal reasons. Lucas: True. But Priya argued that she had the relationship, and that a compassionate conversation from a manager they trusted would reduce the risk of the situation going sideways. Her VP agreed to let her be present in the call with HR. So she got to say, 'I fought for you. I'm sorry I couldn't change the outcome, but I want you to hear it from me.' That made a real difference. Luna: I think a lot of managers in that situation would just follow the script. But she pushed back respectfully and got a better outcome for her people. Lucas: Now, after the announcement, she still had three team members left who were being merged into this new group. And they were scared. They saw their colleagues let go, they saw their manager lose authority. Priya's next move was to set up a team meeting the same afternoon — not to explain the reorg, but to answer questions honestly. She said, 'Here's what I know, here's what I don't know, and here's what I'm going to do to make sure you land well.' Luna: What did she not know? Lucas: She didn't know her own role yet. She was being absorbed too — she would report to the new group's director, but her title and responsibilities were still being figured out. She told her team, 'I don't know if I'll be your manager tomorrow. But until that changes, I'm focused on you.' Luna: That's vulnerable. A lot of managers would try to project confidence they don't have. Lucas: Priya told me later that she learned that lesson in her first month as a manager. She had tried to fake certainty once and it backfired. So this time she chose honesty. And it worked — her team told her they appreciated it. They said they trusted her more because she didn't pretend. Luna: There's a great counter-example from a friend of mine. Her company reorged, and her manager went completely silent for a week. No meeting, no email, nothing. She found out her own status by reading the org chart update in the HR system. It destroyed trust that never fully recovered. Lucas: Yeah, silence is interpreted as indifference or helplessness. Priya understood that even bad news delivered directly is better than no news. So after the initial conversations, her next step was to set up regular 1:1s with her new director — before she even officially reported to him. She asked for thirty minutes to introduce herself and her team's work, and to understand his priorities. Luna: That's smart. She's building the relationship before the formal transition. Lucas: Exactly. And during that conversation, she advocated for her team's projects. She said, 'We have been working on three initiatives. Two align directly with your roadmap. One is a bet that may not fit — I want to talk about how to wind it down gracefully without demoralising the team.' That kind of framing showed she was strategic, not just protective. Luna: So she's negotiating the transition, not just accepting it. Lucas: Right. And she got a win: the new director agreed to keep one of the three projects going with the same team members, and allowed a four-week wind-down for the other. That gave the team a sense of closure and control. Luna: What about the two people who stayed? How did they feel about being merged into a larger group? Lucas: One of them was excited — more visibility, bigger projects. The other was anxious — worried about losing autonomy. Priya spent extra time with the anxious one, asking what he needed to feel safe. He said he wanted clear success criteria for the first 90 days in the new group. So she worked with the new director to define that. It was a small thing, but it gave him something to anchor to. Luna: It's like building a bridge for each person individually. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the core of what a new manager can do in a reorg: you can't control the decision, but you can control how you show up, how you communicate, and how you advocate. Priya's approach boiled down to three things: gather information early, deliver news personally and honestly, and then negotiate for your people even when you have little leverage. Luna: Before we go deeper, Lucas — I want to acknowledge something. If this episode is helping you think through a real situation you're facing, that's exactly what we're here for. These conversations stay ad-free because listeners who find them useful sometimes choose to support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's it — just a way to keep this resource available for anyone who needs it. Lucas: Yeah, it means a lot that people value the practical angle we try to bring. And honestly, hearing from listeners is part of what shapes episodes like this one. So thank you if you've ever chipped in. Luna: Alright, back to Priya. After the dust settled, what happened to her in the new structure? Lucas: The new director ended up keeping her as a manager for her three remaining people, plus he gave her oversight of a new cross-functional project. She essentially came out of the reorg with more scope. But she said the real win was the trust she built with her team through the process. Six months later, when the company did a pulse survey, her team scored above the company average on 'my manager has my back.' Luna: That's a concrete result. And it came from how she handled the hardest week of her management career so far. Lucas: Look, reorgs are brutal. They test every part of your leadership. But if you can get through one with your integrity intact and your team still willing to follow you, you come out stronger. Priya's story is a good blueprint for any new manager who gets that email.