When companies decide they need to reorganise a team it shifts a dynamic. Sometimes that shift seems like it ‘ought’ to be small. That isn’t to say that leadership teams don’t consider that when they are reviewing a restructure slide. In fact, I think very well-intentioned leaders carefully move a group of people from one reporting line to another, and the slide describes the team as moving intact. The popular phrase is ‘lift and shift’, and it often signals no cost – and, importantly, no disruption— just a clean relocation under a new leader.
You can lift and shift a team. But if you remove the leader, you change the group.
Most people can name the best team they’ve ever been on. They can also tell you the best leader they’ve ever had. (And by the way, that doesn’t always reconcile with the best employer they’ve ever had.) Because loving a specific team is about a shared range of co-owned experiences which reflects mutual trust, shared goals and joint (or adjacent) experiences. Good organisations notice those teams because they are usually the most productive, and they work hard to keep them intact. I have seen clients work hard to preserve that group…even if they need to change the leader. That’s the challenge.
An intact team with a new leader is an oxymoron. That team rhythm is co-authored — built, over months and years, between a specific group of people and a specific leader. Decision routes get worn in. Shorthand develops. Everyone learns whose call a given question is without having to ask. The leader is not a figure standing in front of the team. The leader is part of the engine, integral to how it runs. You can’t keep that intact and pull it apart at the same time.
As the saying goes, music is what happens between the notes. The team’s identity is not unlike that – it isn’t really about any specific group decision to ‘be’ something or some way. It’s just a state of being that evolves around it and through it. And because of it. Which is why, when the leader moves on, the team –as it existed –ends too.
The emotional impact on output. I believe executive teams do consider this impact of losing a leader. The gap is understanding that while keeping the team ‘whole’ can help soften the impact, it will not eliminate it. A lift-and-shift looks like putting a new lid on an old jar. But really, you have changed the jar itself: exactly how it seals, the pressure inside, the way it twists open. But it looks the same.
There’s a level of shared grief that should be recognized by leadership. To be clear, we aren’t talking about devastation, but it does count as a profound loss. And that emotional impact is usually underestimated in a C-suite conversation about a reorganisation. The emotional experience deserves its own attention. But the point I want to emphasise in this context is that the operational loss is real. There will almost certainly be a dip in productivity, and possibly in general enthusiasm and energy, in the weeks and months after. That isn’t good or bad. It’s a natural stress response to change, at a group level.
The disruption will likely lead to (manageable) dysfunction. But the other risk is that it gets misclassified. The transition period over indexes the new leader is the ‘problem’ – after all, the team is intact, remember? So six months in, a new leader appears to be underperforming. Maybe. Or, they are still transitioning old dynamics into something they can manage in their own style. But, it seems slower than expected because to the executive team, that new leader was ‘handed a great team’.
If one version is not underestimating that even a great team needs time to transition, then the other version is that changing leaders reveals not a great team, but a coping one. That might reveal itself as a star performer goes flat. On the surface, the reasons could look like anything: lack of interest, lack of direction, communication misfires, even just a bad quarter.
But the underlying cause can be something else entirely — the previous leader filled a specific gap for that performer, or sharpened a particular edge, or softened a communication style. A transition is one of the moments when an organisation can see whose performance is individual and self-sustained and whose is reliant on a particular team structure. That is worth knowing. But you have to know when to look.
Team Identities Are Co-Authored. They Can Be Rewritten.
None of this is an argument that reorganisations are going away, or even that they should. And strong teams are more likely to survive to another leader. There is value in moving teams intact. The goal is to simply fully acknowledge the inevitable disruption is there.
New leaders shouldn’t be protected from this reality. It can only benefit them to understand that this friction is almost unavoidable … and nearly always recoverable. In time, a new rhythm gets set. Star performers re-emerge, because they always were. (Or they don’t, perhaps because they never were.) The team that forms after the move may be stronger, more efficient, and a better fit for where the organisation is going. Just remember that it is new.
