The Grief of Restructuring

It’s a powerful question, because restructuring is not just an exercise in drawing new boxes and lines. It tears at the fabric of people’s working identities; their trust, belonging, and sense of meaning. When that fabric is torn, grief naturally follows: grief for familiar roles, for long-standing loyalties, for ways of working that once felt safe.

We often underestimate how deeply work is tied to identity. An acquisition or reorganisation doesn’t only shift strategy; it unsettles unconscious contracts. People may lose a reporting line that once gave them security, a colleague who was a confidant, or the status that shaped their self-worth. Beneath the surface, there are loyalties, anxieties, and even unspoken mourning.

At a psychodynamic level, restructuring triggers what systems theorists call a disturbance in the “holding environment” — the invisible web of relationships and assumptions that allows people to feel safe enough to think, act, and collaborate. When that environment is disrupted, unspoken anxieties rise to the surface: fears of exclusion, of diminished status, of no longer being needed. People regress under pressure, reverting to old loyalties, defending territories, or waiting passively for direction. The top team becomes both the container and the mirror for these dynamics. If its members can acknowledge and work through their own disorientation and loss together, they restore containment for the rest of the organisation. Without that, anxiety simply flows downward, unchecked.

The first step in addressing this grief is not a town hall or a communication campaign. It’s coaching the C-level leadership team itself. Why? Because employees take their emotional cues from how their leaders hold themselves together as a team.

If the executive team rushes ahead with only the rational plan: roles, KPIs, decision rights, while leaving the emotional undercurrents unspoken, the rest of the organisation senses the void. But if the C-suite can sit together, acknowledge the losses, contain the anxiety, and model honest yet hopeful dialogue, then the whole organisation sees a path forward.

In practice, this means creating a space where senior leaders can:

1. Clarify organisational expectations
   Before they ask others to deliver, they must first align on what the organisation truly needs from them as a team.

2. Name the goals—and the losses
   Alongside setting shared priorities, they surface what has been left behind. This dual awareness prevents grief from festering unspoken.

3. Draft a team charter for new ways of working
   Explicit commitments to how they will collaborate, decide, and resolve tensions rebuild a sense of safety and belonging.

4. Exchange feedback anchored in shared purpose
   A facilitated feedback circle helps leaders hear how they affect one another, and make personal shifts that better serve the team’s goals.

These conversations are not indulgent. They are the very infrastructure of adaptation. They make visible that while the org chart changed in a day, rebuilding the inner sense of safety, connection, and purpose will take deliberate attention.

Too often, leaders reach for a single, linear “change curve” model as a quick answer to complex human reactions. But grief and adaptation rarely follow neat stages. The reality is more fluid. A continuing cascade of conversations, tensions, and recalibrations as people make sense of new roles, relationships, and expectations. Sustainable change emerges not from managing everyone through one uniform emotional sequence, but from keeping alive an open, tiered dialogue: starting and continuing with the top team.

That ongoing cascade of conversation, from leadership team to business units to frontline teams, is what transforms restructuring from a one-off event into a continuous practice of integration. It’s in these everyday exchanges, team by team, meeting by meeting, that new ways of working become embedded as business as usual.

Leaders often feel pressure to communicate quickly and confidently after a restructure. But sustainable adaptation requires something before communication: containment. Senior leaders must first process their own anxieties and grief as a team. Only then can they stand in front of the wider organisation with the authenticity and steadiness that rebuild trust.

In short: To address grief in restructuring, start with the top team. Coach them to acknowledge endings, define new beginnings, and embody the safety and purpose that others long for. From that foundation, the organisation can truly adapt—not just on paper, but in spirit.