The other side of the room
How about the people who deliver the restructures?
Part 3 of my series on what restructurings actually cost, this time, the people on the other side of the room.
This time I would like to explore a difference angle, we spend a lot of time talking about those who lost their jobs, but we rarely talk about the ones who had to deliver the news. And my experience is that you can’t generalize because this is not a uniform group.
In fact, I’ve seen four completely different leadership profiles. All saying the same words, but carrying something completely different home.
The Believer
They agreed with the decision. Understood the business rationale. Believed the restructuring was necessary. Executed professionally and without hesitation.
And still went home and couldn’t sleep because understanding why something had to happen doesn’t make the moment of doing it any easier. Believing in the decision doesn’t protect you from the look on your colleagues’ faces when you deliver the news.
Nobody debriefs the Believer. Everyone assumed they were fine.
well, they’re not always fine.
The Soldier
They didn’t make the decision. Weren’t in the room when it was made. They were handed a list and a script and a date and told to execute.
Their job was to deliver a message they didn’t write, defend a rationale they weren’t part of, and answer questions they weren’t authorized to answer fully. Many times they don’t even know the answers themselves as they dont have access to the full picture.
They did it because that’s what the role required. Loyalty without agency. Professionalism without ownership.
The soldiers are constantly asking themselves if they were complicit in something they had no say over.
Most organizations don’t help them answer that.
The Reluctant
They didn’t agree with the decision, or maybe they agreed with it but not with how it was made — the lack of transparency, the timing, the people chosen, the way it was communicated.
But they executed anyway, sometimes because they genuinely tried to push back and lost, sometimes because they calculated the risk of dissent and decided their own job wasn't worth the fight, sometimes both.
And then, they spent weeks protecting a narrative they didn’t believe in, answering questions with language someone else wrote faking a confidence they didn’t feel.
That dissonance just doesn’t go away after the last conversation is done.
The Betrayed
They were told one version of the story, and they delivered that version with conviction. Only to find out later through a hallway conversation, a leaked email, a second wave of cuts and that the version they were given wasn’t the full picture.
They delivered a message in good faith that turned out to be incomplete, or misleading, or part of a sequence nobody told them about.
And then they start feeling used, having their credibility and their relationships spent on behalf of a decision they didn’t fully understand.
The betrayed leader doesn’t just lose trust in the organization. They lose trust in their own judgment.
Organizations invest heavily in the script, timing, severance packages, overall communication strategy around layoffs, but almost none of that investment reaches the managers who executed the process.
They’re expected to return to their teams the next day, act normally, and not show the weight of what they just carried. And most of them do exactly that because the culture makes anything else feel like weakness.
If you led a team through a restructuring, I want to ask you something:
Which one were you? And who asked you how you were doing afterward?
