Two teams go through the same reorganization.
Both lose colleagues. Both receive new priorities and inherit additional work. Both must learn a new system while wondering whether another round of changes is coming.
Three months later, one team has found its rhythm. People are collaborating again, making decisions, and experimenting with new approaches. The other team remains stuck. Every announcement creates anxiety, employees avoid taking risks, there’s generalized disengagement and even small changes are met with cynicism.
The difference is often described as resilience. But that word can be misleading when it suggests that certain people are naturally tougher than others.
Teams rebound faster when they have opportunities to process what happened, understand what comes next, and rebuild their capacity before the next disruption arrives.
Change Makes Withdrawals from the Team’s Account
Every change requires energy. Employees must let go of familiar routines, learn new expectations, establish relationships, and figure out how decisions will be made. Even a positive change can be exhausting.
The Center for Creative Leadership compares a team’s capacity for change to a bank account. Each disruption withdraws energy, attention, and interest. When organizations keep making withdrawals without helping employees replenish their reserves, change fatigue sets in.
You can hear it in comments such as:
“Why do I need to learn this process? They’ll replace it in six months.”
“I’ll wait before starting. The priorities will probably change again.”
“Nobody asked the people who actually do this work.”
These comments may sound resistant, but they often reflect accumulated disappointment. Employees have adapted repeatedly without enough time, information, or support. Their skepticism becomes a form of self-protection.
Research published in 2025 also found relationships among uncertainty, lower resilience, change fatigue, and job burnout. When people can’t predict what will happen or understand how decisions affect them, recovering becomes much harder.
Create a Deliberate Reset
Rather than pretending that the disruption is over the moment the new org chart is announced, high-recovery teams create a reset.
A useful reset conversation can begin with four questions:
- What did we lose in this change?
- What remains reliable?
- What have we learned about working together?
- What do we need to stop, start, or renegotiate?
The first question matters because every reorganization includes endings. People may have lost trusted colleagues, autonomy, status, a project they cared about, or confidence in senior leadership. Ignoring those losses drives them into hallway conversations and private messages where uncertainty continues to grow and distrust fester.
In this process, leaders who explain what they know, what they don’t know, and when they expect to have more information make a huge difference in how the team process the change. In In the Age of Restructuring, Your Real Job Is Sensemaking, we discuss how naming uncertainty and clarifying what remains stable can give people psychological footing.
Then the team needs to renegotiate the work. If three people have left, the remaining employees cannot continue doing everything exactly as before. So, being realistic helps everyone decide what will be delayed, simplified, automated, transferred, or eliminated. Telling people to “prioritize” without identifying what they can stop doing simply adds another task to an already overwhelming list.
Recovery Happens in Ordinary Moments
Trust grows from small, everyday moments. When a leader follows through on a promise; a colleague admits they are struggling and asks for support which they get. The group solves a tough problem together.
Our article Why Mattering Has Become the Leadership Issue We Can’t Ignore explores why connection, transparency, and respect become especially important during reorganizations.
Individual employees can help create recovery too. Ask which priorities have changed. Share information instead of allowing rumors to fill the gaps. Check on a colleague who has become unusually quiet. Suggest a short team debrief after a difficult phase. Point out a process that no longer serves the new reality. And, reach out to colleagues who lost their jobs to offer them your support and connections too.
Still, resilience should never become an excuse for organizations to overload people indefinitely. Employees cannot breathe their way through an impossible workload or compensate for constant poor planning with a positive attitude.
Teams rebound when they can understand what happened, influence what happens next, and recover some control over how they work. The strongest teams don’t absorb endless disruption without consequence. They pause long enough to rebuild before moving forward.
