Ask anyone who has been through a restructuring what the headcount reduction was. Most will not remember, and those who do will be approximate.
Ask them how it was done, and you will get an account of remarkable precision. They will remember who told them and how. They will remember whether the executive team appeared in person or delegated. They will remember, with something close to forensic accuracy, a single sentence spoken by a director in a town hall three years ago.
This asymmetry is the whole subject of this essay, and it has a practical consequence that executive teams consistently underestimate: the population that remembers is not primarily the population that left. It is the population that stayed.
The retreat into mechanics
Restructuring compresses two incompatible things into the same set of decisions. It requires a commercial judgement that must be made coolly, and it produces a human consequence that cannot be held coolly by anyone with a functioning conscience.
Executive teams respond to this, almost universally, by moving very rapidly to the mechanics. Who, how many, by when, in what sequence, at what cost, under which legal framework. The mechanics are absorbing, they are urgent, they are genuinely necessary, and — this is the point — they are the part that can be done without feeling anything.
This is not callousness. It is a defence, and a fairly humane one. Staying with the full weight of what you are about to do to several hundred people is not sustainable for very long, and a team that stayed with it fully would probably be unable to act at all.
But the defence has a cost, and the cost is that the decisions end up being taken by a team that has anaesthetised precisely the faculty it most needs: the capacity to hold two irreconcilable truths in the same mind at the same time — that this is commercially necessary, and that it will do serious harm to people who did nothing wrong.
A team that has retreated entirely into the mechanics is not being ruthless. It is being absent — and absence, in a restructuring, is legible to everyone.
What the organisation is actually watching
The people who remain are conducting an assessment during a restructuring, and it is not the assessment the executive team believes is under way.
They are not principally evaluating whether the decision was correct. Most of them accept, or at least concede, that something had to be done; they are not naive about commercial reality. What they are evaluating is what kind of organisation this is when it is under pressure — because that, and not the mission statement, is the only reliable evidence they will ever get.
They are watching whether anyone at the top says anything that costs them anything. They are watching whether the difficult conversations are had by the people who made the decision, or exported to line managers who did not. They are watching for the moment when a senior leader is asked a question they cannot answer well, and they are watching what that leader does with it.
And they are drawing conclusions about what they can expect, personally, if things ever go badly for them. Those conclusions will govern their behaviour for years, and they will govern it invisibly.
The tell
There is one reliable indicator, and any chief executive can check it without assistance.
Sit in an executive discussion about a restructuring and ask yourself whether anybody in the room has said anything that cost them something. Not something difficult to say in the sense of being unpopular with the board — something difficult in the sense of exposing the speaker: an admission that a decision they championed is part of the reason this is now necessary; a refusal to accept a comfortable framing; a statement of the human cost in plain language, without the softening vocabulary that makes it manageable.
If an executive team can conduct an entire restructuring discussion without a single person incurring any personal cost in the room, the discussion is not happening. The mechanics are happening.
What it is possible to do
The commercial decision may be unavoidable. Very often it is, and pretending otherwise helps nobody, least of all the people who will be affected by an organisation that fails to act and then fails altogether.
What is available is the quality of judgement brought to it — and judgement here means the capacity to hold both truths without collapsing into either. Collapse into the commercial truth and you get an efficient process that destroys the organisation's trust in its leadership for a decade. Collapse into the human truth and you get paralysis, half-measures, and a second restructuring in eighteen months that is twice as large and does twice the damage.
Holding both is uncomfortable, it is slower, and it is the entire job. It is also, incidentally, the thing that will be remembered — long after every number in the plan has been forgotten by everyone including the people who wrote it.
Laszlo Cser is the founder of Vantaris Consulting, an executive leadership advisory practice working with organisations whose executive decisions carry significant commercial, operational or reputational consequence. More essays.