You have been in the meeting. You know roughly what is coming, you know it will affect people who report to you, and you have been told to say nothing until the announcement goes out. Tomorrow morning you will stand in front of a team who trust you and field questions you cannot answer honestly.
That is the situation. There is no version of it that feels good, and there is an enormous difference between handling it well and handling it badly.
This is a live problem for a lot of leaders right now
A survey commissioned by Acas found that a third of UK organisations expected to make redundancies between February 2026 and January 2027, with large employers more than twice as likely to be planning cuts as smaller ones, at 46% against 21% (Acas, 2026). The CIPD’s spring 2026 Labour Market Outlook found around one in five employers planning redundancies within the following three months, and 58% naming cost management as their highest priority for the quarter (CIPD, Labour Market Outlook, Spring 2026).
The legal picture has shifted as well. From 6 April 2026, the maximum protective award for failing to consult properly on collective redundancies doubled from 90 to 180 days’ pay per affected employee under the Employment Rights Act 2025. Further changes expected in 2027 will extend collective consultation duties beyond the single site, so proposed redundancies can be counted across an organisation rather than workplace by workplace.
All of which means the compliance conversation is happening in every HR department in the country. It is a necessary conversation. It is not the same one as the leadership conversation, and the second is getting far less attention than the first.
Compliance is the floor, not the job
A restructure can be run entirely by the book and still wreck a team.
Consultation periods can be observed, letters issued on time, scripts followed word for word, and the people left behind can still spend the next eighteen months quietly updating their CVs. That is because the process answers a legal question about whether the employer behaved lawfully. It says nothing about the human question your team is actually asking, which is whether the people in charge can be trusted.
Nobody remembers the letter. They remember how their manager was with them in the corridor.
The gap between what you know and what you can say
This is the hardest part of the whole thing, and most leaders get it wrong in one of two directions.
Some overshare. It usually comes from decency, from a wish not to blindside people, and it does real damage. Half-formed information starts circulating, somebody tells their partner, the story reaches a colleague in another team in a distorted form, and people begin making decisions about their lives based on a plan that has not been finalised.
Others go completely silent. They cancel one-to-ones because they do not know what to say in them. They stop walking through the office. They meet questions with a flat statement that they cannot comment, and move the conversation on.
Silence looks like the safe option. It is not, because silence does not stay empty. Your team will fill it themselves, usually with something worse than the truth, and they will fill it by talking to each other rather than to you.
There is a middle position, and it is more available than people think. You can be completely honest about the shape of what you know without disclosing any of the content.
There is a review happening. I know some things I cannot share yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I can tell you is when I expect to know more, and that you will hear it from me rather than picking it up on the grapevine.
That gives away nothing confidential. It also tells your team that you are not lying to them, which at that point is the only currency you have.
Briefing under uncertainty
The military has a straightforward habit that transfers well here. When you brief people in a situation that is still developing, you separate what is known from what is not known, and you always close with when the next update will come.
It works because it takes the guesswork out of your own reliability. People stop scanning your face for clues. They know that what you have told them is the complete set of what you are able to tell them, and they know when the next instalment arrives.
Most civilian restructure communication does the opposite. It is vague about the facts, silent about the gaps, and non-committal about timing. That is precisely the combination that makes people assume the worst.
Set a rhythm and hold it. If you say Thursday, then on Thursday you turn up, even when the only thing you have to report is that nothing has moved. Arriving with no news is not a wasted meeting. It is the meeting that proves you will keep arriving.
What people actually want to know
Underneath all the questions people ask during a restructure, there are usually four they cannot ask directly.
Am I safe. When will I know. Is this being done fairly. Are you being straight with me.
You often cannot answer the first one. You can almost always answer the other three, and answering them properly does most of the work. Explain the process and the criteria as far as you are permitted to. Give real dates rather than telling people they will hear in due course. And be visible, because presence answers the fourth question in a way that words never quite manage.
Presence beats polish
During a restructure, leaders often disappear into their diary. Meetings run long, doors stay shut, and the manager becomes somebody the team sees on an all-staff call and nowhere else.
It is understandable. Being around people who are frightened when you cannot fix the thing frightening them is draining, and the instinct to avoid it is strong.
Resist it. Walk the floor. Make the coffee. Keep the one-to-ones in the diary and hold them even when there is nothing new to say, because those thirty minutes are where somebody tells you they have a mortgage application in and they need to know whether to pause it. That is not a distraction from the work. On the days when the process is running, that is the work.
You do not need a good answer. You need to be somebody people feel able to bring it to.
Do not perform a certainty you have not got
There is a strong temptation to steady the ship by sounding more confident than you are. Leaders reassure. They say things like I am sure it will be fine, or I do not think it will come to that, because they want to reduce the fear sitting in front of them.
The problem shows up the moment it does not turn out fine. Everything you say after that gets discounted, including the things that are true.
You can be calm without being falsely reassuring. Calm is about how you carry the situation, not about what you promise. Saying that you do not know how this ends and that you will tell people what you know when you know it, delivered steadily, settles a room far more effectively than optimism that turns out to be hollow.
The people who stay
Most of the attention during a restructure goes to the people leaving. That is right in the moment and short-sighted over the following year.
The people who remain have watched the whole thing closely. They have seen how colleagues were treated on their last day, whether managers were straight with them, and whether anybody bothered to say thank you. They have drawn their own conclusions about what this organisation does to people when money gets tight, and they will carry those conclusions into every decision they make about their own future here.
Survivor guilt is real. So is the quiet resentment of a workload that has just absorbed a departed colleague’s job with no acknowledgement. Both usually go unaddressed, because by the time the process ends everyone senior is exhausted and wants to move on to something else.
Do not declare victory and change the subject. Name what happened. Acknowledge that it was hard and that people lost colleagues they liked. Then be specific about what the work looks like now, including what has been dropped, because asking everybody to pull together without changing the workload is just a request to do two jobs.
When your own job is at risk too
This gets skipped in most guidance on the subject and it should not be. Sometimes the manager delivering the news is sitting in the same consultation as everybody else.
You are allowed to say so. Not in detail, and not in a way that makes your team responsible for managing your anxiety, but pretending you are untouched when everyone knows you might not be reads as dishonest. A plain acknowledgement is enough, and it usually earns you more credit than composure would.
Get your support from outside the team. A peer in another department, a mentor, somebody who does not report to you. Carrying this alone is how leaders end up either brittle or absent, and the people below you feel the effects of both.
The real measure of it
A restructure is the point where a leader’s ordinary credibility gets tested against something real. Everything you have ever said about valuing people suddenly becomes checkable.
You cannot control the decision. You usually cannot control the timing or the criteria either. What you control is whether people found you honest, present and consistent while it was happening, and that is what gets remembered by the ones who leave and by the ones who stay.
Ready to develop your leadership skills?
Leading well through difficult change is a skill, and it is one worth building before you need it rather than during. Our courses cover the practical ground, including difficult conversations, communicating under pressure, and holding a team together when things get hard. Take a look at our online leadership courses, or explore our in-person leadership courses if you would rather learn alongside other leaders.
