Lessons from living through re-orgs
How you respond to organizational changes at work can help you learn and grow in your career
When I first started working in tech more than a decade and a half ago, I recall getting org-wide emails announcing some executive’s departure and the trickle down organizational changes. It seemed like a lot of people wanted to spend more time with their families or figure out their next adventure. But I was so early in my career that most of the time I had no idea who these people were, why they needed to spend more time with their families, or what their departure meant for the organization. And the changes were often so far up the hierarchy that they didn’t really make a difference in my day to day life. Sure, my more senior peers might pontificate the impact of one such change or explain to me what it meant for our team but as far as I was concerned, it was almost always business as usual.
That all changed at some point towards the mid-point of my career. Perhaps I was getting a new manager or a centralized research team I was a part of was getting decentralized or the decentralized research team I was a part of was getting centralized. Now these changes did have an impact on my life and career. When I first started experiencing these types of changes at work, they were scary and frustrating.
