Uber recently announced plans to cut around 3,300 corporate roles, reduce management layers, halve the number of “micro-teams” and decrease the number of employees sitting more than seven layers from the CEO.
The intention is clear: simplify the organisation and move faster. And on paper, it makes sense.
Too many layers can slow decisions, blur accountability and create a culture where people spend more time coordinating the work than actually doing it.
But removing layers doesn’t remove complexity.
The work is still there. Decisions still need to be made. Customers still have expectations. Priorities still compete with each other and people still need leadership.
What changes is where all of that lands.
The leaders who remain may suddenly have more people to lead, greater decision-making responsibility, broader roles and less access to the senior leaders they previously relied on.
At the same time, their teams are looking to them.
What does this mean for me? What are our priorities now? What can I decide? Are we okay?
And there’s another part of restructuring that I don’t think we talk about enough.
Often, some of the most experienced people leave.
They’re more senior and higher paid, so removing those roles can deliver significant savings. But they take something with them that is much harder to put a dollar value on.
Years, sometimes decades, of organisational knowledge. Client history. Relationships. Judgement. The ability to know what to do because they’ve seen a version of the problem before.
I’ve seen this firsthand in corporate restructures.
Experienced people were packaged out and others were expected to step into the gap, often without the same depth of knowledge or experience. Meanwhile, clients still expected the same expertise, continuity and quality of decision-making.
The organisational chart had changed. Their expectations hadn’t.
There can also be a very human consequence for the people who remain.
After watching experienced colleagues lose their jobs, admitting “I don’t know” or asking for help can suddenly feel risky. People may worry that asking a question will make them look incapable at exactly the time they feel they need to prove they can handle the additional responsibility.
So knowledge can walk out the door at the same time the people who remain become more reluctant to reveal what they don’t know.
And that can have the opposite effect to what the restructure was designed to achieve.
Instead of faster decisions, people hesitate or escalate. They spend time trying to find information that previously sat with someone who knew the business inside out. Leaders become more operational as more decisions, problems and people land on their desks.
The structure might be flatter, but the leaders can end up buried deeper in the day-to-day.
This is why restructuring can’t simply be an organisational design exercise. It also needs to be a leadership and capability exercise.
If you’re giving leaders greater autonomy, are they equipped to make the decisions that now sit with them?
If their teams are bigger or their remit is broader, are they equipped to lead people differently rather than simply absorb more work themselves?
And if you expect them to operate at a higher level, have you created the capacity for them to actually do that?
Because simply giving someone more responsibility doesn’t develop their capability.
You can redraw an organisational chart relatively quickly. Developing the people who are expected to make that new structure work takes much more intention.
That means organisations going through significant change need to think beyond who sits where.
What knowledge are we at risk of losing? Where will that knowledge go? What will our leaders now be expected to own? What capability will they need that they haven’t needed before? And what needs to come off their plate if we genuinely expect them to step up?
Because you can’t assume that removing a layer means the people below it are ready to absorb everything that layer was carrying.
Are we developing our leaders for the organisation we are creating, or relying on the capabilities that worked in the organisation we are leaving behind?
That’s a question worth asking before the new organisational chart is finalised, not after.
