The announcement comes on a Thursday. New teams, new reporting lines, a diagram with boxes that did not exist last week. Most people spend the following fortnight doing the same thing: waiting to see what it means for them.
That waiting is understandable, and it is also when a lot of career opportunity quietly goes to other people.
Here is what every reorganisation produces, however carefully it was planned. The diagram shows teams. It does not show the dozens of small responsibilities that used to live between them. The relationship with the one customer who always calls. The service that three teams used and one team maintained, and that team has now been split in two. For a few weeks nobody owns these things. Some will break. Some will just stop.
At the same time, a set of new managers are trying to understand what they have inherited, usually with no handover worth the name. They do not yet know who is reliable. They are forming opinions quickly, and the people who help them make sense of things in the first month tend to keep that trust for a long time.
So instead of waiting, go looking. In the first week or two, ask your new manager a simple question. What has fallen between the cracks so far that you are worried about? Most will have a list and nobody to hand it to. Pick one item that genuinely matters and that you can do well. Say you will take it, then confirm it in a short message so it is clear the work is now yours rather than something you are helping with.
Be selective. Collect every orphaned task and you will do all of them badly. One or two pieces of real ownership, done visibly and properly, are worth far more than being the person who quietly patches everything.
And keep an eye on the gaps nobody has spotted yet. You probably know two or three things your old team did that do not appear in anybody's plan. Say so before they fail, rather than after.
The people who come out of a reorganisation with more scope than they went in with are rarely the ones who lobbied for it. They are the ones who noticed first what had been left behind.
– Asael Shinder
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