They Split Her Role in Two. The Part They Took Was the Part She Loved.
When the reorganisation lands on you
A client of mine came to a session deeply demoralised.
Her company had been through a major restructure, and when the dust settled, the chips hadn't fallen quite the way she'd hoped.
She'd held a senior creative technology role.
The restructure split her role in two. Her former deputy, someone who had reported to her, was now her peer.
Worse, from where she sat, he'd been handed the most creative parts of the work.
The responsibilities she'd loved most.
The parts that had made the job feel like hers, and that fed her intellectual curiosity.
It landed as a slap in the face. A demotion in everything but name.
The assumptions hiding inside the hurt
When we talked it through, I asked her to separate what had actually happened from the story she'd wrapped around it.
There were several assumptions doing quiet damage, but I suspected, not all of them were true.
The first assumption: that the projects left to her were the lesser ones; less important, less creative, less worth having.
The second: that working alongside her former deputy as an equal was, in itself, a humiliation she'd have to swallow.
So we tested them, one at a time, against the evidence rather than the feelings that were feeding her sense of injustice.
On the second: she admitted, when pressed, that she'd always rated this colleague; knew his work was great. After all, she’d trained him!
She'd praised his work for years. The discomfort wasn't about him.
It was about the change in pecking order, the symbolism of equality where there'd been hierarchy.
Once she named that, working with him as a peer stopped looking like a humiliation and started looking like, well, working with someone skilled and indeed, on whom she could rely.
On the first assumption: the "lesser work" as she initially regarded it, the evidence turned the story right over.
When she actually looked at the projects still under her remit, they were the programmes for the company’s biggest clients.
The accounts the senior team most needed to be stellar. Indeed, that's why they told her they were giving those projects to her.
Not the leftovers. These were actually the crown jewels!
The reframe that changed how it felt
That's the moment it shifted. Not because anything about the restructure changed. It didn't.
But because she stopped reading it as a demotion and started reading it accurately.
She still held the most commercially critical work. She had a capable peer rather than a deputy to manage.
And, this was the part that genuinely lifted her, splitting the role freed up the very time she'd never had to be strategic about raising the bar on creativity in the work she'd just dismissed as unimportant.
The "lesser" projects weren't lesser.
They'd just been under-tended, because the old, sprawling version of her role never left room for her to tend them.
Now there was room.
Why this is so easy to get wrong from the inside
When a restructure lands on you, the instinct is to read every change as a verdict.
Lost a responsibility? Demotion.
Gained a peer where you had a report? Diminishment.
The narrative writes itself, and it writes itself in the worst possible terms, because that's what hurt and surprise do.
But a restructure is rarely a verdict on you alone.
It's a reshuffle, and reshuffles contain losses and openings in the same envelope.
The skill isn't pretending the losses aren't real.
It's refusing to let the loss story you’ve told yourself narrate the whole thing before you've checked it against what's actually in your hands.
She did the harder, truer thing: we looked at the evidence, not the feeling.
And the situation she'd walked in calling a slap in the face turned out to be the best strategic position for her in the new structure.
But only once she stopped reading it as the worst.
Want the deeper version of this?
My free Women in Tech Promotion Playbook walks through exactly how senior women get past being doubted.
How they position themselves with the people who decide promotions, and stop waiting to be noticed for work that should speak for itself.
If this resonated, I write about moments like this every week, the ones senior women in STEM recognise immediately and hadn't quite named yet.
Real stories, fresh client insights, and the conversation most people around you aren't having, or sharing.
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I'm Dr Suzanne Doyle‑Morris and I support professional women working in STEM.
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The Women in Tech Promotion Playbook
Your roadmap to advancement with balance
The Women in Tech Promotion Playbook is a practical, evidence-based guide designed for ambitious women in STEM who want to advance their careers without burning out. Drawing on over 25 years of coaching and research, I outline five strategic steps that help women move from being overworked and under recognised to confident, visible leaders.
