The reorganization that moved one person twice
Think of the person on your team whose read on the business is most accurate. The one who tells you about a problem a month before it shows up in a report. In the last two years, how many times has that person changed manager?
The org chart you signed does not hold that number. It holds boxes, reporting lines and headcount, and every version of it you have ever reviewed was correct about all three. What no chart records is who has to start over explaining how they work.
The mechanism
A reorganization redistributes two things. The first is work, and you plan that carefully, because it is visible, costed and argued over in the meeting.
The second is the cost of being understood. Every person who changes manager pays it again: the new manager has to learn how they communicate, what their concerns look like before they become problems, and whether the flat way they say something serious means it is not serious. For most people that cost is a few awkward weeks. For the person whose style sits furthest from the room's default, it is months, and some of it never fully clears.
This is not a soft cost. Vigilance about how you are being perceived measurably reduces working-memory capacity, which is the same capacity the work runs on. Schmader and Johns demonstrated that in 2003, and the finding has held. A person managing a new manager's impression of them is not performing worse because they care less. They are performing with less of the resource the job needs.
So, the redistribution is never uniform. It lands hardest on exactly the people whose information you were relying on, and it lands in a quantity your planning process has no field for.
The number you can reproduce this afternoon
Take your last two reorganizations. Pull the list of professional employees whose reporting manager changed in each one, and intersect the two lists.
That is the population who have explained themselves from scratch twice in two years. In the organizations I ran, the list was always short enough to fit on one screen, and the names on it were disproportionately the ones I would least have wanted to replace. That is my accounting rather than a published benchmark, and the useful part is not my number. It is that you can produce yours before lunch.
Then price it against something you already have. Replacement cost for a professional employee runs to roughly one to one-and-a-half times salary on SHRM's bands, and higher for specialized roles. You do not need to believe a precise figure to take the next step. You need to know whether the twice-moved list and your last four regretted departures have anyone in common.
Run it yourself
Four steps, one analyst, an afternoon.
- Export manager ID by employee by month from your HRIS for the last twenty-four months. Two years, not twelve, so a reorganization and its aftermath both sit inside the window.
- Flag every professional employee with two or more manager changes in that window.
- Cross that list against voluntary departures, and against your current high-performer or high-potential designations if you keep them.
- Count the overlap. One number, and it either makes you want the next conversation or it does not.
The export is the hard part, and it is hard in a scheduling sense rather than a technical one. Every HRIS sold in the last decade holds manager history, and the cut takes an analyst an afternoon once the data lands.
What to notice before you have run anything
In your next structural change, there will be a slide showing spans and layers. Ask for one more column: how many of the people in each box are changing manager for the second time in twenty-four months.
If the answer is that the system cannot produce that column, you have learned something about the instrument rather than about the people. It is a field that exists in the data and has never been asked for.
I'll be straight about the limit. This cut tells you who absorbed the redistribution. It does not tell you that the reorganization was wrong, and plenty of them are right and worth the cost. It also cannot separate a person who struggled with a new manager from a person who was already leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with you. The column narrows the question. It does not answer it.
Two columns instead of one, on a slide you were already going to review. Most organizations have never added the second one, and it is the one that names a cost before you sign rather than after.
Which of your people has changed manager twice in the last two years, and what do the names on that list have in common?
---
If this is useful to the people who run your structure, forward it. If you want the arithmetic on what a turnover spread costs, the differential turnover calculator runs on data you already hold. A related piece on what a handover file records and what it leaves out is here, and the twenty-four-month cut is set out in full in this week's companion piece.
Sources
- Schmader, T., & Johns, M. (2003). Converging Evidence That Stereotype Threat Reduces Working Memory Capacity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(3), 440–452. The measured finding that managing a threat to how one is perceived reduces working-memory capacity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Converging Evidence That Stereotype Threat Reduces Working Memory Capacity
- SHRM. Replacement cost bands: 30–50 percent of salary for entry-level roles, 100–150 percent for professional roles, up to 200 percent for specialized roles. SHRM
- Mann, P. A. (2026). The Perception Revolution. Fast Company Press. Chapter 4, on pattern recognition in the people closest to the work, and Chapter 2 on what a departure costs beyond the requisition.
Peter Allen Mann is the author of The Perception Revolution (Fast Company Press, 2026). He spent thirty-seven years in leadership, including four years as a Navy Surface Warfare Officer and two companies founded and run. He writes about late-recognized autism and perception at peterallenmann.com.