Restructuring and Redundancy

Who it's for

HR business partners and HR generalists supporting a restructure, the leader who owns the decision, and the managers who will announce it, hold the at-risk conversations and lead the team that stays.

Output

• A scored report after every room, with the moment that earned each score and one recommended focus
• The decision in four lines, the first minute of the announcement and the first two sentences of the at-risk conversation, written and said aloud before the real ones
• A trajectory across every attempt, and for the HR director a Ren summary of each participant and a team report
• Scored against published frameworks: the Cynefin framework, Boyd's OODA loop, Rest's four-component model, bounded ethicality (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel), influence without authority (Cohen and Bradford), care and challenge, high-stakes dialogue, clear communication, the Minto pyramid principle, Aristotelian rhetoric after Heinrichs, participatory facilitation and Schwarz's ground rules

Program contents

1. Deciding under uncertainty — Strategic Decision
2. Ethical judgement · Challenging upward — Ethics Test · Managing Up
3. Announcing under challenge · The at-risk conversation — Presentation Under Pressure · Difficult Conversation
4. The team that stays — Meeting Facilitation

How the program works

A four-week program for HR business partners and the leaders who will announce a restructure and hold the individual conversations, assigned by an HR director, built on Renatus. Six simulation rooms · Four weeks, one or two rooms a week · Every scene invented, nothing about a real employee · Unlimited attempts · Ongoing thereafter.

The rooms

Why this program exists

An HR business partner and a leader who carry a restructure decide with half the numbers, hold the line when a name is pushed onto the list, announce it to a room that has heard the rumours, sit across from a person whose role is going, and then face the team that stays. This program prepares them through simulation. Ren builds each scene from the participant's real role, seniority and sector, and plays every person in it, so every room is new and moves with each decision. The decision itself, the selection and the consultation belong to the organisation and its own rules. Ren rehearses the conversations, never the decision.

What you'll achieve

1. Rehearsal of the moments a restructure puts in front of them, as often as they want: the decision, the line held, the announcement, the at-risk conversation and the team that stays
2. A scored report after every room: each dimension with the moment that earned its score, strengths, development areas, blind spots where the evidence shows them, and one recommended focus
3. The decision in four lines, the first minute of the announcement and the first two sentences of the at-risk conversation, written and said aloud before the real ones
4. Unlimited attempts at every room, each a different scene for their current role, scored on the same dimensions and charted against every attempt before it

At a glance

Who it's for

HR business partners and HR generalists who will support a restructure, the leader who owns the decision, and the managers who will announce it and hold the individual conversations. It is assigned by the HR director or head of people; the manager's lines in this guide are written for whoever that is. Every room calibrates to role, seniority and sector, so one cohort can hold a chief executive and an HR business partner in their second year, and both run every room. It assumes participants know their organisation's redundancy and consultation procedure, or have the adviser who does. It rehearses the judgement and the conversations the procedure is carried out with.

Cadence

4 weeks

1

Deciding under uncertainty · Strategic Decision · Read Trade-off Recognition and Clarity of Framing; ask for the decision in four lines

2

Ethical judgement · Challenging upward · Ethics Test · Managing Up · Read Ethical Recognition and Cost Tolerance; read Grounding and Outcome; read the Ren summary across three rooms

3

Announcing under challenge · The at-risk conversation · Presentation Under Pressure · Difficult Conversation · Read Question Response and Poise; read Framing and Follow-through; hear the first two sentences

4

The team that stays · Meeting Facilitation · Read Air-time Management and Closure; read the team report; set the ongoing plan

Session by session