A reorganisation is never a clean exercise in moving boxes. It’s a series of quiet transfers of accountability, and the consequences land on people, not charts. I learned that last year in a way I’d rather have learned second-hand.

The reorganisation

In 2025 my company reshuffled its China leadership. My new manager, the head of communication and the general secretariat, lost the secretariat and gained IT, cyber, and office management, functions that had previously sat under HR. Ten people out of about a hundred and twenty were let go, and several scopes were redistributed to the people who remained.

One of those scopes was crisis management, and it landed on one of my direct reports.

The assumption I made

He’s highly autonomous. I’m not formally in charge of crisis management myself. The two of them, my manager and my direct report, have known each other for years through the French community in Beijing.

So I assumed they could and would interact directly. I told myself I didn’t need to stand in the middle of a scope that wasn’t mine.

I was wrong.

What actually happened

My direct report is blunt. To outsiders he can read as rude, or avoidant. My manager is controlling and tactless, and he used their long familiarity as a licence to make frequent remarks, sometimes to my report directly and sometimes to me, about his behaviour, his inadequacies, or tasks he had supposedly missed.

When I finally looked, the pattern was clear. The “missed” tasks had either never been delegated to him, or had been put on hold in writing with no follow-up. The criticism kept coming anyway.

Proximity made it worse. They sat back to back. Being physically adjacent to the person who keeps finding fault with you is a pressure cooker, not a collaboration.

The cost

A few days before he left, my direct report moved to another part of the open office, out of sight, with my approval. He hasn’t come back.

By then the damage was done. He went on two weeks of sick leave for depression. It was moral harassment, and I watched it happen while telling myself the scope wasn’t mine to manage.

The repair

After those two weeks there was a mea culpa and an exchange between the two of them, with me acting as mediator. We agreed that most interaction would go through me, and by email. The physical separation helped: it removed the casual remarks and gave my manager less to pick at. It still happens, but less.

My own trust in that manager is breached too. He broke it with most of his other reports, not just mine. So my focus now is simpler: answer his requests without fuss, get them done fast, and keep my attention on my scope and my people.

What I’d tell my past self

  • Autonomy is not abdication. “He doesn’t need me” is not a plan for someone who reports to you.
  • Familiarity is not safety. Two people who have known each other for years can still have a broken working relationship.
  • Verify before you judge. When a complaint about one of your reports reaches you, check whether the task was ever actually delegated.
  • Watch the seating chart. The cheapest intervention of the whole episode was moving a desk.
  • Psychological safety is the job. It’s what keeps the people you’re responsible for from having to take sick leave to survive you.