Rebuilding trust after layoffs or a restructure
Trust after a restructure doesn't come back on its own, and it doesn't come back from a town hall. It comes back from the specific behaviors your leaders show every week, in the gap between the words at the podium and the choices in the hallway. Kestryl Edge runs in-person workshops that give your leaders those behaviors to practice, with measurement across the next six months so you can tell whether the trust is actually coming back.
Who this is for
- You just went through a reduction in force, an acquisition, or a leadership change, and the team is quiet in a way they weren't before.
- You announced the restructure well and the trust still dropped. (That's normal. It isn't a comms failure.)
- You want a measurable path back, not a workshop that leaves the team feeling slightly better for a week.
Who this isn't for: a team where leadership is still actively undermining trust. Fix that first. The workshop can carry a team through the neutral zone, not around a leader who is making it worse.
What actually rebuilds trust
Most change-initiative plans end at the announcement. The real work is in the neutral zone: the stretch between what was and what will be, where people lose faith in the plan because the leader stopped showing up with answers. Every leader is on their own hero's journey through that stretch; our job is to make the mentoring explicit, not implicit.
Three capabilities tend to decide whether the trust comes back.
Communicating under constraints. Most leaders can't share everything. Trust still has to come back. We teach the specific moves for showing up when you can't tell the whole story: naming what you can and can't say, closing the gap between words and action, and handling the question you don't have an answer for without faking one.
Repairing specific trust events, not abstract trust. The team isn't losing faith in leadership in general. They're losing faith over the thing that happened to the person they liked, the promise that didn't hold, the sequencing of the layoff that one person got wrong. We work through those specific events in the room. See the field guide on repairing broken trust for the question shape.
Reading low-trust signs early. Low trust is quiet. It shows up in meetings that got shorter, in Slack threads that used to be funny, in the engineer who stopped pushing back. We teach leaders what to watch for and what to do when they see it.
How a workshop works
Three stages, measured end to end:
- The Leadership Baseline. Before the workshop, we measure where trust actually sits. Not a vibe survey. Specific behaviors, specific stakeholder groups, specific moments after the restructure that matter. This becomes Phase One of the engagement.
- The workshop. In person. Leaders practice the hard conversations the next quarter will require: the all-hands question they can't fully answer, the direct report who is thinking about leaving, the peer leader whose department has stopped collaborating. Research-backed, light on slides, heavy on reps.
- The measurement loop. We re-measure right after, at three months, and at six months. The report shows whether the behaviors stuck and whether the trust metric moved. If something didn't change, we see it.
Pricing gets scoped on the fit call. Team size, format, and the state of the restructure drive it.
What people have said
"I love that there is authentic levity in how you present — you are relatable and you make the information accessible to your audience." - Lindsey
"If you want the real deal in EQ and leadership development that isn't run of the mill, you need to call them." - Lindsey Kay
What to do next
Book a 20-minute fit call. We'll ask about the restructure, who the team already trusts and who they don't, and what the next quarter looks like for your leaders. If a workshop isn't the right next step, we'll tell you.