A reorganisation has moved half your team's scope to another group. You argued against it and lost, and morale has collapsed. What do you do?

Own the decision without pretending you made it

The first thing the team will test is where you stand, and there are two ways to fail it. Disowning the decision — "this came from above, I fought it, I think it is wrong" — buys you an afternoon of warmth and then makes you useless, because you have just told eight people that their manager cannot influence their circumstances and that the correct response to a decision is to wait for it to be reversed. Claiming you wanted it fails differently: people know you argued, the pretence is transparent, and once they have caught you managing them they will discount everything else you say.

The position that holds is narrow and worth rehearsing, because it is what an interviewer is listening for. You say that the decision is made, that you were part of the discussion and made the case for keeping the scope, that the reasoning you were given is the following specific thing, and that you are now accountable for making it work. You can be honest that you would have decided differently while being unambiguous that you are not relitigating it. Those two sentences coexist; candidates who think they cannot are the ones who end up either sulking publicly or lying.

The part most people omit is the reasoning. A reorg that arrives as an announcement with no rationale is experienced as arbitrary, and arbitrary is what makes people start looking. If you were given a reason, relay it even if you disagree with it. If you were not given one, go and get one before you speak to the team, because "I do not know why" from a manager is worse than an unpopular answer.

Find out what each person believes they have lost

Team morale is not a single quantity and the aggregate reading is useless. Do individual conversations in the first week, ask what specifically got worse for them, and expect four or five genuinely different answers that need different responses.

What the person has lost	What they need from you
The interesting problem they came for	An honest read on whether comparable work exists here within a quarter
The scope their promotion case was built on	A re-planned case against work that still exists, in writing, or the truth that it is now harder
Standing as the team everyone came to	Visible ownership of something the organisation depends on, not reassurance
Confidence that the team still exists in a year	Whatever you actually know about headcount, and a plain statement of what you do not know
Their working relationship with people now in another group	Permission and a mechanism to keep collaborating across the new boundary

The one candidates handle worst is the third-row problem, because it is about status and nobody says it out loud. It surfaces as complaints about process or about the receiving team's competence. Take it seriously anyway: a team that has stopped believing it matters stops volunteering for things, and that is much harder to reverse than a bad quarter of delivery.

The fourth row is where honesty is uncomfortable and non-negotiable. Do not offer reassurance you cannot support. If you genuinely do not know whether the team shrinks next quarter, say that you do not know, say when you expect to know, and say that you will tell them within a day of finding out. People can work under stated uncertainty; they cannot work under a promise that later turns out to have been a guess.

Rebuild real scope, or say the team is smaller now

Sentiment management alone will not survive contact with the next quarter. Half the scope has gone, so either you find work of comparable weight or the honest conclusion is that this is now a smaller team with smaller ambitions, and both of those are legitimate answers with different consequences.

Rebuilding means going and getting something. Look for the work the organisation is failing to do rather than the work adjacent to what you lost, because arguing for the adjacent thing reads as trying to undo the reorg. Ask your peers which of their problems they would gladly hand over. Ask your director what keeps being deferred for want of an owner. Then make a specific proposal for one thing, with what you would stop doing to afford it. One genuine new ownership within a quarter changes the team's story from "we were cut" to "we changed shape", and that story matters more than most managers credit.

If nothing of that weight exists, do not manufacture it. Padding the team's remit with low-value work is visible to good engineers within a fortnight and confirms the fear that the team is being wound down. The honest version is to say the team is now smaller in scope, to be explicit about what that means for growth paths, and to help the one or two people whose ambitions no longer fit to move internally to somewhere they do. Managers find this counterintuitive because it looks like losing people. It is losing people on good terms and with their goodwill, rather than losing them to a competitor in three months along with their opinion of you.

The resistance you cannot see in yourself

The failure mode that does the most damage is not a decision or a conversation; it is a posture the manager holds for months without noticing. It looks like agreeing in the meeting and then telling your team the receiving group will make a mess of it. It looks like not investing in the handover because a poor handover proves you were right. It looks like keeping a shadow copy of the work "just in case". It looks like every skip-level and every retrospective becoming another airing of the reorg.

Each of these feels like loyalty to your team and is the opposite. You are teaching the team that the organisation is something to be worked around, which makes them worse at their jobs and unpromotable, and you are guaranteeing that the next decision of consequence gets made without you in the room. The specific commitment worth making out loud in an interview is that you will make the handover succeed, including telling the receiving manager the things about that system that would embarrass you, and that you will stop discussing the decision with the team after a fixed point.

Then judge yourself at six weeks on observable things rather than on mood: whether the team has taken on something new, whether the people with disrupted promotion cases have a written plan, whether anybody has resigned citing the reorg, and whether the reorg has stopped appearing in the retrospective. If it is still the standing item, the problem is no longer the reorg.