If you look back over the past five to seven years, how many times has your company gone through some type of reorganization or restructuring, whether large or small? Restructuring usually comes with a displacement of employees through layoffs and early retirements. Often, many of your most experienced employees are let go, some of which were current and aspiring leaders.

This leaves your company with gaps in some of the most critical roles in the organization. You’re also left with gaps in potential talent to step into those leadership roles.

Companies already are stretched from not having the leadership skill set necessary to take on key roles. Deloitte found in a 2016 study that companies are not ready to meet leadership needs, with more than half of executives reporting this concern.

You Face Three Tough Challenges

When a reorganization or restructuring occurs, these statistics can be exacerbated by immediate pressure from three inevitable challenges:

• Higher voluntary employee turnover: There’s often high uncertainty among employees about the future of the company. They quickly become unsettled about their personal future with the company — both how long they might have a job or the opportunities that might exist for them. They’re tempted to look elsewhere for the next steps in their careers. In the short term, you’ve got to keep your most promising talent that remained from jumping ship.

• Inexperience: Your organization suffers from a lack of talent with solid experience to move into leadership roles, ready to hit the ground running. Most of your experience has left the company. Your remaining knowledge of the industry, business cycles, operations, customers and financial drivers is limited. There’s a very real short-term operational risk of mistakes, missteps and stress on the company that could be detrimental not only in the short-term but also hard to recover from long-term. You are likely to experience further erosion of your employee base, operating revenue and margin.

• Changing needs: You’ve got to rebuild your pipeline for the longer-term. Your needs will be different, in terms of both numbers and the type of talent you need to carry your organization into the future. So, you’ve got some organizational “soul-searching” to do.