Mind the Gaps: Organizational Changes and Your Career Lifecycle with Ryan Conley

Has organizational change redefined your job role? If it hasn’t yet, it will at some point. Whether acknowledged or ignored, every organizational change at a company impacts you. This is broader than just layoffs and more employees under a single manager. What are the organizational changes we might see, and what can we do to stand out and stay the course? This week in episode 355 we’re joined by guest Ryan Conley. Listen closely as we uncover different patterns of organizational change and provide practical tips to take action when those changes happen. Ryan helps us understand the corporate lifecycle and how to reframe this concept to understand where we are in the career lifecycle. You’ll hear from Ryan’s personal experience why the most resilient (and successful) technologists can identify and fill the gaps left after an organizational change whether that means working for a new boss, joining a different team, or changing job roles. Original Recording Date: 11-13-2025 Topics – Framing Our Focus on Organizational Change, Observations and Patterns, Defining the Career Lifecycle, When Colleagues Leave the Company, Layoff Resources, Working for a New Boss, Becoming Part of a Different Team, Shifting Job Roles or Job Level Changes, Parting Thoughts 2:58 – Framing Our Focus on Organizational Change Ryan Conley is a global field principal with 11p years of technical pre-sales experience. Before this, Ryan accumulated 13 years of systems administration in industries like education, finance, and consulting.In a recent episode of our show, guest Milin Desai compared organizations to living, breathing organisms that change. Nick posits that we don’t always think changes at our company will or can affect us as employees, but they do. Ryan references Aswath Damodaran’s writings about organizational change through the frame of a corporate lifecycle. We can relate by considering where our company might be in that lifecycle.As we experience the impacts of organizational change, Ryan encourages us to consider where we are in our career lifecycle. 4:19 – Observations and Patterns We see organizational change in different ways. What are some of the things Ryan has seen that he would classify as organizational changes? Let’s take a step back, past the current headlines, and look at the wider industry.Companies are growing inorganically (through mergers and acquisitions) or organically through investments in R&D (research and development), for example.Ryan has worked with companies that grew by acquiring 2 new companies each year to give an example. When you’re on the IT side of the acquiring company, there is a lot involved in the process like integrating e-mail systems, networks, and CRM systems. This process also involves getting 2 teams to work together. If one team needs to move from Office 365 to Gmail, it can be a big adjustment to employees’ daily workflow.The acquiring and acquired companies may have the same or very different cultures. In some cases, a company will want to acquire others with similar cultures, while some may not be concerned about the culture and choose to focus on the intellectual property (products or services, knowledge of how to build or manufacture something, etc.) of the company to be acquired. Nick says the experience for people on the side of the acquiring company and that of the company getting acquired can be quite different. Nick worked in IT for a manufacturing company for about 9 years, and over the course of his time there saw the company acquire several other companies. Nick usually had to go assess technology systems of companies that were going to be acquired and figure out how to integrate the systems in a way that would best service the user base.From what Nick has seen, some employees from the acquired company were integrated into the acquiring company, while others were eventually no longer with the company. Anxiety levels about an acquisition may be different depending on whether you work for the acquiring company or the acquired company. “The people are just as much of the intellectual property of the company as, in many cases, the actual assets themselves. And in some cases, that culture just isn’t a fit.” – Ryan Conley Ryan shares the example of someone he knew who left after another company acquired their employer because the culture was not a fit. Losing a key leader or a key subject matter expert after an acquisition could create a retention problem because others may want to follow them or start looking elsewhere."So how do you protect the culture internally? How do you integrate a different culture in? But also, how do you kind of protect the long-term viability of the team as individuals, first and foremost, but then also the organization long-term?Depending on the intellectual property the acquiring company is after, we don’t usually know the level of due diligence completed to understand the key resources or subject matter ...