You may go to work reporting to your boss one day, but find yourself reporting to a new senior person in between you and your boss the next.
If so, you’ve just been “layered.”
“Layering is when the organization puts somebody in between you and your current boss,” explained Mary Abbajay, president of leadership development consultancy Careerstone Group and author of “Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work, and Succeed with Any Type of Boss.”
Is this a cause for celebration or a time for receiving condolences? It depends. Layering can happen in growing companies that go from a handful of employees with no managers to hundreds of employees in need of clearer oversight. Restructurings are common in general.
But it can also be a red flag about your team’s performance. And when the majority of us get a sense of identity from work, we can take the change personally, especially when we wanted be the new layer, not the layered. Newly layered employees can interpret the action as a sign that they are losing status.
