The Toronto Maple Leafs fired their coach and management — again. In the business world, wholesale management resets rarely work the way leaders hope, says an HR expert
The Toronto Maple Leafs made headlines this week when they dismissed head coach Craig Berube, the latest in a series of leadership changes that have defined the National Hockey League (NHL) franchise's turbulent recent history. Berube's departure — along with a broader shakeup of the hockey operations structure that includes the firing of general manager Brad Treliving in March and team president Brendan Shanahan in May 2025 — reignited a debate that extends well beyond the ice. For HR professionals and business leaders, it raises a pointed question: does blowing up an entire leadership team actually fix what's broken?
The short answer, according to Cissy Pau, Principal Consultant at Clear HR Consulting in Vancouver, is: it depends. And the stakes are almost always higher than organizations realize, says Pau.
The internal cost that can be overlooked
“Wholesale change is disruptive regardless of how you frame it,” Pau says. “If you have a senior leadership team and all of a sudden they're gone — I'd imagine that creates quite a state of flux for the organization, along with stress and uncertainty.”
Pau draws a crucial distinction that boards and CHROs often miss: the impact of a leadership reset is heavily shaped by how employees felt about the departing team in the first place. If a leadership group was well regarded, then their sudden removal can devastate morale, even if the decision made strategic sense from the top down, she says.
"If your leadership team is well liked and supportive of the staff, and then all of a sudden you walk in one day and they're all fired, that's going to have a much more detrimental effect than if the leadership team is not well liked,” Pau says.
The inverse, she notes, can be true as well. When staff have long harboured doubts about a leader's competence or direction, a decisive change can come as a relief — but only if it’s handled with transparency and care, she says.
What the data tells you
For organizations serious about making evidence-based decisions around leadership, Pau points to employee engagement surveys as an underused diagnostic tool. Annual surveys that include questions about leadership communication, staff support, and team confidence can surface meaningful trend lines over time — and department-level data can identify whether a performance problem is organization-wide or isolated to a specific team.
“If satisfaction drops consistently across the board, then you know something systemic is happening,” she says. "But if one team is rating their manager at 65% and another is at 90%, that tells you something very different — deal with that first and then see what happens."
This kind of targeted, data-informed approach stands in sharp contrast to wholesale removal. Pau argues that most high-functioning organizations move through change sequentially: one intervention, then assessment, then the next step — not a simultaneous sweep.
The institutional memory problem
Beyond morale, Pau warns of a risk that rarely makes it into post-mortem analysis: the loss of institutional knowledge.
“What if you've had that person for 20 years and they're the head of sales? It's hard to just replace those connections and those relationships,” she says. “You lose your head of sales, your finance person, your operations lead — that doesn't seem like a smart business practice. And now who's left doing the work? All the people remaining, who are confused about why the whole team is gone.”
In a corporate setting — unlike professional sports, where contracts and performance metrics are structured differently — a wholesale termination also carries significant financial consequences. Unless there’s cause for dismissal, the severance cost of simultaneously removing an entire leadership team can be substantial, and that financial reality should factor into any reset decision, says Pau.
When a new CEO comes into an organization, it can also be tempting to make big changes, but it’s generally a good idea not to do it all immediately, says Pau. “Every CEO wants their own team, but they usually don't come in and say, ‘All right, everybody's going and I'm going to start from scratch’ — there's usually a period of evaluation where they meet with people, and maybe not the whole leadership team gets turned over.”
Setting leaders up to be measured fairly
So when is leadership change warranted, and how should boards and CHROs decide? Pau's answer returns to fundamentals: clear, specific performance expectations set from the beginning. In the Maple Leafs’ case, they missed the playoffs for the first time in 10 years — generally a measuring stick for success in the NHL.
"If you've got a senior leader, there have to be some performance metrics of what your expectations are of that person — and the more specific the better,” she says. “Is it revenue, is it new customer acquisition, is it growth? What are you expecting, and in what time period? And how are you going to measure their success?”
But she’s equally insistent that the how matters as much as the what. A leader who hits every target while leaving a trail of damaged relationships and staff turnover has not, in her view, truly succeeded.
"You usually get into trouble on the how — people are upset and they feel disrespected — that's not a good culture,” she says. “A truer reflection of a leader's character is how do you handle things when times are bad, when you have that string of losses, when you lost that client or that customer, revenues aren't good, and economic downturn has occurred, what do you do?”
For HR professionals watching the Maple Leafs' saga from a comfortable distance, that framing may be the most transferable lesson of all. Wholesale change is sometimes necessary — but it’s rarely the first, or wisest, move, according to Pau.
"Before a company goes ahead and does a wholesale change, they really need to think about the unintended consequences and the potential impact it has,” she says. “That doesn't mean don't do it — but think about all the potential soft impacts on the organization and on the staff."
