Anne Morris

And I want us to get into storytelling maybe in a structured way.

But I mean, just to state maybe what's obvious, layoffs can help you make progress on some problems.

If you're making a strategic pivot, if you're evolving to a more specialized workforce, if you're looking for a financial lifeline for whatever reason, obviously this is a tool in the toolkit.

Markets often will reward you, particularly in the short term, if they interpret this move as a sign of a leaner and meaner workforce.

But the costs of this decision often get less attention.

And I just want to pause on this before we can jump into what you do about it, because I think it's material to where we're going to go in this conversation.

But if you look at the data, and some of your colleagues really study this rigorously, Sandra Sucher, I'm thinking of, I know there are others.

But if you pull the lens back and look at what happens next to companies, what you see is reduced innovation over time, lower team engagement, attrition of talented people, a culture of hesitation and fear that starts to seep into the workforce, unless you're deeply intentional about it.

And so layoffs are this very blunt instrument with real collateral damage.

And the path to competitive excellence...

is not littered with layoff announcements.

And I feel like that is getting lost in this whole story right now.

And I'd like to position us as coaching well-intentioned leaders, right?

who remain at these organizations and whose job it is is to bring this workforce that has just absorbed this pain, bring them along and into the future.

So where do you start with that challenge?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and I like the list of mistakes that you started to articulate earlier.

But if you have found yourself here where you have hired human beings and then let them go, right?

And it's not for obvious performance reasons.

Either you over-confidently predicted demand, which I think we saw that happen during COVID, or the strategy that you assumed would work is not working.