This blog post is the fifth in a series that is a deep dive into what I call The Principles of Truly Human Leadership, from the revised and expanded 10th anniversary edition of my book, Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, available now.
Several months ago, my friend Simon Sinek visited our BW Papersystems facility in Phillips, WI to record an episode of his podcast, “A Bit of Optimism,” which was released this week.
There was a clip from the episode that received a lot of attention where Simon and I are talking about layoffs. At one point Simon says: “Layoffs aren’t strategy. They’re a symptom of a system that’s lost its heart.”
I recently wrote about Barry-Wehmiller’s response to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. In my reply to Simon about layoffs, I said: “Layoffs are a broken part of our society. It means your business model failed. You let people down.”
This discussion reminded me of one of the Principles of Truly Human Leadership from my book, Everybody Matters: The Power of Caring for Your People Like Family. This particular one says: An essential role of leaders is to provide those in their span of care with a grounded sense of hope for the future and aspire to send them home each day knowing that who they are and what they do matters.
A Grounded Sense of Hope
The discussion in the podcast clip clearly resonated with a lot of people, judging by the number of times it was shared and the many comments. Here are a few:
Layoffs are the worst thing you can do if you want dedicated talent and a culture of trust, transparency, and growth.
When leaders announce “necessary restructuring,” what employees often hear is: “You’re numbers, not people.” That disconnect doesn’t just damage morale; it erodes psychological safety, which is the foundation of innovation and trust.
I have experienced 11 layoffs during my career. Engagement and creativity every time was deteriorating, people going to work only for earning money.
When companies realise that their people are not just numbers on a balance sheet that's when they create really special businesses.
The best measure of a successful company isn't just the money it makes, but how well it helps its people thrive and feel valued every single day.
Layoffs are clearly in the front of people’s minds at the moment. From a recent Bloomberg article:
A report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed almost 950,000 US job cuts this year through September, the highest year-to-date total since 2020—and that was before the heavy October run of announcements. (Excluding that first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, US job cuts in the first nine months have already surpassed full-year layoffs for every year since 2009.) When something is almost the worst since the Great Recession… “that’s not a very encouraging number.”
My major responsibility to the team members of Barry-Wehmiller is to provide them a grounded sense of hope for the future. We do that through a robust business model that gives them a sense of employment safety so they can count on the financial security to plan their lives.
This is what I meant when I told Simon that layoffs mean a business model failed. A business model should allow for security for the people in the business.
Reducing People to Numbers
Until the 1980s, it was rare for companies to use layoffs to balance the books. When Jack Welch became the CEO of General Electric in 1981, he made cutting jobs a central plan of his drive to increase the company’s share price.
By the 1990s, “downsizing” was a popular word in business. For public companies, announcements of downsizing are often followed by a jump in the company’s share price as investors celebrate these “fat” organizations shedding “unnecessary headcount.”
Once, after giving a speech at an Air Force base, I asked the colonel in charge, “I’m just curious. How do you teach these young men and women to kill people?”
He thought for a minute and said, “Well, we don’t teach them to kill people; we teach them to take out targets that made bad decisions.”
I said, “Well, I’ll be damned. We do the same thing in business.”
Rightsizing, de-layering, business reengineering, streamlining . . . these are some of the other euphemisms for the now-routine business practice of eliminating jobs to improve profit. They reduce people to numbers and distance executives from the true cost of their actions.
I frequently ask people in various audiences, “How many of you have ever been laid off?” Usually a third of the people raise their hand. I ask, “How did it feel?”
The emotions come pouring out: “It was the worst day of my life. It’s such a rejection. I was told to clean out my desk by five o’clock and see the personnel department for my final check. I was told, ‘You’re gone, we don’t need you anymore; we can’t afford you anymore.’ Then I had to go home and break the news to my family. The shame I felt was almost unbearable. I had to say to them, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to make the mortgage payment, the car payment, pay the college tuition. I don’t know what I’m going to do because nobody is hiring.’”
You also rarely hear leaders talk with compassion about the impact of layoffs on the lives of individuals and their families after companies send them home with damage to their self-worth and a dramatic loss of income. You also never hear concern of the collateral damage of the people left behind.
In this environment of business where people are so disposable, is it any wonder that Gallup has found that only 21% of people strongly agreed that their organization cared about their wellbeing?
At the core of this issue is that when business reduces people to numbers or functions, not treating those people within their span of care as someone’s precious child, they are telling those people they don’t matter.
What’s the Matter?
I was reading an article the other day about the high level of disengagement in the workplace right now, which Gallup calculates at a remarkable 79%. Here’s some of the most important takeaways from a study detailed in the article:
- 46% of U.S. employees have considered quitting because they feel emotionally exhausted or numb at work.
- When asked to describe their jobs in one word, workers most often said “tired,” “surviving,” or “meh.” Others say “unfulfilling,” and “necessary.” Some go further: “blah,” “adequate,” “autopilot.” One person simply wrote: “I’m here to get paid.”
- Most say they’re “just surviving” rather than thriving, and many no longer believe asking for help would make a difference. Just eight percent selected “I’m thriving.”
- Among workers who identified as experiencing negative emotions, researchers asked what they believed was the biggest contributing factor. Two causes stood out: 27% pointed to feeling undervalued, while 19% cited a lack of purpose or meaning in their work.
Those survey results, to me, describe people who just don’t feel like they matter. Again, when people are treated like numbers or functions, when they are seen through that lens and used for someone’s success instead being seen as people, this is why people feel this way.
If people, when asked to describe their jobs, just say “unfulfilling,” “meh,” “blah,” or “I’m just here to get paid,” it is because their job doesn’t matter to them. And that is because they don’t feel like they matter. To matter, people need to feel valued and feel they are adding value.
A few months ago, Zach Mercurio, the author of The Power of Mattering, was a guest on our Truly Human Leadership Podcast. He said:
If you want anything to matter to someone, they first have to believe that they matter to you. Nothing matters to someone who doesn't first believe that they matter. It's very difficult for anything to matter to someone who doesn't first believe that they matter
So, when people feel valued, when you see them, when you hear them, when you see them as someone's precious child, sibling, friend, someone living a life as vivid and complex as your own, they develop two beliefs that give them the confidence needed to add value: self-esteem, which ieves the belief that I'm worthy, and self-efficacy, which is the belief that I'm capable. Self-esteem and self-efficacy have been found to be the two most significant drivers of individual performance.
Mattering is the essence of Truly Human Leadership. Through it, we strive daily to create meaningful work for our team members. We cultivate caring, empowering environments in which our people can come together to share their individual gifts—marry their passions to their skills— in the creation of value for themselves, for others, for the organization. We help them see the joy and happiness that is realized from achieving our shared vision together.
Being a Good Steward
In my podcast discussion with Simon, he said this to me: “I wish leaders took leadership as personally as you do. They see it as a rank or position. They see it as power and authority, but they don't take it as seriously as raising a child.”
Simon and I often talk about this, that leadership and parenting have a lot in common. As a parent, a child is brought into your life and you're responsible for their safety and their growth. And in business, a person is brought into your company and you're responsible for their safety and their growth.
When you flip the lens to see the people in your span of care in your organization as someone’s precious child, it becomes easier to accept this premise. And when you see people as somebody's precious child, it profoundly affects your leadership.
My responsibility to our people is to make sure they’re safe in my care, where we can create economic and human value in harmony. And when people feel safe and then they feel like they matter, they will share greater gifts with you.
Some people think it's just about being nice. It's much more profound. Parenting is not being nice. It's being a good steward of the child in your care. Not necessarily your child, but someone’s precious child.
Leadership is identical. And part of it is having a safe business model where they can raise a family, they can count on you and put their trust in you and have a career with you.
It is an essential role of a leader to give the people within their span of care a grounded sense of hope for the future and aspire to send them home each day knowing that who they are and what they do matters.
If leaders in organizations accepted that role, we wouldn’t have to worry about layoffs. If they flipped their lenses and saw their people as people, as someone’s precious child, it would have an incredible impact on their decision making.
And this is how we create the world that my “nutty idealist” friend, Simon, and I imagine is possible.