It's been a rough week.
I'll leave the details out to spare the innocent, but over the last few days I've been locked away in small conference rooms to have incredibly difficult conversations with people about the end of their career with the organization I work for.
Yes, you read it. Layoffs. Oh, the dreaded L word.
There's just no good way to slice it. It sucks. It sucks for the individual, it sucks for the company, it sucks for the person having to deliver the message, it sucks for the people who are left behind. It. Fucking. Sucks.
I've been unfortunate enough to go through this with a few companies during my career. The worst was when I had to lay off 150 people in two days at Zillow. What a killer few days that was.
It's never the employees' fault either. They get caught up in the middle of organizations growing with good intent. Companies don't grow with the idea of having to eventually get rid of people, but things happen. The market moves slower than expected, products don't catch fire like they thought, business units get shut down.
The Shock, The Silence, The Stories
The shock you see on the faces of the innocent. I've seen tears, I've seen anger, I've had people say things they regretted later, and I've seen people struggle to leave the room, frozen. Rarely are people truly shocked — the aura of weirdness usually breathing life into the air for the days and weeks leading up. I believe good organizations are well-versed at leaking rumors ahead of time. Why blindside people?
It happened to me right out of college. My second job. I had flown back from New York on a Thursday night. When I landed, I turned on my Blackberry and had a calendar invite for 8:45am the next day with the President of our company. I told my wife, "I'm pretty sure I'm getting laid off tomorrow." My gut was right. The company went bankrupt about a year later.
Timing is never great either. Nobody ever says, "This is actually the right time for me to get laid off." We had just bought a condo. We were young. We didn't have much money. The idea of not getting a check every two weeks was scary for a minute. But, as it always does, the sun came up the next day, and within a few weeks I had five job offers, and life went back to normal.
There are hard feelings that follow. You start second-guessing every decision you witnessed. You wonder why you, why not Steve in Accounting or Debra in Marketing? You just can't objectively look at a company the same after going through that process.
Layoffs suck. There is just no good way around it. Good people, who do good work, get caught up in the middle of the corporate hurricane with no fault of their own.
If you've been through it, you remember how you were treated. Was it cold and scripted, or was it empathetic and supportive? I've laid people off, had them be screaming mad at me for a few weeks, and then call me later because they knew I was there for them no matter what. In a world of cold corporate organizations focused on shareholder growth and executive compensation — be human.