What You Do Is Who You Are

Is there anything that’s preventing you from getting your job done?” or “If you were me, what would you change in the company?”

When I heard about a problem, I tried to seem ecstatic. I’d say, “Isn’t it great we found out about this before it killed us?” Or, “This is going to make the company so much stronger once we solve it.” People take their cues from the leader, so if you’re okay with bad news, they’ll be okay, too. Good CEOs run toward the pain and the darkness; eventually they even learn to enjoy it

Explain why taking the action you’re taking is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is. A layoff, done properly, is a new lease on life for the company. It’s a hard but necessary step that will enable you to fulfill the prime directive, the mission that everyone signed up for: eventual success. It’s your job to make sure that the company didn’t lay off those people for no ultimate purpose—something good needs to come of it

If your leadership caused or contributed to the setbacks that necessitated the layoff, cop to that. What was the thinking that led you to expand the company faster than you should have? What did you learn that will prevent you from making that mistake again

State the facts clearly. “We have to lay off thirty people because we came in four million dollars short of projections”—or whatever the case may be. Don’t pretend that you needed to clean up performance issues or that the company is better off without the people you so painstakingly hired. It is what it is and it’s important that everyone knows that you know that

But if you assign meaning to the layoff before anyone else, and you do so candidly and convincingly, your interpretation has a decent chance of being the one that everyone remembers

To do this, you must accept that you can’t change reality, but you can assign it a new meaning

Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand

Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win

If employees have a real say in the business, they will be far more engaged and productive. It’s also often the case that sending the question up the hierarchy not only slows things down but results in a less accurate decision