Corporate Life-The Layoff

There comes a time in any working person’s life where the company they work for, large or small, multi-national or startup, is forced to reduce cost and cut back on the workforce, for whatever reason: loss of a contract, competitive pressures, leadership preparing the company to be sold, new CEO/leadership needs to make an impression, pressure from stockholders to improve profitability, etc. The downsizing is never easy, and the aftermath is always brutal, inhumane and never easy. Who decides who should be laid off and who are spared? Usually it is the worker bees that get cut, since it is usually the managers who make the decisions as to who to lay off, so they tend to protect their own. Those locations with the accumulation of the most powerful managers will tend to be spared the axe, while those locations that do not have a champion get hit disproportionately since workers in far flung locations are usually the blank unknown faces; they are easier to cut than people you see every day because there isn’t the personal connection with the decision makers. Older employees often get the axe more often than not because of the persistent youth movement that corporate mythology promotes, regardless of the unique expertise of the people being cut, the mantra is that everyone is replaceable, indeed, the accumulated salaries of the older workers also make cutting them yield higher return on the bottom-line.  Those factors are all variables and are uncontrollable in the greater scheme of the situation.

Regardless of the reason for the layoffs or for selecting who gets laid off, there is one thing that is within the control of those who are laying off people: how they choose to break the news and how they treat those who are laid off, that is the humanity and empathy shown by the decision makers. How the layoff decisions are executed and how humane the soon to be former employees are treated during the layoff process is often a referendum on the humanity of the managers and senior leadership of a business. It is also fair predictor of how fairly the employees will be treated in the future and how the senior management views the employees: as partners in the business enterprise or as indentured chattel.

I recently observed from the outside two very different approaches.

One is from a large health system. The health system cited the decline in reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid as the driving force for the restructuring. The announced number of layoffs is 1% or the total 45,000 employees, or 4,500 people. The move was announced via a widely circulated press releases. The release also reports that the layoffs are going to take place over a number of weeks as managers and HR people try to ease the impact of the layoffs. It was promised that the corporation will do their utmost in relieving the pain of the decision. The news was publicized, and the health system took responsibility for what they needed to do. I am sure that there will be employment placement assistance along with the requisite severance and healthcare insurance packages offered to everyone affected. The points to note are that this was a planned restructuring, and the actions are implemented in transparency to those who are still employed as well as those who are being affected. How transparent is something that we cannot see or experience, they are internal actions that we cannot observe readily. but their intent was known at the very beginning and they were not trying to hide these layoffs from their employees, their customers, their shareholders, or the broader healthcare market.

On the other hand, I have experienced a few situations where manufacturing firms are being reorganized. One is happening in a similar timeframe as the situation above with the health system but handled completely differently. The number of people affected corporate wide is pretty small, below 100 workers. There was no press announcement, for fear that this information would somehow work to the benefit of their competitors or to the detriment of their stock prices. In fact, they kept the layoffs secret even from the managers affected. One of those who was laid off was in a meeting with their managers when HR came to tell them that they were needed, and their manager had no clue until well after the fact. One fellow was running a meeting when he was told to report to HR, he told them to wait until the meeting was over before he went and found out his fate. One manager had a day off and was told that she was losing an entire section by another employee who had enough wits to call the manager at home as her co-worker was being marched out the door.

This was more along the lines of the layoffs that I had the misfortune to experience. I was working for a manufacturing firm many years ago when there was a hostile takeover of the company board, and the owner of the firm, the son of the founder of the firm, was walked out the doors without being allowed to pack up his office. We were sitting on pins and needles for weeks after the board coup until some of the people at our site, the corporate research lab, told us that they had been alerted by the head of engineering with the news that the lab was being shut down at the end of the week; but the select few, those that they had informed, are being kept on. They were of course sworn to secrecy and were told to not come to work on the day when the company security was going to show up unannounced to layoff the rest of the lab.

When the day came, about a dozen of us had all cleaned out our desks and our offices. We had diligently left the computer hard drives untouched, and we were all sitting quietly in our offices when the head of engineering arrived with a handful of security people in case we got violent, and a truck full of cardboard boxes for us to pack our personal possessions. He was shocked to see the empty labs and offices; he was even more shocked when we didn’t even acknowledge the news in a way that he expected, no one cried, no one seemed depressed, in fact everyone seemed relieved that the wait was finally over. The security guys were relieved that they didn’t have to do the ugly job of clearing out the lab of our possessions.

No such luck in this latest instance. There was no warning, very few of the managers were aware of the impending layoffs. A good number of people who were selected were getting ready to retire, a few had filed their paperwork for later in the year, yet they were included in the bloodletting. The unfairness of it all became evident when  some others in the same situation but in other locations were spared the ignominy of being swept out with the layoffs; they were rather told to retire behind the scenes so that they did not have to go through the long, public, and forlorn display of marching to the parking lot with the contents of their office desks.

Looking in from the outside, it appears that the reorganization effort was done hastily, without foresight. The main consideration was speed, expediency, the reorganization of the top level management structure, the weeding out of the bottom of the food chain as  executed through the layoffs, but the middle level management structure was left To Be Determined, probably because they figured they would have time to make it up as time went on. In the period of a single workday, many managers discovered that they did not have any direct reports nor who they were to report to, nor which business unit they would be working in. More than a week after that fateful day, they still don’t know their own fate, other than the fact that they were fortunate in still having a job.

All too often, management types are so divorced from the reality of the day to day operations that their main and persistent belief is that people will get over the pain and suffering if you gave them money for their pain; any hurt feelings can be assuaged by an adequate severance package. They conveniently neglect the fact that those who they had cut are not just head counts, but flesh and blood people who are connected to their co-workers through years of working, struggling, and toiling together for the company; that this shared bond of their employment is more than just a job, it is what pulls them closer together as a team and that bond is strong, stronger than any bonds other than familial bonds.  This I find to be the most dominant myopia afflicting the American management class: their view of the company structure as abstractions of their charts and flowcharts which completely blinds them to the real people who occupy each of the boxes that they have sketched out so carefully on their wall charts.

Alas, one last boost of energy from the management came a week later, when the leadership released a video that is mandatory viewing for all the employees. The leadership emphasized their “excitement” in this, the latest program of the month, and how this reorganization will be the magic elixir that will revive and reinvigorate the company. Additionally, the leadership admonished the employees that were left to operate with integrity.

The irony is heavy here. I am very sure that “excited” is not a good word to use. In essence, the message is that the management is “excited” to disintegrate the livelihood of the families and the decision to throw them out into the streets was easily made and inconsequential when measured against the future profitability of the company, even though it was the efforts of those who were thrown out who put the company in profitability in the past.  Even if management does not care one whit about those who were laid off, it is certainly rubbing salt into the wounds of those who saw their colleagues and friends suffer through major emotional upheavals. This strategy will certainly breed the kind of loyalty needed that the management expect and motivate the positive attitude that the work force are expected to have to give it their all for the almighty company.

The second irony. One that is a little more subtle, is that while the management pontificate on integrity, they themselves are lacking integrity by being dishonest in the way that they executed the roll outs of these layoffs. I am sure irony is on the wane in corporate America today, at least in those industries that are treading water, the senior management probably didn’t even notice their unintended hypocrisy, or maybe they did but didn't care. 

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In the end, people are resilient, they will survive upheavals, some may even thrive as they step away from the oppressive environments that these management leaders seem to foster. I survived my dealings with the American management ethos, I hope the same for those who had to come face to face with it recently. Good luck to them all. Go team, Go!!

Volleyball Coaching Life-Criticism

I received this today in my email from The Daily Stoic (https://dailystoic.com/), a daily email newsletter that remind us about the lessons from the Stoics.

There is a certain archetype that is as old as literature and history themselves. One of the first times we see it in the West is with Cassandra in the Greek tragedies. She has the power to see into the future but no one listens to her. Then we have Demosthenes, whose warnings against the rise of Phillip (Alexander the Great’s father) are so incessant that everyone hates him for it. Later on, in Rome, Cato the Elder—Cato’s grandfather—was such a frequent (and ultimately prescient) critic and hawk when it came to Carthage, that he would play the same role. In fact, he would end every speech he gave, no matter the topic, no matter the occasion, with Carthago delenda est (“Carthage must be destroyed”).

His grandson, Cato—the towering Stoic—would develop a similar reputation as a kind of obstinate truth-teller, even when it was inconvenient, even when it disturbed the peace, even when it made enemies, even when he was exhausted or knew he would be ignored.

In all these cases, people just wanted them to let.it.go. Why do you have to be so annoying? Why can’t you be more strategic? Don’t you see you’re just pissing people off?

All of which was legitimate criticism. Perhaps with a bit more tact and better awareness, these important messages could have been heard earlier or more receptively. Cato the Elder and Cato and Demosthenes seemed to almost be trying to alienate people with the way they spoke and hammered their message.

But it’s important to understand the distinction between how you say something and how often you say it. Tone is one thing (to always be considered), timing is something else. “Waiting for the right moment.” “Trying to figure out the best way to say it.” “Not wanting to turn people off.” Those are timing issues that, more often than not, we lean on as excuses for avoiding one of the hardest things to do in the world: speaking an unpopular truth. Warning people about a reality they’d rather not deal with.

Cicero, a contemporary of Cato (and an admirer of his grandfather), would quote this line of poetry:

“Indulgence gets us friends

But truth gets us hatred.”

If we tell ourselves that our main job is to be a good messenger, we risk compromising our message. We end up leaving out important or unpleasant parts of the message, rounding off its sharp edges in the pursuit of fitting in instead of standing out so our message may be heard. We can end up going along to get along...even if the conclusions that come out of that are wrong.

But if our job is to tell the truth—no matter what, no matter who it upsets or how unpopular it makes us—and we are committed to doing this as long as we have an ounce of blood in our bodies? Then no pesky considerations or compromises can stop us. And, hopefully, we can wake people up—as Winston Churchill did about Nazism—before it’s too late.

This struck a chord because this is in essence what we do as coaches on a daily basis. No matter how we try to communicate with our players and parents, it all boils down to delivering the news, good or bad, and you cannot sugarcoat the message to soften the sting of the truth. Many successful coaches are blunt to a fault, and their players, past and present, revere them for their honesty, no matter how much it hurts.

Some coaches can lessen the immediate blow while cushioning the criticism in pillowy softness; they are obfuscating the real truth, while some coaches have been somewhat successful with that tactic at that moment; in the end, they will have to tell the truth while looking the player in the eyes.

Others will use timing to soften the blow, as the Daily Stoic note points out, timing is something we: lean on as excuses for avoiding one of the hardest things to do in the world: speaking an unpopular truth. Warning people about a reality they’d rather not deal with.

It is never easy to tell someone that they are not working hard enough, that their effort is just not up to your standards when they probably never had a frame of reference that was as strict as your expectations. The initial reaction, whether they are mature or not, whether they are experienced or not is to react defensively and then say try to rebut your criticism. Eventually, you hope, they will come around to your understanding and that defensiveness can turn into something positive.

This is especially challenging when you are not dealing with adults, because at least adults will have been through the drill before, at least you hope so. You also hope that adults will have maturity on their side. They can understand that your intent isn’t to attack but to correct, to get their attention, to make them better. At least you assume that they have the maturity.

But since we are dealing with teenagers who’s purpose in life is to rebel and resist, the question is not whether we should differ in how we speak to young players as compared to how we speak to adults; the question is HOW we should translate our message in order to effectively deliver the entire essence of the message as we try to declaw the negative emotions for the youngsters even as we try not to put spin on the truth or that the message delivered is not misunderstood by the receiver.

In IMPACT class, we always talk about the praise sandwich. We pile on the praise for something the player excels at doing at the beginning and the end of our conversation and we sandwich the criticism in between, cushioning the blow so that they will at least acknowledge and absorb the message. I have always felt funny about doing that, but I have always used it early in my coaching experience. I have given the benefit of the doubt to my players, thinking that they can see right through my tactic and they were forming a hard shell against this tactic. I don’t know how it helped the medicine go down, but it made me feel less awkward. I have tried many things, I have gone the technical route, telling them all the things that they will need to do to get better, hoping that I can disguise the sting. I have tried to be the hard-ass coach who just care about the results and not about the human player, that didn’t work.

It wasn’t until I adopted the mien of the truth teller that the Daily Stoic described that I became better at communicating criticism to my players. Once I realized that I can not strip away the pain with out watering down the message, the task actually became easier. The difference is that I don’t give my players a head fake about how well they are doing in the other aspects of the game. The difference is that I give them a vote of confidence to show them that I have confidence in them and in their ability to learn, to get better. I try to demonstrate what a growth mindset should feel like coming from a coach. I don’t reassure them that they are doing fine, I don’t praise them when they aren’t getting it. I do praise them, overly praise them, when they get it right, or show hints at getting it.  

This week has been a whirlwind for me as my beloved St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup. As I was digging through the copious amount of press coverage of the team online, I found this little nugget. This was written early in the playoffs, when Vladimir Tarasenko, the Blues high priced scorer was struggling, and the team sorely needed his contribution. Interim head coach Craig Berube, a tough guy if there ever was one, said this:

"Vladi has to work without the puck a lot harder," Berube said. "And he will. And he's got to get more involved. You can't just wait for things to happen. Especially in the playoffs. You've got to go get it. You've got to go make it yourself. It's about working. It's about working with your line."

Did you notice the nuance? Berube was out in public, he wasn’t praising in public and criticizing in private. He told the truth, in public. He didn’t make it personal, he didn’t go after Tarasenko, because he needed the guy to produce. The nuance is right after the initial criticism: And he will. That was it. In those three little words, he sent a message to Tarasenko: “Hey buddy we need you, we can’t do this without you; you have done this a bunch of times before and I know you can do it again; I know you are trying to do your best, but we need more; I believe in you.”

All of that in three little words. All in a reverse praise sandwich. He went from criticizing to praising to criticizing again.

If you are to believe those in the Blues organization, Berube’s no nonsense communications is a great part of what got them to turn the season around, from being in last place on January 3 to raising the Stanley Cup on June 13. He tells them what they need to hear not what they want to hear, he says it professionally but simply, and he shows them that he has faith in them, no matter what.

Let’s Go Blues!!!