TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: Unsolicited Advice: How to handle layoffs with care | from Fixable

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

When an organization lays people off , those who remain are often left scrambling to find their footing – and hold other people up – in an environment that no longer feels stable. In the wake of ongoing tech layoffs and the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the public sector, Anne and Frances are back with a new Unsolicited Advice segment to set the record straight about what layoffs mean for an organization — and the responsibility leaders have to own what went wrong.Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hugh. Today, we have an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. It's unfortunately a part of the news cycle that doesn't seem to end. Mass layoffs. When an organization lays people off, those who remain are often scrambling to find their footing in an environment that no longer feels stable.

So today we're sharing a 2025 episode from our show, Fixable, where hosts Francis Fry and Ann Morris try to set the record straight about what layoffs mean for an organization and the responsibility leaders have to own what went wrong. Whatever you're dealing with at work, Fixable is there to help, offering actionable insights to create meaningful change in your life and workplace. Listen to Fixable wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have a problem you want fixed, call their hotline at 234 Fixable. That's 234-34-349.

2253 to leave Anne and Francis a voicemail with your workplace problem. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. Now on to the episode right after a quick break. Welcome to Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Anne Morris. And I'm your co-host, Frances Fry. This week we're bringing you another edition of unsolicited advice, where we give advice to people who didn't ask us for it.

Well, who's our lucky recipient today? Well, Francis, today's unsolicited advice isn't totally unsolicited. We want to address a question we see so often in our show inbox, which is what to do after your company experiences a layoff. Today we want to talk to the people who have to pick up the pieces the next day, senior leaders, managers, HR teams. Oh, we get this question all the time, all the time. Yeah, we've coached a lot of leaders and organizations through this one. I also want to acknowledge. that as we record this, there are whole public sector organizations and organizations that rely on government funding that are confronting large-scale layoffs and disruption right now as the Trump administration works to reshape government. For those of you listening out there who are impacted and looking for work, we're thinking about you and the people who depend on you. We hope you'll listen to our episode from last season on job seekers and find something there that is helpful to you. The headline on our advice is to not do this alone. Your real enemy right now

is isolation. So build a community to help you get through this difficult time. You're going to get to the other side, we promise. Absolutely. This kind of disruption to your life is a team sport. And Francis, in a future episode, we hope to give unsolicited advice to the architects of these decisions. Surprising to no one, our point of view is that move fast and break things is not the right approach here. Does that mean we're going to give Elon advice? Yeah, we'd love to give Elon some advice and his boss and the Republican Party because this is not just about one or two men at the top, which is how this story is being told. We gave advice to the Democratic Party last year, and it only seems fair to include our Republican friends as well. I do love symmetry.

Yeah. It's just balanced. We're just going for fair and balanced, Francis. I like it. I like it. In the meantime, today, we're going to talk to the people left holding the bag at any organization that's experiencing layoffs. We want to answer the question. Where do you go from here? Let's get into it. All right, Francis, to put this conversation in context, if we look at tech as an illustrative example here, what seems to be happening is that after a spike in layoffs in the last few years, some companies are continuing to shed workers in 2025 and rethink exactly who they're going to need to compete in an AI world. As we record this, meta just laid off about 5% of its workforce. Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, they've all announced job cuts while still hiring

for more specialized roles in AI and machine learning. I think a fair way to characterize the general mood is that even as the economic news is relevant, relatively good, at least here in the U.S., disruption and uncertainty in the business environment are still driving a fair amount of caution, and layoffs have almost been normalized at this point as a way to deal with our economic anxiety. You know, that normalization, I find that it really underestimates the consequences of repeated layoffs.

So what do you think companies are getting wrong about this calculus? Anytime a company has a layoff, they should do a deep dive and have the humility to understand where did I go wrong? Because for sure, a layoff is on the other side of you, senior executives. It's on the other side of your failure. So the first thing I think they're getting wrong is when they talk about it, they're not doing it with the humility and bit of shame around confessing a failure. They're not taking it personally enough. they're almost doing it with like a jocular, muscular energy. Like, look, we're tough enough to do this.

I'd like you to be humble enough to admit you've had a failure because it's the only way you're going to learn from your failure. Yeah, and just to underline that, because that's exactly where we're going next. I am sensing also the opposite in some organizations. Like, hey, look at this as a sign of strength. We're willing to inflict this kind of damage on people. I don't know if that's the kind of masculine energy some of these leaders are talking about,

but I think they are deeply misreading the situation. Please, the role model of any energy is not failure dressed up as strength. Please, please, please. Yeah, for sure this step is not being framed as failure. 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, you know, 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, force, 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. Yeah, a layoff is a failure to anticipate market trends. It's a failure to anticipate technology trends. It's not lost on me that the companies that say they want us to believe in their abilities to use AI in the future weren't able to use it to help anticipate what was going on today. So that is like deeply troubling to me and incongruous. But it's also a failure to manage performance.

Like if there are all these people that could be managed out now, well, what the heck were you doing with your day job over the last year? Why was this not caught? So it's just showing a ineffective management. It's failure to anticipate. It's that we weren't really doing our job that well. And it's that we take the collateral damage of humans that leave and the collateral damage of humans that stay. We take it. too lightly. So I'm really stuck on when we work with companies in crisis when they've inflicted harm, the ones that are a successful turnaround, they really

frame this the right way. And I have yet to see an organization recently frame this with any hope of making a positive move forward. But maybe that's the point of this episode. Maybe we can help if they if they want to. Okay. So let's get into what doing this well looks like. And I'd like to position us as coaching well-intentioned leaders

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. I would start with an apology. Some own it, some own it energy. Own it energy. It will be very difficult to listen to any of the words that come out of your mouth if you don't own it in the beginning. And so own what went wrong to lead us to this place. And your role in it, and the more sincere and the more specific, the more likely you are to repair the relationships that you have undoubtedly harmed. And I'm talking about the relationships within the order. because you've destabilized them. You've injected trauma, particularly if you have made a habit of this over the last couple of years. So I would start with an apology.

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 overconfidently predicted demand, which I think we saw. that happen during COVID, or the strategy that you assumed would work is not working. So one of the two things happened, and it's on you. And I love your advice to start with explicitly, unambiguously owning it. This, I made a mistake, and it was not free, both for the good people leaving and the good people staying. Exactly right. And then my subtext is, and AI can help people, use your own products. AI can help. Yeah. I would expect. that the organizations or the parts of organizations that have really digested AI would be able to anticipate these much better than the rest of us using the old-fashioned whoops?

Yeah, well, I think that bridges to the second point, which is, okay, own your historic mistake. Now, bring us into the present tense. What is the plan? Right. What is the plan to not make this mistake going forward. But what is the plan period? Because now you have a smaller workforce looking at all of its options for employment. So you got to make the case for staying and for really leaning in. So what's your plan? What's the update? What's the new strategy? What's the plan for better execution? What else besides letting people go is the company doing to position itself to win? And I think it's really important to do it in that kind of context because as our dear friend and colleague Tom DeLong always advises, all ambiguous information, just assume it's being interpreted negatively. So you have to fill in the story.

I think about that bumper sticker all the time. All ambiguous information is interpreted negatively. We have a negativity bias. So if you want us to think positively about something, you have to be crystal clear about it. Yeah, and I think optimism is really essential here, but it's hard to get to optimism with ambiguous information. So I think after we've apologized, we got to get to work on convincing people that we've got this. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Own it. We've got this, step two. And then I think the third step here is to describe the future in rigorous and optimistic terms. So give us a plan for the present. and then tell us what the payoff is if we roll up our sleeves and help you build the next phase of this organization. For instance, I'm struck by the research that Gallup does every year. And I think the latest data I saw was that only 15% of U.S. employees strongly agree that their organization's leadership makes them enthusiastic about the future. And in our experience, that number drops to single digits at best during a layoff. As you know, I'm gnaw off a limb competitive. If I was

competing against companies that were doing these layoffs, I'd be salivating. Because what do we have to do? We've got to explain what happened, own it, address the present moment, and then give an amazing plan going forward. Yeah. Tell us about the future in vivid and specific language. You know, tell us what it's going to feel like when we get there, give us a data-driven case for why we're likely to get there, and then repeat it over and over and over again. I mean, one of the things I'm struck by is, you know, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes energy that goes into preparing for a layoff, you know. Companies think about it for a long time. They think about how to do it. They think about, okay, how are we going to compensate very deeply well-intentioned.

they send the email, like the grim layoff email, and they dispatch people to go and execute this, and then they breathe a sigh of relief thinking that their work is done. No, they've guessed be done. That their like communications work is done. And they've only done the first step. There's this huge communication need now to tell us the plan, right, and tell us what's going to happen when we get there. because you have the whole rest of the workforce that you now have to bring along and get buy-in from. And I feel like the investment in that part of the challenge is just painfully, painfully, painfully, painfully short of the challenge.

If we were going to bring this to advice to the people who are staying, realize that your job is to place a narrative in the minds of people that they can. proudly and eagerly talk about in your absence. Yeah. And so you have to give us the rigorous and optimistic way forward in a language and with enough repetition that it sticks so that I can talk about it to other people and that those people understand it as if you said it to them. So in many ways, even though the whole organization, including you, dear leaders, has gone through a trauma, it's up to you now to get your can-do spirit. And what I want to advise is,

you might be done with layoffs because you were planning it for a long time. And so you might be tempted to have an exasperated sigh or an exasperated disposition. You're ready to move on. And you might be disappointed with others who aren't matching your cadence. You had months of a head start. Yeah. And so you've metabolized. it, you've absorbed the shock of this, you've gotten yourself in the mindset to move forward, but the people around you are just beginning to move through those phases of metabolizing this information. And their new reality. When we talk about the storytelling for bold change, and I think that's what this is, we summarize it with honor the past, create a clear and

compelling change mandate, that's here, and provide a rigorous and optimistic way forward. So if I I was going to think about what's the summary advice from storytelling, honor the past and rigor and optimism about the future. And I would make that as tight as possible. And to your point, if you're somewhere stuck in the middle of this hierarchy, if the pattern holds your senior leaders probably have not thought deeply and rigorously about how from a storytelling and from a support standpoint, point, they're going to bring the rest of the workforce along. And so what can you do within the circle of influence that you totally control? It might only be with your direct reports to block out, you know, these narrative steps with people. We've seen it make a huge difference. Because part of that first step of owning the past, owning the mistakes, owning where we are,

owning the costs for everyone leaving and staying, you're also making that discussable. You're bringing it out of the shadows, the individual pain that people are experiencing in their offices, and you're saying, yeah, no, this is collective pain. We're going to name it. We're going to work through it. And we're going to get to the other side together. And that's not a nice to have. High-performing teams, as we know and as influenced by the great Chris Ardress, high-performing teams, a very key characteristic they have compared to everyone else is that they have the courage to discuss the undiscussable. And layoffs can be a third rail.

One person will say to another, oh, don't talk about it. Our senior team doesn't like to hear about it. That is not what the senior team should be looking for in an organization. In fact, the opposite. Bring it up, reward people for bringing up, make sure that it is metabolized through everyone so that we can overperform. So this is not a grin and bear it moment. Yeah, what I find so hopeful about Arjuris' research on this,

And it really did fall out of a lifetime of work on identifying the variables that really explain high-performing teams. And then here's the part that really excites me. They're not even that good at it. You don't even have to be good at it. You just need, this is courage over competence. Courage over competence. Because sometimes, you know, I have those people pleasing side. And so I will pause in the face of conflict sometimes.

And I have to like steal myself for it. And I go back to this again and again because his research doesn't conclude if you're a UN-level conflict negotiator, discuss the indiscustible. But everybody else, this stuff is high stakes for you to touch. No, his point is really all of us need to get in there and find a way to make this stuff discussable. So that we right-size it. And it's not to feel good, right? This is a hardcore variable that defines high performance. Yeah. So now, Frances, I want to throw out a couple other things to think about if you're the one who has the ball in this complicated moment. One, I want to talk for a second about the employer value proposition because you may be in a situation where you can't offer stability or security. It may be a fast-moving situation.

You may not be able to guarantee that there won't be layoffs again. But I think there's an interesting question about what can you offer in those moments. When I've seen people do this really well, it's an opportunity to have a clear adult-to-adult conversation with the people around you that is roughly, I am not going to protect you from the truth here. I can't make any guarantees. But if you stay, right, and if we figure this out together, we are building a future where you will have a place. So this is a high risk, high reward situation. I'm not going to shield you from the risk part, but I want to have a very clear conversation about the reward. I love that because it's acknowledging we're in an risky environment, then we would expect compensation to be different than if we're in a safe environment.

We would expect that my need to give you experiences and education to all. augment all of the rest of it. Also, compensation, experiences, education, you got to dial all of those way up to make up for what you have dialed way down, which is security. 100%. And you may be an environment where comp can't be on the list today. But then make sure it's experiences and education. Make sure you have really gone after the other one. Yes. And let's talk about compensation tomorrow. Oh, yeah. Good. When we hit it out of the fucking park because your employees are all thinking about it. So you not talking about it is not helping you in any way. For instance, there's another category I want to make sure we really hit,

which is how to take care of yourself in an environment like this. Bringing a network of human beings through this, and I keep saying trauma, and I don't want to casually use that word, but it's okay. It really is often experienced as trauma for the people staying. Being responsible. responsible for those human beings, absorbing this experience and getting them to the other side, it takes an extraordinary amount of emotional energy. What do you personally need so that you can show up for work the next day in a sturdy place, being able to create an environment with the people around you can get back up and start to thrive again. It's a very personal question. And it's not optional. It's not indulgent. It is in the best interest of you, and it is the best interest of your

employer to figure that out really quickly and to solve for it. So two things come to mind. One is it's why we need a team so that no one of us is on 24-7, right? The great research by Leslie Perlow showed us that teams that share the 24-7 burden outperform teams where everyone is on 24-7. So let's share the 24-7. That's the first thing. The second thing is what we know from the trauma ward, and I do think it's the right word, so they have shorter shifts. And so you can do it, but understand that it's like you're metabolizing food and energy and stress at a very different rate. And so you've got to go off camera. You've got to go take timeouts at a much higher clip. If it were you, Ann Morris, the amount of food you would have to consume. I mean, you eat how many times a day now, you would just be eating non. I eat every three hours. And it would go down to 90 minutes for sure.

And it has when I've been in this situation of having to lead people through layoffs. Amy Cuddy calls this surge capacity when she talks about this challenge. So how do you solve for your own surge capacity? And it requires deep intention and deep care of yourself in order for you to be of service to the human beings around you. Thank you so much for listening. to this episode. Your participation helps us make great episodes like this one, so please keep reaching out. If you want to figure out any questions about your workplace problems together, send us a message. Email, call, text, fixable at ted.com, 234, fixable, that's 234, 349,

2253. We read and listen to every single message. Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris. And me, Frances Frye. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Ban Ban-Chang, Daniela Valoreso, and Roxanne Highlash. And our show was mixed by Louie at Storyard.