A friend of mine works at a company that is going through layoffs right now. He isn't a manager, but as one of the people who has worked there the longest, he realized that he is in something of a leadership position even though he isn't a leader. He cares for the people he works with, and he wants to figure out how best to support them. In search of wisdom, he found your blog post:
What layoffs teach us about technical leadership
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In March I published a piece called How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership? It demonstrates (I hope) why production line metrics shouldn't be copied and pasted onto knowledge work.
We had lunch together a couple of weeks ago and I looked up your site while he told me about it. One thing I read in your post (and I think I was reading it accurately) was you acknowledging your limited perspective and experience. I interpreted it as an individual contributor who hasn't been involved in the discussions of layoffs, and thus, as an outside observer, you were making some cogent guesses about what's going on behind the scenes. Then, based on those guesses, you had some advice to share.
My long reply may be entirely unnecessary, but I wanted to write and let you know how spot-on you were. I tried to find some way to email you, but try as I might, I couldn't find a way to contact you through your website. Instead, your website led me to Twitter, which pointed me to Mastodon, which told me to reply in a thread to a post, so... here we are. I hope that's OK.
Layoffs happen because leadership fails. There's a lot I could unpack there, from vision and mission development and alignment, to strategy development, to recruiting, to defining and measuring success, to holding people accountable, to managing budgets... the unfortunate truth is that many people in leadership positions don't really know what they're doing, either because they're victims of the Peter Principle, or they are the type to fill a gap and take on a challenge because there's no one better to do it (and sadly, that doesn't magically confer on them the knowledge and experience needed to do the job).
I believe that no one wakes up in the morning wanting to do a lousy job or make a company/team worse, but I think many people wake up having no idea what they're doing. If I'm being honest, I'm in that camp a fair amount of the time.
But honesty keeps me humble, and combining honesty and humility keeps me talking, questioning, pushing, and learning. By my nature, I avoid accidental invisibility. And because I am so very aware of my own inadequacies, I see the brilliance in others and try to let others know.
"Give the credit, take the blame" is one of the maxims by which I lead. When I have seen leaders fail to the extent that they not only lose their jobs but also their teams are laid off, it's often because they're avoiding taking the blame. They hide the problems as much as they can and often overwork their teams, hoping they can catch up or make things good enough that the problems will subside and everyone will keep their jobs.
But taking the blame means publicly acknowledging the problem and failure, and that's the first step to fixing it. If we fix it, we can credit the people who fixed it, and with no more problems, maybe we all get to keep our jobs.
I'm writing this as I re-read your post, and I apologize that it's not a bit more structured and coherent. But I wrote the above while reading "Common Categories of Laid Off Individual Contributors." I want to jump down now to "Criterion 1: Opportunities for charges to have impact."
Here’s my spicy opinion: even if you think your charges have impactful work right now, you as a leader don’t ever get to rest on your laurels about this.
That sentence was super encouraging to me. One of the things I struggle with as a manager is celebrating what we have accomplished. I'm always focused on where we need to be at least 2-3 years from now, and when my team delivers something, I've already moved on to what we need to be working on next. I view that as an important part of my job, but it's not something that I hear much about from others. Most people I know in leadership are pretty reactive and very focused on right now and maybe a month or two out, 6 months at the most.
An employee pointed out my weakness here a few years ago, and I've been working on it since then. I want my employees to know how valuable and awesome their work is. But as I told him at the time, part of our roles was to have different time horizons. His focus was on the shorter term, and mine on the longer term, so that we could be successful long-term. It's important to retain that focus while celebrating today's successes and ensuring everyone at the company knows who is delivering.
I get it; performance conversations are uncomfy. They’re also literally part of the leadership job.
Preach. In my first Big Management Position (15 years ago now, sheesh), I hated how annual reviews worked. There was a big once-a-year process and forms to fill out, and everyone was filled with dread at what the outcome might be. You never knew what was coming.
I decided to change that for my team and implemented a monthly check-in, a bi-annual review, and then we had the university-mandated annual review.
Monthly: What can I, as your manager, do to help you be more effective? What can I unblock for you? What do you need that you're not currently getting?
Bi-annual: Let's go over your annual review form and the subjective and objective measures of success that we agreed on for the year. I'm going to talk about everything you're awesome at. Here are your strengths, and I value them. You're doing amazing in these areas.
Annual: Here's what we accomplished this year. I'd like to see you grow in these other areas next year.
It transformed my team. Since then, I've taken a strengths-based approach and never regretted it. Performance conversations are way more comfy when you can praise your team members, and leveraging and developing people's strengths typically means better performance so you don't ever have to have those uncomfy conversations.
But they do still arise. There will be conflicts between people, or someone will start slacking off. Again, it's rare that a person has woken up in the morning and decided to tank their team's performance. The problem is typically either a systems issue, something happening outside of work, or a conflict with the team. Systems are typically easy to fix. Something outside of work can either be outlasted or it can't, and you have to be honest with your employee about the expectations of the job and their delivery. If there's an unresolvable conflict, again, it comes down to the expectations of the job.
As a manager, I don't really fire people. They fire themselves by not meeting the clearly expressed and agreed-upon requirements of the job and the company. And if they choose to fire themselves (even if I'm the one who has to say the words out loud), then I won't feel too bad about it. Because if we kept them, then the team gets drug down, we do worse work, and we're setting ourselves up to be cut.
See? Layoffs all come back to leadership. If we let people who hurt our performance or culture (which hurts performance) stay, then we're failing as leaders, and it's not going to end well for anybody. The best-case scenario here is that the leader is fired, and someone else is brought in who can get the team back on track.
This one makes me angry. An IC can do great work on an impactful problem, and then get canned because the vice president making the cut list didn’t realize they were doing it. We live in hell.
This one's so hard, and more and more, I don't think it can be avoided. When I see a VP or C-level exec make sweeping cuts, and we lament that someone was let go because that VP didn't know how valuable that person was, the truth is that the VP not only didn't do the work to find out, but they were never going to. Even if you were crowing and throwing parades for an IC, if they fell within whatever bands were set, they'd be cut because the people cutting weren't paying attention.
In that instance, the VP sucks. They're a bad leader. And a bad leader isn't going to carefully address the system of the organization and be thoughtful and careful about downsizing. At best, they'll set a budget target based on some spreadsheets and tell their directors and middle-managers to decide who to cut to meet the budgetary goal, which isn't the worst approach. Those managers at least know their teams. But more often these days, the managers don't even know their people are being let go, or the manager is being cut at the same time, and it's all a numbers game.
One of the words I've heard a lot over the last year is that people within a certain job/title are "fungible." As an engineer, you know how absurd that is; you can't take a React dev and tell them to go build a back-end system in the next week. And yet, to a certain type of leader, a software engineer is a software engineer. Or a recruiter is a recruiter. Cut 30% and keep the rest, and use something as a litmus test to determine who the 30% are.
You know what I think leads to this approach? A fear of conflict. The hypothetical VP, in this case, doesn't want to do the hard work of figuring out who to cut and having to weigh people's lives. Nor do they want to get into the weeds to think about what skills are needed within the short- vs. near-term, and they don't want to have the conversations and debates needed to truly map out the best of some terrible choices. So instead, they make it "objective" and let "data" decide.
As someone who has looked at a lot of project manager's resource plans and skill matrices, I can tell you, the data is usually pretty bad. Ditto for HR systems.
I just re-read this section while editing, and it's not encouraging. I'm sorry for that. Sometimes, people suck and we just have to do the best we can to support each other and maintain our own mental health.
I know the picture I’ve painted here looks bleak. We want more agency than this analysis suggests we have. Not all the tasks I’ve prescribed sound like fun. And the reward for doing the tasks won’t exactly save humanity. Often, it won’t even set us up to retire early on an island somewhere.
Oh Chelsea Troy, have hope! There are nerds in the world like me who actually do think these tasks are fun. I love leading, growing, and developing teams. And while it may not save all of humanity, I believe that we can make the world a little better.
I subscribe to deontology, which is an ethical system that says (in a horrible summarization of it) the end does not justify the means, but instead the means must be just. Or, to put it as Brandon Sanderson does in The Way of Kings, "Journey before destination." I've been working in tech for over 20 years, and I am extremely aware that even just 200 years from now, no one will remember my name or anything I built. The end of my work is actually all irrelevant and will pass away. The only thing that matters is how we treat people along the way, and how we treat them will influence how they treat others. If we love others and pour into them, that will make the world a better place. And we can do that as engineering managers, product managers, coaches, and teammates.
We have agency in how we represent ourselves and treat others. In my experience, doing it well won't save you from a layoff (in early 2022, I switched companies because my job was effectively given to someone who lived closer to HQ, and then in late 2022, I was laid off from that company I had just joined). Still, it's better than not doing it. And becoming the type of person who leads well opens a lot of doors.
I've rambled at you enough. Thanks for blogging, and I hope there was something encouraging here for you. Thanks for being an encouragement to me and my friend.
