Accept Yourself

“Oh but plans can fall through as so often they do.”

The Story

It’s been hard to look at the news recently.  Layoffs in the U.S. tech sector have continued to pile up.  Employers both big and small have laid off staff in staggering quantities — some more publicly than others.   At the time of this writing (January 2023), over 100,000 have been laid off in the last 12 months.  It’s a sharp contrast to the heady tech sector hiring days of 2021 and early 2022, where many tech firms seemingly couldn’t add staff fast enough.

I was never a student of economics, but even I can see how the tea leaves have changed.  The low interest rates have gone up and stock prices have gone down.  Cutting back on hiring new employees is always the first “lever” to pull in an economic downturn.  And for many firms, this was what eventually came to pass in 2022 — “do the same — or more — with less.”

But many firms have seemingly jumped very quickly to laying off existing employees.  Many companies indicate that layoffs are “the last option” — but I find that hard to believe from some of the firms that have laid people off.  Sure, there are other ways to explain layoffs —

• A quick way to cull under-performers (i.e, the Jack Welch school of management).

• A business decision results in a pivot that renders a portion of the organization redundant.

But many firms that have participated in layoffs over the past 12 months have acknowledged that they grew too fast.  While that’s a helpful admission, one wonders why they didn’t realize it earlier.

These companies clearly made a significant planning error.  An error that impacts their bottom lines, the lives of those laid off, and the lives of those staying with the firm (“how do I know that I’m not next?”).

One also wonders why a non-insignificant percentage of the layoffs are impacting employees with many years of service at firms, instead of those “new employees” that were hired on less than a year ago.  There also seem to be some swathes of commonality in the areas of layoffs — diversity, equity, and inclusion seems to have been a popular area to deem no longer necessary.

Still, if you aggregate the number of hires and layoffs by major tech firms, the number of hires vastly outweighs the fires.  So even though the current headlines are about layoffs, the hiring spree of the last few years outweighs the number of people let go.

But for the people no longer employed, this math is still a hard pill to swallow.

The Lesson

I don’t have platitudes to offer those impacted by these layoffs.  There isn’t anything I can say that hasn’t already been said.  I’m not even going to try.

What I would like to do is look at these circumstances through the lens of change.  I’m thinking about the following…

Plans are meant to change.  Morrissey says as much above, as do these two quotes:

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — former U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower

”Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Mike Tyson

In life, we are taught to put together the perfect plan and execute it.  Only when we fail at that perfect plan do we start to understand that there is no such thing as a perfect plan.  We often fail to leave room for flexibility and adaptation.  Having options are critical to achieving some sort of satisfactory resolution or solution.

Just because a change hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean it never will.  Headlines of layoffs at one company make employees at other firms rightly think one of two things — “it’s never going to happen at my firm” and “it’s only a matter of time until it happens at my firm.”  Both of those things can be true in the moment.  I used to work at a firm that had never done layoffs.  It was a selling point to new employees.  That changed a few years after I left that employer, when the company cut hundreds of employees loose.  It damaged employee morale and trust, and made those who remained feel a lot like employees at those big tech firms are probably feeling right now.

The Smiths — “Accept Yourself”