What Happens After The People Cull?
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A friend of mine works for a large multinational in the financial sector. Over recent years, he has lived through multiple rounds of layoffs, redundancies, and downsizing programs, he jokes that only the language changes each time. He is losing his hair on top and blames, half jokingly, the “swinging blade” that keeps coming closer. And yet, the next day, everyone is expected to carry on as if nothing has happened.
A recent Fast Company article by Jenny Fernandez and Kathryn Landis makes an important point: the real cost of layoffs is often felt not on the day people leave, but in the days and weeks that follow.
Teams experience a significant shift continue with fewer people. They lose informal networks, unwritten decision rules, institutional memory, and confidence. Work slows, risk tolerance drops, the remaining team waits for cues before acting.
We see this all the time in organisations moving through restructure, rupture, and rapid change.
That is because performance lives in what happens between people: in trust, repair, communication, emotional steadiness, and the ability to keep working together under pressure. Not just in job descriptions and org charts, or even KPIs.
This is where many leaders get stuck. They are expected to reassure the team, restore momentum, manage uncertainty, and keep delivery on track, while carrying their own distress and often the team’s as well. If we are not careful, we either distance ourselves emotionally or take the team’s pain fully on board. Neither response helps us lead well.
What effective leaders do instead is hold the space. They create enough safety for people to be honest. They contain anxiety without amplifying it. They help teams process what has happened without allowing the system to collapse into silence, blame, or exhaustion.
They repair ruptures early, protect cohesion, and create the conditions for trust to rebuild.
That is the heart of relational intelligence, and the foundation of my HOLD the SPACE program. Helping leaders connect, contain, and collaborate under strain, while managing the relational space where resilience and performance are built.
This matters in the lead-up to a people cull, durning the event, and in the immediate aftermath. How leaders communicate before change, how they manage ambiguity during it, and how they respond afterward all shape whether a team becomes cautious and compromised, or cohesive and capable.
That is why I also deliver a short, practical webinar called WHAT NOW? for leaders managing teams through the lead-up to, immediate aftermath of, and recovery from a people cull.
Because when people are hurting, leadership is about creating enough steadiness, clarity, and relational safety for people to keep moving. Probably one of those few times when we don’t need to have all the answers, just the compassion.
Click here if you want to have a conversation about WHAT NOW? If you have a pressing urgency around pending layoffs, and Hold The Space if you are concerned about leader burnout from this process.
