When a sunrise doesn't feel like a new beginning...
When a mass layoff is internally branded “sunrise,”
it raises an uncomfortable question: sunrise for whom?
A recent headline-making layoff initiative affecting 16,000 workers was reportedly called “Sunrise.” The name was likely meant to signal renewal. But for those leaving, it underscored how easily corporate language can drift from human experience. Layoffs may sometimes be necessary. Treating them as purely operational events is a leadership failure. The way organizations downsize tells employees -- and the market -- exactly who they are.
Businesses -- like the broader economy -- move through natural cycles of expansion and contraction. Strategies that once looked bright and full of promise sometimes fail to deliver. Timing shifts. Competitors innovate faster. Markets evolve in ways forecasts didn’t anticipate. Products that once felt indispensable quietly reach the end of their lifecycle.
Despite our best planning, organizations must occasionally resize to remain healthy and sustainable. Most leaders understand this reality — and employees do too. Workforce adjustments are not new, nor are they inherently reckless. They are part of the rhythm of business.
What concerns me are not the routine, carefully managed corrections that occur in a disciplined organization, but the large-scale disruptions that arise when growth accelerates beyond what market intelligence, operational readiness, or long-term sustainability can support. In an environment that rewards speed, scale, and headline growth, the pressure to expand quickly can outpace the guardrails that normally protect both the business and the people who power it.
Employees join organizations in good faith. They step away from stable roles to invest their talent in a shared vision. They bring pride, energy, and trust to the work. That trust carries an implicit expectation: that leadership has weighed the risks responsibly and is building something meant to last.
Situational awareness, driven by market and industry intelligence and conservative business practices, helps minimize the risk of unnecessary downsizing. It’s on us to take care not to ramp a business up too quickly, beyond what is realistic, feasible, or sustainable, only to turn around and pull the plug when analysts weigh in on what our finance, and marketing teams should have warned us about before we hire thousands of people.
Because, as business leaders, the buck ultimately stops with us. If we have traded on our reputations as leaders and our top-tier brand identities to attract “top talent,” only to push a mass number of these same people back out into the street again, when a business concept fails, it risks being perceived as a breach of trust if we failed to do our homework before we drove the business to achieve scale.
Adding insult to injury is the dehumanizing treatment that too often surfaces in high-profile ramp-up situations, leading to mass layoffs. Ironically, the larger the societal impact in terms of net additions to the unemployment rolls, the greater the risk of treating people like numbers on a spreadsheet rather than as human beings. In the worst scenarios, executives go so far as to blame the thousands of people they are laying off for the failure of the business venture, which they were invited to be a part of.
As human being, we owe our colleagues recognition that we have all been doing our best to make the business succeed, a transparent explanation of what we believe has gone wrong in our forecasting, an attitude of humility and genuine regret when aspirational plans don’t pan out — or at the very least, an approach to downsizing that recognizes the life-altering experience they are about to face.
Compassionate layoffs aren’t about being “soft.” They are a strategic leadership discipline that protects brand trust, employee engagement, and long-term organizational credibility. When done well, downsizing becomes a test of culture -- and a signal to the market about who you are as an employer.
5-Point Messaging Framework for Protecting your Brand
and Maintaining Trust During Downsizing
1) Scale Up Sensibly. Manage the number of layoffs that may be needed if the business fails to meet specified growth targets over time.
2) Scale Down Strategically. Allow time for staff to apply for other internal roles. Redeploy top talent to other parts of the organization where they are well-positioned to make an impact.
3) Cushion the Blow. Provide the maximum severance available, offer meaningful outplacement programs to departing employees, and support them in securing competitive new roles. Partner with other industry or area firms who may be willing to participate in ‘job fairs’ when you know they may be looking to grow a division or fill viable opportunities you can help broker.
4) Stay Respectful and Humble – keep people ‘whole’. Leaders should never place blame for a business failure on the shoulders of the talent they are laying off. The buck always stops with leadership. If there were performance issues, they should have been addressed well before a mass layoff was even considered.
5) Maximize Psychological Safety. When you support the people who are leaving to the best of your ability, when you are transparent about the reasons for and necessity of the change, and when you remain respectful of everyone involved, a funny thing happens.
People being laid off accept that what is happening is necessary, and while they don’t love it, they are better prepared to move on, while people who remain behind still trust you to be the kind of leader they want to follow, the kind of culture that they still want to be a part of, and the kind of brand they can still take pride in.
Compassion isn’t accidental. It’s operational. It requires deliberate planning, messaging discipline, and leadership rehearsal.
This is paragraph text. Click it or hit the Manage Text button to change the font, color, size, format, and more. To set up site-wide paragraph and title styles, go to Site Theme.
