CEO's LinkedIn crying selfie about layoffs met with backlash
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
People making the layoffs need to stop saying things like "I take responsibility. I made the choices. It was my fault". Saying this is an insult to the rest of the company and to the people being laid off. It's the company's responsibility. Hiring and firing is not a one-man show. If it is, then you're micromanaging. It also insults the people getting laid off because you're making it about you, as if you get to hire and fire anyone at anytime. If you truly take all the responsibility and blame, then set your compensation to $0 or much lower and keep as many employees as possible.
Apologize to the employees leaving as a company. Explain why. Tell them what happens next. Apologize again.
Don't insult them by making it about yourself.
The buck stops with the CEO.
Every hire/fire decision may not be made by them. (It should be at a smaller shop.) But the decision to lay off must be.
> Apologize to the employees leaving as a company. Explain why. Tell them what happens next. Apologize again.
Apologising to people you’re letting go is condescending. Doing so publicly is asinine. Telling them what happens next is…awkward? There is no next, at least not in a mutual context. You laid them off.
Messaging should focus on the people remaining. The CEO should speak to them and honestly acknowledge the mistakes they made that lead to a lay-off. Explain how they are over-correcting in response to those mistakes to safeguard the jobs of those who remain. Then get back to work.
Caveat: every culture is different. What’s expected in one is cringe worthy in another. This is what makes anything said publicly likely to backfire for all but the most anodyne firms.
> set your compensation to $0 or much lower and keep as many employees as possible
If you’re independently wealthy, sure. If not, you’re liable to freak everyone out. It says quite plainly your shop is at the red line.
This reads to me like: “Sorry we hired you in the first place, and now have to let you go. But (what happens next) we’ll give you 3 months of severance, which will hopefully soften the blow a bit.”
I pictured a regaled tale of overcome personal hardship, the modern “stiff upper lip, kid.”
If “what’s next” is within a mutual context, it’s fine.
The people getting laid off work for the company, not for the CEO. The CEO is also an employee of the company.
>Apologising to people you’re letting go is condescending.
"I want to apologize to the people leaving today. We failed our commitment to you as a company."
How is that condescending?
>Messaging should focus on the people remaining. The CEO should speak to them and honestly acknowledge the mistakes they made that lead to a lay-off. Explain how they are over-correcting in response to those mistakes to safeguard the jobs of those who remain. Then get back to work.
Part of softening the blow to the people remaining is treating the people leaving with respect and dignity. How does it look to the remaining employees if you treat the people leaving like shit?
This isn’t true! You didn’t commit to hiring them for life. If you wanted to, you could have contractually granted that. You didn’t. You hired them at will and are terminating them similarly. Lying to people is condescending.
The company has no place apologising. The CEO may, personally, though I think that should be limited to expressions of sympathy for what the laid off are going through.
Wrapping executive decisions in the veneer of the firm feels like deflection. Their peers didn’t make this call. You did, as CEO.
More importantly, this is a public corporation and finances are disclosed to some extent that outside parties may consider the profile of the company.
Jobs was independently wealthy. That’s fine. (And tax efficient.)
If the CEO isn’t, paying themselves zero puts them in a financially precarious position. That isn’t great for decision making. If done so with the aim of reducing layoffs, it could suggest operations close to a red line. (One person shouldn’t have a material effect on the cash cushion unless the CEO was making off like a bandit, in which case they’re not the type to do this anyway.)
What the CEO could do is cut their pay to the median, to what they need to survive or to the lowest employee’s pay. This could be part of the overcorrection if the mistake made was high pay. But it’s unlikely to save anyone’s job, and shouldn’t be positioned that way.
> this is a public corporation
The LinkedIn consultancy the crying CEO leads isn’t public.
No, he earned $1 a year. Guess how much he paid in income taxes.
For me personally that depends on what the apology is for. If I recently joined a company and was laid off I’d be pretty pissed for having put time and energy into getting up to speed. In that situation I’d appreciate an apology for wasting my time.
If it was more of a “I’m so sorry you will now die in the gutters because obviously you were just on our payroll as a charity”-apology, then yes, that would be condescending. :)
Have you heard of small businesses?
I agree with your point about it being insulting and making it about himself, but there's plenty of businesses out there where one person's decision making leads to lay offs, and that doesn't equate to micromanaging...
I'm not referring to small businesses. The layoff letters we see and read about on the internet are all from companies.
I've yet to read a layoff letter from a small business during this layoff cycle.
The crying CEO leads a twenty-something person firm, according to LinkedIn.
Too be honest almost all linkedin posts are ingenuine. It fathoms me how many people use their or their family diseases, suicides and misfortune to gain a bit of attention on LinkedIn (and ofc other social media). But he was just too much. At the same time I do think a female would have maybe gotten away with it.
What the heck is this? "A female"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOjm9g767xs
https://ksltv.com/499014/man-in-custody-after-leaving-hot-sa...
100% bang on. I've been through a layoff, it sucked but the company were straight-forward, didn't mince their words and didn't fuck around. If I had to sit through some spiel about how the manager or CEO felt, I would've been upset.
It reminded me of the scene when Jonah Hill's character in Moneyball learned how to tell a player they were cut/traded from their baseball team, and then had to actually do it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjhHrcyiQI)
Good. This is what a CEO should be doing. Maybe if it is successful the company will generate more revenue and prevent further layoffs.
I don't have a problem with him or his company profiting from this. But at the same time, I believe the backlash is well deserved.
I don’t know if it’s a trend but I’ve noticed it a lot more over the last several years
"Today I am making the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by about 18%, to ensure we stay healthy during this economic downturn. I want to walk you through why I am making this decision below, but first I want to start by taking accountability for how we got here. I am the CEO, and the buck stops with me."
https://blog.coinbase.com/a-message-from-coinbase-ceo-and-co...
It reminds me of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's self-centered opening paragraph in his layoff letter:
"Today I am making the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team by about 18%, to ensure we stay healthy during this economic downturn. I want to walk you through why I am making this decision below, but first I want to start by taking accountability for how we got here. I am the CEO, and the buck stops with me."
As a founder of a venture-backed startup with first-to-market tech that went through an accelerator in Palo Alto in the 2010s, Silicon Valley is basically entirely accurate. Actually tamer and more restrained than reality in many regards, at least anecdotally.
Then in 2022 a CEO posts a picture of himself crying for firing employees which might have been off taste and break the feel of realism in the show. I can kind of imagine Russ Hanneman posting a crying selfie then Gilfoyle and Dinesh making fun of it but that would still look like a caricature.
"Some of you will be loosing your jobs... in other news though I'm getting a promotion, so, every cloud..."
Since the pandemic though it’s really become a cesspit of virtue signalling and attention seeking. It’s just people and companies shouting over each other for likes.
I am convinced it’s not a worthwhile use of time to engage with it for more than say 10 minutes a week.
I closed my account and don’t miss it one iota.
I used to agree with you, but I’ve recently seen some extremely mediocre engineers land some big career opportunities simply because they had cultivated an image on LinkedIn that made them a minor “influencer”.
I did a lot of laughing at the vapid, daily platitudes they would post and the dissonance between the capabilities I saw at work vs what they often claimed LinkedIn. Now I’m wondering if I am the dummy.
Nowadays though I dont think I could force myself to post the vague platitudes and false positivity.
If people need or want to do it, my advice is to minimise time investment, ignore the feed and at least post with some authenticity.
If you stick to the networking and direct messaging there are sometimes useful opportunities and some of the people there are worth the connection. Some of the better recruiters also post real roles they have available with useful details.
If you see your home page feed for longer than it takes to click to somewhere else then you're probably doing it wrong.
In tech it seems to me like it has become more common with startup culture and with everything being focussed around customers and marketing. I can't imagine someone at Bell Labs would have tought of strong criticism as anything other than necessary.
But I just assumed it was the CEO version of that same social mechanism.
old.reddit.com/r/notliketheothergirls/
For individuals who think "any publicity is good publicity", it might have worked.
Any business can go viral at anytime easily. It doesn't mean it's good for business.
For example, if I owned an ice cream truck business, I could record myself throwing ice cream at my customers' face instead of handing it them. I'll go viral. But it doesn't mean it's good for business.
I wonder how people's reactions and intensities would differ if they knew we're talking about a small business basically the size of your local bakery.
(Don't get me wrong, I think this is pretty cringe, but I feel like many people are venting their feelings about big-tech CEOs onto this guy.)
If you are going to do this as a form of damage control, at least have someone else post a ‘surreptitious shot’ of the CEO crying after layoffs.
If someone on your company dies, that you knew personally, and you're making a statement about it, ok, maybe.
Otherwise, get a grip.
For me it's a fail on all fronts, lacking in authenticity, shallow attempt to gain empathy, marketing trick and sadly melodramatic, over sentimental.
Go out there, explain what the problem is, assume some degree of responsibility without saying things like 'it's all my fault', do not be overly familiar (i.e. 'we are all family!'), but don't be a jerk and get on with it.
That said, there's this weird wave of 'empathy realization' happening among the traditional white boomer business class with the diversity thing. It's as though they haven't thought about the issue before, and they're all having these personal 'moments' making these 'realizations' for the first time.
It's a bit like when you visit a country for the first time, you're overwhelmed by all of the details until the familiarity and 'reality' of it wipes away the romanicization.
I think a lot of those tears of empathy are actually 'real tears'. While might in a way be more authentic, it almost doubles the cringe factor because WTF kind of person is so 'moved' because they have a 'diversity program'. It's like those Hollywood movies where the white family adopts the black kid who 'does well' etc..
We need much, much more reasonable cynicism and satire in pop culture. SNL for example doesn't do it so much except for politics. I think too many studios are afraid of what big advertisers might think.
"I have two daughters and both of them at one time were babies and I held them and they cried on planes. It’s happened to me, I’ve had a baby on a plane. If you’re ever- This is how selfish people are. When you’re on a plane and you hear a baby crying, you think that’s happening to you.
You’re like, “Ugh, this is gonna ruin my flight! It’s gonna ruin it!” Well, look at the parent, ’cause that person is holding a crying baby on a plane, which means they’ve been traveling with a baby all day, which means they have a baby, okay? So their life isn’t even good. They don’t like anything. Their whole life is, ugh, Jesus! If there’s any joy for them, it’s that this is now bothering other people. “Yeah, you listen to this shit now!” Waah!"
And got press pickup from it. Everybody in the media (really, everybody on social media) should read Trust Me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It talks about how companies plant negative media stories about themselves for publicity (from the pov of someone who has done it).
So seeing how the CEO of a marketing company is so out of touch with reality, and created a PR disaster for his company, it is in no way good publicity.
While his company is small, I think at a larger tech startup’s scale there might be some things you could do to avoid being “forced” to lay people off:
- Avoid taking VC money. This will force you to be disciplined and responsible even when everyone is bullish, while also avoiding having to do layoffs/pay cuts/freezes/etc. during a bear market when profits dip. As long as the company remains viable, you can ride out the storm and not have to listen to investors and “advisors”.
- Somewhat related, don’t go on hiring sprees. If you poach someone from another company because your idea is one “rockstar” away from taking off (it always is, isn’t it?), that employee may no longer be able to rejoin the old company, and when laid off may resent having being convinced to join your company. Hire responsibly and sustainably, otherwise people’s lives will inevitably get ruined.
- Always set an example by not having extravagant salaries, bonuses, and perks for yourself and your leadership team.
- If you’re a business owner, dedicate a decent percentage of profits that flows back to employees. They are taking a risk by working for a startup, so they should get a share of the upside, as well.
- If money does become tight, “taking responsibility” means freezing/cutting your own salary first, then those of other executives, and so on. You won’t die if you have to forego the Benz for an Accord, but employees with a beat-up Civic will definitely feel the pain if you start with them.
- If worse comes to worst and you can’t avoid layoffs, doing all of the above will reduce resentment. Doing the layoffs in a humane, empathetic manner and offering counseling and job placement help is the right thing to do, and can leave a lasting impression on your former employees and the general public.
People that say this are quick to demand you to cry when THEY expect it. Doesn't have to do anything with empathy. Perhaps it is good for marketing indeed.
To be honest, if I were laid of and see my former boss crying about it I would have mixed feelings too.
For Facebook and Google the narrative is already set: "suddenly too much dead weight", trying to shame them 'lazy' employees...
Since it's driven by people who want to get hired (or hire) I guess it cannot be more authentic than a job interview.
LinkedIn feels like a social network full of teenagers who knows their parents monitor everything they do.
I saw this post around when it came out; I thought it was ridiculous, but not even top-5 cringe on LI for the day. How many of the people slamming this guy are authors of 10s or 100s of histrionic self-laudatory posts that try to deliver some big lesson? It's all gross. Don't act like this guy is uniquely terrible!
It reminds me of how Americans love to point to the outrageous actions of other countries as a way to whitewash our own sordid past...but I digress!