When leaders send mixed messages

I’ve heard people ask, “Why do senior leadership tell us that we’re all family one month, then announce layoffs the next?”.

Here’s why:
1️⃣ They may wish that they could be transparent, but they can’t due to restrictions such as not being able to share sensitive info that could affect the company’s share price and/or potentially be seen as giving you an ‘insider lead’ (hello jail).
2️⃣ They may see you as family, but they may also have to make hard decisions for the company's good and maybe to save it.
3️⃣ They may want to tell you, but due to the pressure (from elsewhere) to keep employee engagement high, they may hold off.
4️⃣ They didn’t have a fully-informed comms person to advise them not to call everyone their ‘family’ if layoffs were on the horizon.

Am I saying I agree or disagree? No, it’s not my job in these situations to give a personal opinion.

It’s my job to guide, recommend, and support. If clients decide not to follow a recommendation *cough cough*, I ensure that mechanisms are in place to measure the result.

We can then use the data to show those decisions' impact and learn from them.

Recommending a plan of action if things don’t turn out the way they'd have liked (for example, unhappy retained employees, decreased employee engagement, reduced productivity, loss of talent, decreased profits and share price in the long term).

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