Leading Through Layoffs: A Masterclass with Esi Ansah

Full Transcript

(00:02)
Esi Ansah: Since we’re talking about common challenges and mistakes, let me start with a mistake. A lot of times HR becomes the face of change, especially when it’s negative or adverse change. A lot of CEOs will quickly sit, decide on what needs to be done, call in HR and say, all right, HR, we need you to implement. We’ve decided. Now you go figure it out and you communicate with the people, et cetera. Visibility of leaders is extremely important in a time like this. The last thing you want is HR feeling already over burdened, then probably handling all the pressure that comes from the team, now being the one who needs to explain and all that.

(00:52)
Darius Teter: Welcome to Grit & Growth from Stanford Graduate School of Business, the podcast where Africa and Asia’s intrepid entrepreneurs share their trials and triumphs with insights from Stanford faculty and global experts on how to tackle challenges and grow your business. I’m your host, Darius Teter, the executive director of Stanford Seed. Today we continue our focus on the most important resource in most businesses: your people. And we’re picking up where we left off in our last conversation with HR expert Rokhaya Ndiage to talk about those painful moments when you may need, or can only afford, fewer people. We put a lot of labels on this: downsizing, furloughs, layoffs, right sizing, workforce reductions, redundancies, passing out pink slips, giving the ax. Our new guest offers her perspective on navigating the emotional and strategic complexities of workforce reductions, providing a clear blueprint for leaders facing tough HR decisions, from managing team morale to ensuring your downsizing is data-driven.

(02:06)
Esi Ansah: My name is Esi Ansah and I’m here at Ashesi University. I’m the executive director for Center for Leadership. Generally, my background is in HR and consulting. The Center is set up to provide leadership development for executives across sectors, so private sector, public sector, academia, civil society. And we’re looking at transforming the way in which leaders are developed and the impact that leaders can make.

(02:39)
Darius Teter: And I understand you also have your own business, your own HR consulting company. Can you tell me just a little bit about that?

(02:47)
Esi Ansah: For the last 16 years, I’ve run a firm called Axis Human Capital Limited, and we do organizational development, we do recruitment and training, and just working with people in different ways, whether it’s training, support they need, et cetera. And it’s been exciting. I mean, for the last 16 years we’ve seen a lot of change in the market, so it’s lots of learning and that makes it easier for me to transition into this role and bring some of those lessons in.

(03:16)
Darius Teter: I’m interested to hear about some of these changes in society, but first I have my first Ghanaian tongue twister. So you’re Esi Ansah of Axis and Ashesi.

(03:23)
Esi Ansah: Okay, so yes, it’s Esi of Axis and Ashesi. Think of Ash …

(03:33)
Darius Teter: Ashesi. See, I already screwed it up.

(03:35)
Esi Ansah: OK, then.

(03:36)
Darius Teter: So, Esi Ansah of Axis and Ashesi. That is a tongue twister. Okay, well, I wanted to kick us off with something that – I do this just for fun, and it’s meant to provoke you. It’s a lightning round. True or false? Okay, so I’m going to make a statement and I want you to react as if we are at a cocktail party and I was mansplaining something to you next to the bar. It is best to phase your layoffs in stages to minimize the disruption to your company.

(04:06)
Esi Ansah: Can I get a middle ground?

(04:09)
Darius Teter: Yeah, of course.

(04:11)
Esi Ansah: Sometimes.

(04:12)
Darius Teter: Okay, two more words about that.

(04:15)
Esi Ansah: Context matters. And then being practical. Context. Practicality.

(04:21)
Darius Teter: Here in Silicon Valley, it’s been weird to watch Google and Twitter and a bunch of these companies every two months announcing another round of layoffs. Okay, second true or false question. After a round of layoffs, your remaining staff will be so grateful for their jobs that it will result in higher productivity and morale.

Esi Ansah: False.

Darius Teter: You hit the buzzer, you won. Okay. Small companies with less than 30 people generally don’t need HR policies, and they can’t afford to follow every government policy.

Esi Ansah: Very, very false.

Darius Teter: So, SMEs, sorry guys. You don’t get a free pass because you’re little.

Esi Ansah: Exactly.

Darius Teter: All right. Okay. Poor performers generally know who they are and they won’t be surprised to get laid off.

Esi Ansah: False.

Darius Teter: Okay, interesting. We’ll come back to that one too. The more that staff understand the challenges facing the company, the better it is for times of …

Esi Ansa: True.

Darius Teter: Okay, so that’s an easy one. True. One easy. Yeah. Okay. I threw that one in there just so it wouldn’t be all wrong. I wouldn’t sound like a complete idiot. Okay, so let’s go back a little bit here. I know I said this in our last episode, but it bears repeating here. Downsizing is one of the toughest challenges any leader can face. In regulated environments like unionized workplaces or government agencies, there’s a very structured process to follow. But what about when those structures aren’t in place? In small businesses, making these decisions can feel even more daunting. That’s why I turned to Esi with 15 years of HR consulting experience to uncover the most common pitfalls leaders encounter. And just as crucially, how to avoid them.

(06:15)
Esi Ansah: Let me structure that into mistakes we make before there’s a need to downsize and the mistakes we make when we’re downsizing.

(06:23)
Darius Teter: Okay.

(06:23)
Esi Ansah: Biggest common mistake is the lack of data documentation. It always comes back to bite you. Where you have performance is not documented. There’s no data gathered on operations, what goes on in the company, et cetera. And when you need to downsize, you need to justify every decision that you make. Which department stays intact, who goes home, who stays? And that is when people struggle because they don’t have the data. So the biggest mistake, even before downsizing becomes an option or the only way out, gathering data, documenting everything,

(07:03)
Darius Teter: Let me explore that with you. Having a track record of performance evaluation is useful if you have 10 people in marketing and you need to lose five of them. And so you want to lose the five that are the least effective. And then there’s sometimes where you just have a whole product line is going away so that team goes away. But I totally get it. And what I’ve noticed a lot is that when companies decide they want to lay somebody off, they try to build that record sort of frantically. They’ll say, oh, well, no. See, we had a meeting with them two weeks ago where we told them they were underperforming and that’s why we laid them off. So this is not something you can fix quickly. It’s something you need to be doing as a good practice anyway, right? Yes.

(07:46)
Esi Ansah: I mean, you have to build the system so that when you need the system to work for you, it will. The last minute shenanigans – that doesn’t work. Even more so for small companies. Big companies tend to have their systems in place. The data gathering is there, especially when they have investors. When you have an investor community or stakeholder, you’re doing regular reporting on your policies and systems, et cetera. Now, for SMEs, typically you may have a small board. They do check to see what’s going on in the company. But you may find that SMEs are so busy, caught up in the operational work, that they may not pause long enough to build the right systems, the policies in place. And so at the end of the day, they’re kind of left wanting when it’s time to make some of those decisions and the information is not there. So we are actually a higher risk group when you talk about SMEs for landing ourselves in situations where we don’t have enough data to justify the decisions we’re making about downsizing.

(08:55)
Darius Teter: Probably the hardest part of downsizing? Being honest, giving that tough feedback and documenting performance issues along the way. It’s something many leaders shy away from. In smaller companies, there’s often this assumption that managers already know who’s performing well and who isn’t. So when downsizing becomes necessary, they think they can make decisions without a lot of preparation, and that’s where things go wrong

(09:19)
Esi Ansah: When it comes to downsizing itself, is building a strong case for it. Now, if you’re running a company and perhaps on the surface, all seems well, your employees think, well, we might be struggling, but hey, we’re still getting paid. Our boss is still going on trips, and we see people coming in and maybe potential investors talking to us. So everything seems fine. So when you say, okay, we do have a crisis, we need to shut down, sometimes it shocks people because they didn’t see it coming, and they didn’t see it coming because perhaps the leader in that organization did not articulate it clearly enough to them or in the bid to avoid causing fear and panic, actually avoid telling people the full truth.

(10:13)
Darius Teter: It comes from a place of good intention, which is, I don’t want my best people to take off because they’re worried about their job security.

(10:20)
Esi Ansah: I’ve been through that twice. In 2016 and then in 2019, I had to let some people off the team. Now what I realized was the sense of urgency with which I wanted the team to move, et cetera, I wasn’t getting it. And so at the end of the year, we had a session, just very high-level figures, and then literally the light bulbs were going off in people’s heads because they could see, yes, we do make money. So they see the revenue come in, and then the side that they hardly ever see: expenditure. So now showing them that the bulk of our spending isn’t salaries. And so after that, when you start talking about, look, we need to take some cuts, and as a leader, when you ask, okay, guys, you’ve seen the picture, what do we do now? My leadership style is such that if somebody’s not performing, we sit down and we have a face-to-face on it.

(11:14)
If we have to sit down and talk about it three times, put in whatever interventions we will, and after that conversation, I’ll send you an email or – and document, we talked about A, B, C. So by the time you’re taking that role off your payroll, there’s no surprise. They’ve seen it coming. And when you make reference to, well see, we’ve had this conversation about A, B, C, it makes sense to them and it makes it easier. So the role of documentation, the role of being very intentional about it, and it may come from a very good place in terms of the decision to let people go so that the company can survive. That communication bit is often a challenge where we’re not open enough, we’re not transparent enough, because we don’t want to rock the boat.

(12:04)
Darius Teter: So part of communication is helping people understand the “why,” right?

(12:09)
We’ve done everything we can do. And I mean there’s a myriad of reasons, right? You discontinue a product, you lose a major customer, some external shock like a currency devaluation or new government. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, but still you need to be clear on the why. But what about the communication of the actual bad news? How do people do – what’s best practice? What are common mistakes when you’re actually having to convey that one terrible message? When I’ve seen it done well, there’s kind of a communication ladder. This is first, this is second, but talk to me a bit about communicating the bad news.

(12:44)
Esi Ansah: A few keywords. Data. Two, transparency, because they work in the company, they know what’s going on, so you can’t sugarcoat anything. Transparency. And then three, I’d say empathy and support. Now, I’ve seen companies that may not articulate the “why” well enough to themselves. And so when they’re communicating it, they struggle. They anticipate the pushback, especially where there are unions involved. Then they get worried, and because they themselves haven’t settled on how to communicate the “why,” it becomes a problem. One of the best things you can do, especially for SMEs, is: don’t wait till all the decisions have been made and then bam! You just release the information. You tell them, we need to close down this unit for this reason or that reason. Once you get a sense of whatever change, whether it’s internal or external, whatever change in your circumstances is driving the need for downsizing, start with just sending out a couple of feelers and soft communication where if, let’s say we’re in the month of March and we realize that our operations cannot carry on beyond August or July. Once we have that high-level discussion in March and we decide, you know what? We’re going to have to shut this unit down somewhere in April, we start letting them know, well, we’re reviewing how well things are going, et cetera. And then you have a plan, a comms plan. Of course, you’re planning the actual operational shifts and changes, but you have a comms plan that helps you to start, all right, so for the next two months, we’re going to update you so you know that there’s something coming. We’re working on it.

(14:35)
Darius Teter: Exactly. What not to do: cause panic. And then find that some of your strongest employees are updating their profiles on LinkedIn. So what’s a key strategy to avoid that?

(14:45)
Esi Ansah: There are different ways of handling it. I’ve seen situations where by the time you’re making this announcement, you’ve kind of had one-on-ones with people. And so without telling them you’re staying and so-and-so is going, or that unit is going, well, so far, the sales team for this product line seems quite secure, et cetera. And so we actually will need, in the new version of us, we’re actually going to need a lot more from this team, et cetera. And I have found it very helpful actually in my small company to talk to individuals and say, you know what? How are you feeling about all of this? You’ve heard me talk about changes coming, changes coming. I know you’re nervous. How are you processing this? How do you feel about this? You can see the, “Okay, good, I’m glad you asked. Now let’s talk. Well, I’m not too sure what’s going on.

(15:38)
I’m not too sure whether this is still viable for me and for your high performance.” That’s when you assure them: look, whatever happens, I’m going to need the kind of support and the expertise you bring to the table. So I need you to hang in there. We will communicate. If you’re going to be affected, we’ll let you know in good time, et cetera, et cetera, so relax. You want to stagger the communication, right? And you want to use data. That’s the key for me, so that it doesn’t feel and sound and come across as, well, the management team has decided that so-and-so units should go. And if, for example, you have some people who are quite litigant, they can now start poking in there and trying to create and make assumptions, create stories and theories about why it’s this particular department, why it’s that product line. And so in your communication, let them know what the plan is, okay? So we’re going to make changes in the next three months and on a monthly basis, we’re going to update you. If you haven’t heard anything from us, relax. And if you have any questions, please, please ask. And one of the things that’s very useful for managers to do when you tell people that – please speak up, if you have any concerns, ask questions. Don’t let it be just you telling them, let them experience it.

(17:00)
Darius Teter: I mean, there’s a balance here between what you can share and what pragmatically you really can’t share. And also when you open yourself up to questions, you will often get questions that you actually can’t answer because it’s too soon, right? So I think there’s a really delicate balance there, and I wonder if some of that is also driven by the policy and regulatory environment. There’s almost no legal recourse in the U.S., but I think it looks quite different in, for example, Ghana.

(17:28)
Esi Ansah: Yes, the sharing of information is not opening your books and pouring everything out, but the very high level, using data that just communicates the need for us to make this change. And then also, I mean, within the policy framework, like you’re saying, we have the Labor Act, which is very specific in terms of what you can and can’t do.

(17:54)
Darius Teter: While each country has its own specific labor laws and processes, there are some principles that apply nearly everywhere. In many regions, labor laws require notifying regulatory bodies when layoffs are planned, especially for large numbers of layoffs. And that provides a formal avenue for recourse outside of the courts. This type of structure exists globally, and it aims to ensure fairness and due process for both employers and employees.

(18:19)
Esi Ansah: And so going ahead, informing the chief labor officer, especially if you’re dealing with numbers, there’s a National Labor Commission and the National Labor Commission sits on or oversees a lot of labor. They serve as a regulatory, more of a space for recourse. And so sometimes a lot of SMEs do whatever they’re doing. And when employees are unhappy, an alternative to the courts or taking direct legal action is going to the Labor Commission. And there’s a chief labor officer who, the commissioner of the National Labor Commission, and they do have a structure in terms of informing them when you’re laying people off and how you need to go about it. Now, they don’t dictate, or the labor law doesn’t dictate, how many months of severance you have to give them, et cetera. It leaves that to negotiation. However, if you skip any of those loops and an unhappy employee, sometimes they may go home, talk to a spouse, talk to a family member, a friend, and then that person starts asking questions: “Oh, how many months for every year work? Did they pay you? How did they communicate it? Did they just tell you this morning?” And then people wake up to the reality that, “Hey, I don’t think I’m being treated fairly.” And then off they go, sometimes without coming back to you to say, look, I realize that you’ve skipped some steps here. They go straight to the Labor Commission and then once they call you in, that’s not pleasant.

(20:01)
Darius Teter: Does the Labor Commission have an enforcement mechanism? I mean, can they make you do things?

(20:05)
Esi Ansah: Yes, they can. So once the case comes, they will hear both parties, et cetera, and then they decide, okay, the company has been unfair in this regard and needs to pay the compensation and X, Y, Z. So it’s a shortcut as opposed to going the full legal, I’m taking somebody on, I’m going to court and all that.

(20:27)
Darius Teter: I’ve got a 50-person company. I know I have to lay off 15 people. I’ve done my homework. I’ve kept my performance management data. I’ve been communicating to the team at a very high level that our financial picture is deteriorating. So everyone in the company understands we’re all in this together. We are not profitable. There’s trouble coming. We have to figure out what to do. What do I communicate with this Labor Commission? And when?

(20:55)
Esi Ansah: So typically they tell you in the Labor Act no less than three months. So you go ahead and you let them know that I’m three months ahead, I am going to be laying people off, and we will be – the number of people who will be affected. And it’s really just informing them so they know. That way, when a case comes before them, it’s not the first time they’re hearing of it. And a lot of times, if let’s say there’s an internal settlement, you have two people you’re laying off, you have a conversation, and based on whatever performance or the role going off your books, typically there’s an agreement and people part ways. And for SMEs, one of the things that we can do is actually to help people. That’s the empathy and support part.

(21:49)
Darius Teter: Downsizing is always going to be hard, but Esi highlights three important strategies for handling it: support, transparency and communications. Supporting employees through their transition helps to reduce tensions, whether it’s career counseling or helping update their resume or their external profile. Transparency means being clear about the reasons why is this happening. And clear communications at the appropriate time minimize the shock factor. In large corporations, layoffs are often a swift and impersonal process. You’re called into a room. Your laptop and ID are taken. Your email account no longer works. You may even be unceremoniously escorted out of the building with barely enough time to grab your personal belongings. But what does this process look like for smaller businesses, especially in contexts like Ghana? How does downsizing unfold in a setting where relationships are often much more personal? I have to say the answer surprised me.

(22:50)
Esi Ansah: Don’t be surprised if you run an SME and you have skilled and unskilled labor, you have a good mix. Let’s presume you have a good mix. People who are literate, people who may not be, et cetera. Once there’s a layoff and people are told and people are affected, sometimes they go and they come back, and they come back. They may come with a family member, an older family member. In our context, you listen to the elders and so they may come back – you look surprised!

(23:18)
Darius Teter: They come back. Well, they come back and do what? Like, hi, I would like you to meet my mother or my uncle?

(23:25)
Esi Ansah: You may have, and actually in all fairness, that is reducing because companies are structuring things better, but it’s not unusual that they come back and they say, look, so-and-so has a sick mom and really needs this. Is there anything you can do? Is there maybe even a pay cut? Maybe just what can you do so that he or she doesn’t lose the job? So it’s not unusual for people to come back and try and negotiate, try and find out if there’s any way in which you can help them, et cetera. But generally, especially the more formal the context is, the more formal the organization is and the more structured, ideally you have policies in place. But once you have people falling off your system, most people would take whatever it is and then go and consult. That’s something I’ve seen happen, especially – I can think of about four SMEs, including my own, whether it’s one person or it’s three people or 10 people.

They take whatever you give to them, and they go and go and talk to family members, friends, lawyers, and then they may come back …

Darius Teter: Pastors?

Esi Ansah: Pastors, yes. And then they may come back and say, well, given that I’ve worked in here for X amount of years and I’ve done this and this and that, this compensation is not enough to just hold me together until I find something, and so is there anything we can do about it, et cetera. And I think a lot depends on how it’s communicated, the finality of it and the bid to provide support. It’s okay to let people know, look, this is standard for all the 12 people who are going home, and so there’s really nothing we can do about your packet. However, let’s sit down and let’s have a conversation and let’s see how we might support you beyond this stage. And that’s where the real support is. And depending on how you do it, people walk away very grateful, and they become ambassadors for the company.

(25:35)
Darius Teter: Here’s the critical takeaway. With clear policies and transparent communication, you minimize the need for messy post-layoff negotiations. Instead, you create a path where the focus shifts to supporting employees through their transition. When everyone knows what to expect and understands the reason behind each decision, it becomes less about questioning the process and more about helping people, and I mean actually helping people to move forward.

(26:01)
Esi Ansah: We ran a session for a company that was laying folks off, and we had a three-part exit program. We call it a career transition program, that those who wanted to go back to school, and in that case, I leveraged my being an academic to talk about, okay, why this master’s [degree]? What do you want to do with it? And providing that advisory support. And then there are those who want to move into another job. That’s where the CV writing, the LinkedIn profiles, the interview skills, negotiation skills come in handy. And then you have the third group of those who want to go off and start on their own, especially if they’re getting some amount that can help them to do that.

(26:43)
Darius Teter: Esi takes a very hands-on personal approach to helping laid off employees in their transition. Instead of a generic two-hour session with an outsource career coach, she sits down with them directly, sharing her own experience and helping them plan their next step, whether it’s consulting or starting their own small business or freelancing. Esi encourages starting small, even just building a freelance profile to test the waters. This approach gives employees the confidence to begin something new and manageable. But what about employees who haven’t performed well? How do you handle their requests for references if they didn’t actually meet expectations?

(27:20)
Esi Ansah: The first part is honest, painful, brutal, constructive feedback. And sometimes they also have things in the company that didn’t work for them, so we need to learn to listen because their criticism of the system can actually help us to refine things. And so they still have the conversations. Now, I’ve had people who’ve left and I’ve been very upfront with them. I will not write a referral for you. I will give you feedback on how you can improve so that you can actually go and fit somewhere. If you find a job, great. If somebody calls me and asks me, have I worked with you before? I’ll let them know, yes. If they ask for a reference, I may tell them, I’d rather you talk to so-and-so who works directly with them, or I’ll just give them the bare minimum. I usually go out of my way to do very thorough, detailed references where if the person has added value, I’m not shy about it, I let the world know. And so I may write you a reference and I’ll just let you know upfront that it will be very short. It was more like verifying that you’ve worked with me and I’m not going to tell them things that aren’t true. Once in a while it hits people and they realize, ah, and then because we do consistent feedback, there’s no surprise there.

(28:40)
Darius Teter: Esi’s approach to feedback is refreshingly direct even after employees leave. But what about the impact of layoffs on those who stay? They may feel guilt or a sense of loss, and they’re also going to wonder: Am I next? Or am I now expected to do the work of two people for the same pay? Rather than focusing solely on reassurance, Esi advocates for a blend of support and forward momentum. By forward momentum, she means providing a compelling initiative or vision for the firm that remaining employees can get behind. And yep, sometimes that might mean more work.

(29:13)
Esi Ansah: Helpful, but it’s done as a standalone. So when there’s a layoff, sometimes we bring in counselors, placement folks and the counselors to talk to people who are left. And we spend, sometimes, more time trying to manage, do damage control and let them know it’s a new day, you’ll be fine. Colleagues have gone, it’s time to focus, et cetera. Sometimes there’s too much of that and not enough of new projects and pilots that spark the interest and take their attention away from what has happened. So yes, the counseling support is great, but then stagger that such that people can just have some new initiative, some new, okay, we want to break into this market. I need your team to come up with something, give them something that actually invigorates them. And I think honest conversations, and especially if it’s company-wide, it’s a good time to have conversations around how do we add value to your experience with us, and how do you intend to add value to us as well? And I’ve had those kinds of conversations where back in the day I used to do that and I kind of lost it along the way, but whenever people joined, I had them write an essay and the essay was “Axis before and after me” and “Me before and after Axis.” When you have those kinds of reflective conversations, you push people to identify how they might add value and how the company might also add value to them, and it sets in motion. It’s a new season.

(30:52)
Darius Teter: See, that’s a really tough assignment. I mean, honest to God, if somebody said, Hey, Darius, what does Seed look like before and after you and what do you look like? I would be completely stumped, or I’d make up a bunch of BS that sounded good.

(31:06)
Esi Ansah: I think it forces people, and the narrative that goes along with that is the company should be better off because you’ve passed through it and you yourself, how do you want to grow? What do you want to gain out of this so that it’s mutually beneficial? And then keeping it quite simple, and it tells them, we’re here for you and you’re here for us. We’ve got to improve and you’ve got to improve as well.

(31:33)
Darius Teter: What is the role of the leader, the CEO, in this process versus head of HR or whatever they call that position?

(31:42)
Esi Ansah: Since we’re talking about common challenges and mistakes, let me start with a mistake.

(31:46)
A lot of times HR becomes the face of change, especially when it’s negative or adverse change. A lot of CEOs will quickly sit, decide on what needs to be done, call in HR, and they say, all right, HR, we need you to implement. Here’s the way forward, and you go figure it out. We’ve decided. Now you go figure it out and you communicate with the people, et cetera. Visibility of leaders is extremely important. In a time like this, the last thing you want is HR feeling already overburdened, then probably handling all the pressure that comes from the team, now being the one who needs to explain and all that. But when you have a CEO who would go around, walk the floor, talk to people, and where there’s anything that he can do, he does it and he makes it very visible and being very upfront where people ask questions, where he doesn’t have the answers, telling them, look, globally, our industry is in crisis, and so some of the things you’re asking me about, forecast, et cetera, we didn’t expect what’s happening and I can’t promise you, but what we can manage, what we can contain within our context, we’re going to do.

(33:02)
And so the visibility of the leader in a time like that is extremely important. Fielding questions and not running away, a leader needs to inspire in a time like that. Now, sometimes it’s very difficult when leaders have not been visible, they’ve been sitting on the outside, so whatever, you now come and now you try to engage and tell people it sounds like, oh, this is just spinning us a story, and it’s just sound bites.

(33:33)
Darius Teter: They haven’t been there, right? Oh, thanks for coming off the golf course to fire me.

Esi Ansah: Exactly.

Darius Teter: Gee, that’s so personal.

Esi Ansah: Exactly.

Darius Teter: Well, I mean, there’s been some really, there was this big, this, I forget the name of, it was a technology company here, and the CEO brought 600 people onto a Zoom call and fired them all over Zoom, and I think the CEO was told, Hey, you got to be present. Your leader has to be visible, but they completely, they didn’t read the second half of the memo. Like you said, don’t be visible only for bad news, and at the last moment. Be present and visible about the strategy, about the problems of the business. But what about for the bad day?

(34:13)
Esi Ansah: I think one of the things that we might not do enough of, sometimes, as leaders is listening. We show up so we can tell, we show up so we can give the new direction, and this is where we’re going, this is what we’re doing. All right, everybody get in line. Let’s do this. Sometimes getting close enough to ask questions – What’s going on? How are you processing all of this? What are some of the ways in which we can do things differently? The CEOs or the senior-most leader has a role to play in engaging people, and it doesn’t mean go in and talking to everybody. If you have a company of 80 people, you’re not going to spend all your time reaching everyone.

(34:55)
Darius Teter: Listening isn’t just about hearing, it’s about understanding the context behind every decision.

(35:03)
Esi Ansah: We have people who can’t explain, justify the decisions they’ve made, because they didn’t own it from within. Being able to explain why you think, oh, this client came and said this was their challenge, and we recommended training in this area and restructuring in that area. Well, justify why. Explain why this is your solution. It can’t be because you plugged in a prompt into some space and then it gave you a response. You need to let me know, well, the client is located near a market, a local market, and this, and this happens there, and for that reason, when we spoke to them, we went to their office. It wasn’t even what they said, but what we observed as we walked around, as we watched the body language, et cetera, then I know that you’re taking the client’s context into consideration,

(35:55)
Darius Teter: But clear direction isn’t enough. As I mentioned previously, employees may need a vision for what lies beyond the downsizing.

(36:02)
Esi Ansah: If you focus on the reason why you’re downsizing and you don’t focus on what you’re going to, what you’re evolving to do differently, you will have people who see the doom and gloom, and there’s really nothing that inspires them about the future because the vision is still the same, and we’re just letting people go, and we’ll carry on with business as usual. That’s dangerous. You lose more people that way.

(36:28)
Darius Teter: And once the vision is clear, the next step is inviting everyone to be a part of that journey.

(36:33)
Esi Ansah: Empowering people to come up with solutions, empower people to try things, and when you do have successes, celebrate those. Let people feel that, okay, whatever changes we’ve made, it’s actually making an impact. It’s making a difference, and we’re still alive. We’re still thriving. Sustaining the change is the biggest challenge and building a whole new culture around, okay, this is a new way of working, but let’s not get too comfortable because very soon we might have to pivot again and being ready to change. But once they’ve seen how you’ve involved them in the change process, then they are more willing and able and ready next time you say, Hey guys, change is coming.

(37:18)
Darius Teter: I appreciate Esi’s approach to the never easy challenge of downsizing. It’s not just another process to manage, but it’s a chance to lead with transparency and respect. It’s about genuinely supporting those who leave while creating clarity for those who stay and by building a vision that everyone can connect with or at least feel informed by. And don’t forget about your customers. Some of the people you let go were probably the face of your company with at least some customers. You need to make sure they understand what is happening in the business and underscore your commitment to keeping their business. I’d like to thank Esi for sharing her insights and experience. I hope that if you ever face the unhappy prospect of letting people go, that you find some strategies here for coming out of the other side both stronger as a business and respected as a leader. Erika Amoako-Agyei and VeAnne Virgin researched and developed content for this episode. Kendra Gladych is our production coordinator, and our executive producer is Tiffany Steeves, with writing and production from Nathan Tower and sound design and mixing by Ben Crannell at Lower Street Media. Until next time, I’m Darius Teter, and this has been Grit & Growth. Thank you for listening.