Companies fail at layoffs as the era of empathetic leadership ends

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Companies can't do layoffs right because they're trying to act like 'cool parents'

But the harshness of recent layoffs suggests that any managerial empathy workers gained during the depths of the pandemic was short-lived.

"We've come out of this season of, 'We're all in this together,' and, 'Let's talk about psychological safety,'" Muriel Maignan Wilkins, a cofounder of Paravis Partners, a C-suite-advisory company, told Insider. Now all bets are off. The cold and impersonal nature of these layoffs, combined with the sheer numbers of employees being cut, has sent workers reeling, she said, adding:"The need for empathy wasn't just a flash in the pan."There's long been"an employee desire to be treated as human, and the pandemic highlighted it even more," Wilkins said.

"Being a compassionate leader doesn't mean you fix things but that you bear witness to people's suffering," Wilkins said."If you're treating a layoff as an arm's length transaction — an email, not a conversation — you're not acknowledging what the other person is experiencing." Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, told Insider that companies' poorly managed layoffs pointed to a broader decline in good leadership. Managers need to be empathetic, she said, but they must also provide workers with guidance and direction and not shield them from economic realities. The tendency now, Taylor said, is to manage"like a cool parent" — one that fails to set boundaries in order to be loved.

 

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