Being a Servant Leader when "It's Nothing Personal"

A year ago, I was laid off from a company that I was deeply dedicated to. I was ejected from a team made up of people I cared about, by leaders I trusted (even though we didn't always agree). It was devastating, even when I was able to find ironic optimism in the situation.

I've been very lucky -- I quickly found work (in a market most of you know is pretty rough) and I landed in a team full of friendly and supportive people who appreciate my contributions. I've had spectacular support from family, friends, and peers who genuinely care about me. They've listened to my bellyaching, they've offered useful advice, they've taken time out of their lives to help me get back on my feet. Friends: if you're reading this, I cannot express how much you've helped me in the last year.

After the initial jostling and with all of that luck and excellent support, I found myself sleeping better, exercising regularly, and losing weight. I'm not perpetually stressed, burnt out, or feeling like I'm fighting daily to keep my job. By almost every metric, my life is better than it was a year ago. Yet, I still have these days where I'm hounded by invasive thoughts about the layoff, where I get stuck in a loop feeling like I just don't fit into the world of tech businesses anymore, that it was my fault, that I didn't try hard enough, or wasn't smart enough; heck, pick any useless self-defeating thought, and I've probably had it.

That's absurd, isn't it? by every objective measure, I should feel great. The place where I've landed seems to think I fit in fine, I feel valued, and I've got plenty of evidence indicating that I'm a pretty resilient person ... so why has the experience of changing jobs (without deciding to change jobs) been so hard for me to shake?

Well. I often process by writing, and you wouldn't be seeing this if I hadn't arrived at some kind of answer. You'll never see the earlier drafts that vacillated between "manufactured saccharine platitudes" and "just complaining, but poetically" because those were just me screaming into the void, begging for catharsis.

You'll see this essay because as I wrote to myself, I realized that most of my stress about this unchangeable thing in the past flows from a subconscious realization that there is a fundamental incompatibility between my core understanding of what it means to be a member of a team, and the leadership principles that so many tech companies have aggressively adopted in recent years. My strife, and this sense of unresolved, festering inadequacy, stem from this need to understand whether there was something more I could have done to save myself and my peers -- but I don't think there ever was, and now I think I know why.

Don't worry; In the interest of authenticity, I kept a little bit of the complaining.

Bring Your Authentic Self to Work

Management discourse bats this phrase around a lot, and if you've spent more than a minute working in a corporate environment, I'm sure that you've heard it. It's well-intentioned: it embodies the idea that teams work better when everyone can be honest and vulnerable with each other. People appreciate managers who can admit to fault and work to better themselves; everyone feels more valuable and more like a part of something greater when they don't spend all day watching their backs. It's win-win for people and businesses: we're are all happier, and our teams perform better.

Encouraging authenticity isn't always easy, though. Allowing teams to show up with their authentic selves needs to be more than just a platitude; it takes work. You need both explicit and implicit (cultural) limits to what you expect from a person's authenticity, and you need to anticipate some conflict and be prepared to use that conflict for productive, growth-oriented discussions. Explicitly, authenticity isn't a free pass to harass or intimidate your co-workers, and implicitly, healthy authenticity means that sometimes, everyone will face a situation where they'll need to adjust their behavior to mesh better with the team. That's the value: it's sometimes a little harder in the short term for everyone to both express and permit authenticity (in themselves or others), but in the long run, we all tend to feel more valued and accepted, and we tend to work more effectively.

I strive to be a people-oriented teammate and leader, so obviously, I'm on board with bringing my authentic self to work. Given that, I was happy for a long time at my previous company because I felt like the culture encouraged authenticity.

But what if your organization suddenly shifts away from prioritizing the health of teams? What if, instead of thinking about growing and building your work community, scaling your systems, or improving the environment ... your shareholders or corporate leaders have decided that short-term P&L is the only meaningful metric? I've seen this happen widely across the tech sector in the last 18-24 months; teams have been eliminated so that companies can chase the AI dragon; expensive knowledge-bearers have been replaced with offshore hires; R&D and improvement projects have been shelved in favor of squeezing ever-tighter margins out of existing products.

Suppose that growth and long-term sustainability are something your company, business sector, or industry simply doesn't value anymore. Does it still make sense to bring your authentic self to work?

It depends a lot on who you are, I think. If you're authentically the sort of person who speaks up when they see something wrong, who believes that the health of teams and people is paramount, who works diligently behind the scenes to multiply the efforts of others, or who will take a short-term loss in exchange for a long-term upside, you're likely to find yourself in a bad situation.

The Lifeboat

An organization chasing short-term wins will soon take a frank look at its outflowing and inflowing cash, and inevitably, they'll notice something like: "people are our most expensive asset." (Notice the subtle shift from 'most valuable' to 'most expensive'). If your company is chasing margins and has deprioritized all of its systemic improvement projects, it's a safe bet that they're about to start pulling the tarps off of the lifeboats .

It's debatable whether layoffs work to improve the fortunes of a company, but this isn't about whether they make sense. Change is happening, so buckle up, buttercup: your salary is a cost center.

I can't speak to how every team handles this sort of thing (and I can only guess about what happened behind the scenes leading up to my layoff). However, I've seen something like a "lifeboat exercise" often enough to know that it's somewhat common, particularly in teams that are either facing an existential crisis or who are manufacturing some kind of crisis to force cost-cutting. In the best case, managers will be collected into a room and told "Imagine you can only keep x percentage of your team." It isn't stack ranking! We don't stack rank here. We just need you to decide who gets to stay on the lifeboat. See, we're focused on saving as many people as possible.

These exercises may not always be a direct precursor to a layoff ... but they do introduce an immediate and abrupt cultural shift in management. If a manager chooses to defend a team member's value, they go against the grain and paint themselves as an outlier. The exercise reframes management decisions into an abstract utilitarian problem: you must cast away some of your team to save the rest ... and you must do it in front of your peers, under pressure. It's much easier, at an individual level, to dehumanize and ignore the fact that these expensive assets are human beings.

So, if you're a manager with principles favoring team health over personal career growth, you're already at a disadvantage in the lifeboat exercise. Maybe there's another, higher-level lifeboat exercise happening, where your bosses will decide whether you'll be thrown overboard? If that's true, do you really want to be the manager who stands up in front of everyone and says "Sure, maybe keeping everyone onboard is a little riskier, but are we the sort of leaders who will sacrifice people to save ourselves?" Meanwhile, if you're an individual contributor who gets noticed for speaking up when things aren't right, or who vociferously advocates for systemic improvements, you're at risk in this lifeboat exercise -- who wants to keep a whiner around? Your only hope is that some manager will stick their neck out to defend you, to maybe point out that the 'complainer' is also suggesting solutions.

In the worst cases, line- and middle- managers are cut out entirely; executives decide based on some abstract metrics they've invented. Top performers identified by that metric get to stay; everyone else gets cast off of the lifeboat. Remember: we're saving people here! Never forget that.

This latter approach is especially bad for individuals who focus on improving team dynamics: their wins aren't their own, by design. Some metrics attempt to correct for this: if you've seen a layoff that only includes individual contributors and doesn't touch managers, the leaders conducting the lifeboat exercise probably recognize, at least in the abstract, that multiplier and indirect contributions exist -- but good luck to you if you're a team-multiplier who isn't in a literal management position.

Regardless: once the lifeboats get dusted off, your culture has shifted, abruptly and dramatically. Maybe the layoff doesn't come, but the damage (or boon to the bottom line, I suppose, depending on your perspective) has already happened. You've sorted your workforce into the people you want to keep, and the people you'll toss overboard to feed the sharks ... and you've identified the managers who will go with the flow, and which ones will make it hard for you to throw people overboard. The impact on people and your culture will be felt.

It's ok though ... after all, it's Just Business, right? There aren't really sharks in the water, and in business...

It's Nothing Personal

Ok look. This is the part of the essay where I got angry. This is the part with the hopefully cathartic complaining that I promised you earlier, plus one important request to any leader conducting a layoff.

"It isn't personal."

Please don't ever say this to someone when you're delivering devastating news.

That individual knows full well that it isn't personal to you.

We know you don't care about us as individuals (at least, not as much as you care about your bottom line in the coming quarter, or protecting your own standing in the organization). We know that you've made some "difficult decision" to "eliminate [our] position" but that no part of that decision prioritized our value as a real, complex person. We know that you frame this as impersonal intentionally because that makes it easier for you to make that difficult decision to eliminate our position.

But listen. It is absolutely and deeply personal to the individual you're firing. They're thinking about all of the sleepless nights they've burned keeping rickety systems from toppling over; they're remembering all of the times they've sacrificed their personal and family time, their energy, and their mental health for the outcomes of this team; they're feeling stupid and used as they recall their hope that someday their sacrifices would mean something. They know that you sat in a room with a bunch of other leaders coming to this "difficult decision," and that nobody spoke up for them, that nobody stood and said: "This person matters; this human being is valuable, our organization is better with this person here." It's deeply personal to know that as an individual who cared about their team, you weren't even valued enough to have the news delivered by someone you've worked with for most of a decade, that the task of discarding you has been fobbed off to some new exec.

Conversely ... we in the workforce know that these things happen. We know that the lurching Frankenstein monster we call Shareholder Value dominates all reason in the boardroom. Again, it's debatable whether or not layoffs make sense even given the Shareholder Value calculus... and certainly, we don't believe that business leaders like doing them. But please, I beg of you: don't pile on during this terrible moment to remind us that we're just cogs in your relentlessly grinding money machine. You don't care if it's personal to us; "It isn't personal" is something you tell yourself because derivative concepts like "business value" let you launder your guilt.

We see it. We see you dodging any recognition of the real human costs of your layoff. It hurts us directly, and it diminishes you as a leader.

Deep breath. Where does that leave us?

Does my Authentic Self Even Belong Here?

I'm outspoken. I try not to polish my own reputation (though, I'm sure you've noticed I'm not immune to hubris). I use data, I make lateral, non-obvious conclusions that sometimes set me apart from other leaders and contributors, and I relentlessly advocate for systems improvement. I advocate for my peers, I strive to celebrate collective wins, and to use failures as learning opportunities. I do these things even when they're hard and thankless because I think they're important.

I rank my priorities at work thusly:

1. The growth and well-being of my immediate team, first and foremost
2. The success of my organization, following closely behind
3. My own personal career growth and development, with whatever energy remains (but remember, my development provides leverage to points 1 & 2, so I try not to neglect it.)

In a healthy organization, I firmly believe that these priorities lead to success for everyone. Focusing on the health of my team first makes sense because that's where I can have the highest leverage to affect positive outcomes in the organization. Putting the needs of the organization or the culture at large ahead of my own is indirectly beneficial to me personally in the long run -- the rising tide lifts all ships, as they say -- and even if it doesn't benefit me personally, placing my benefit before that of the team or the organization is actively harmful to everyone involved.

I constantly strive to live up to the ideal of servant leadership -- the idea that a leader's highest purpose is to enrich their teams and their cultures. Servant leaders wholeheartedly believe in the value of bringing your authentic self to work ... and I believe they feel particularly betrayed when their cultures descend into lifeboat-deballasting nihilism.

That all sounds a fair bit more self-aggrandizing than I'd hoped. I promise -- all of the above is my platonic ideal; I for sure don't always achieve it. But even assuming an imperfect application of those values, where does it leave me and people like me? Is there a place for the servant leader in organizations that value short-term wins and personal accomplishment above all else? Is there a place for those of us who make a point of measuring our success by watching to see if those we serve are healthier, wiser, and more autonomous ... instead of tallying up our direct contributions?

What does that mean for me and my angst about a layoff that's a year in the past and which ultimately improved my life?

I've realized that I assume uncritically that other people strive to lead like I do. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, I've taken it for granted that people reach leadership positions because they've sacrificed for the well-being of their teams and organizations. That they've become a manager or VP or whatever because they're seen as a force multiplier or standard-bearer who emphasizes and grows the unique talents of those they lead.

I've swallowed the platitudes and believed in the value of the authentic self and the servant leader. Then, because I've allowed myself this steadfast belief in the good of people and the virtue of authentic leaders, I've been shocked and hurt when, faced with a crisis, those people have revealed themselves as the antithesis of what I believe a leader should be.

Importantly, despite my best efforts, I take it very personally. I'm outrageously offended by it; I'm appalled when I see self-interest and leverage combine so that people are treated like things and managed like capital. I think that offense, that pain of knowing people like this exist, and that we elevate them and permit them to debase us all, is where this lingering intrusive angst about my layoff arises.

That's also where my doubts come from. Do I matter? Do people like me have a place in a world that values only the most soulless (but most easily countable) victories?

I think the world will remind me that mine is the path of pain. That it's easiest to tune out, ride the wave, go with the flow; do what it takes to get through the day with minimum hassle.

I can't help being me, though; and frankly, I like who I am. I have no desire to change core values about what it means to be a member of and leader in a community. My subconscious has been telling me for a year that I can't suppress my authentic values for the sake of comfort. My angry superego has been throwing a tantrum, demanding that I recognize this:

My leaders failed me, not the other way around.

I belong. I'm valuable ... but my value is inconvenient to leaders who fail to serve their teams. This seems like an important thing to realize, even if it's taken a while to get to a point where it feels true. It does feel like a weight is lifting though, so maybe this is the (admittedly obvious) revelation I've been seeking. I guess time will tell.

What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the nature of what it means to be a leader, and about the struggles and compromises leaders must make in the face of the challenges their teams face. Do you have a burning desire to tell me that I'm hopelessly naive, overly idealistic, or that I'll simply never make it until I can tune out the part of my brain that prioritizes people first?

Let me hear it, Reader.