The most obvious statement ever, right? Corporations are made up of people. Should be obvious.
(Warning, some folks are going to really dislike this post. But in my company, we tell people what they need to hear, even if it isn’t what they want to hear.)
Apparently not. Apparently people are replaceable and disposable. Allegedly, people can be replaced by AI and automation. Experience is overrated, and too expensive. People are a burden that brings down share prices with their payroll and benefits and all that human stuff.
So when a company is struggling, where do they make the cuts? People. But not all people. Some people. People the leadership think don’t have value. People that don’t produce revenue directly (except for the leadership of course, even if their decisions are why the company is up a creek bad enough to consider layoffs). People who may be older and experienced that are paid more for that experience because they can actually do the work and have client relationships built. Or they cancel internships and entry-level jobs because training people and developing talent isn’t important to the short term goals of the shareholders and executive bonuses.
Back in my 20s, I worked for a large Fortune 500 in lower management. What I realized very quickly was that the prevailing theory of leadership was pretty simple…the dead fish float to the top of the tank, while the fish who work hard to keep the algae under control stay at the bottom, working. Being competent didn’t mean getting ahead, it meant getting more work assigned by people who couldn’t actually do your job if you left (but they played a mean round of golf, apparently, so they were obviously leadership material).
If that last paragraph made you uncomfortable, you are probably in an executive leadership position. If it made sense, you probably actually do the work that drives value for your company. Sorry, not sorry. There are too many dead fish floating on top of the tanks these days, blocking the food and the sunlight and the filters, poisoning the folks working at the bottom to keep the tank running cleanly.
About now, some readers are saying I don’t understand how valuable executives are, and maybe even pointing out that there are good reasons for how much they get paid even when the company is laying off thousands of actual workers. Okay, then read this….
https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay/
Now, why has executive compensation grow so much compared to worker pay? Read this…
https://www.businessinsider.com/executives-pay-cuts-dont-avoid-prevent-layoffs-2024-2 and see what the executives are arguing justifies their ever-growing compensation packages.
Then there is this guy, whose leadership skills are so horrific he thought firing 900 people over Zoom was appropriate but is fighting tooth and nail to get his own job back, dragging the company though a costly legal battle. https://www.inc.com/esther-lian/fired-900-people-over-zoom-ousted-by-board-now-wants-back-in/91392557
It’s time to reassess what we are calling “leadership” and redefine what actually constitutes value in the people who make up our companies. If your company is losing revenue, start looking from the top down for issues instead of assuming it’s a problem with the payroll of the people who make your company run every day. The old saying that people leave because of bad management is an old saying that we still use for very good reasons.
