Let me start where it stings: your team’s trust isn’t built at the offsite with paintball and a three-course dinner. It isn’t built in that 8 a.m. Slack message either, the one with the little fire emoji and a motivational line recycled from LinkedIn. It’s built, or it’s wrecked, the day you have to let someone go the right way.
One specific day. The day you fire someone.
And I’m not talking about the person who leaves. I’m talking about the ones who stay. Because while you think you’re managing a departure, they’re doing something far more dangerous to you: they’re watching. They’re measuring how you treat the person you no longer need. And with that, in silence, they decide whether you’re someone to trust or a coward with a nice slide deck.
How trust is managed when you fire someone the right way
I’ve spent years in agency life. I’ve seen cutbacks, mergers, clients who walk on a Friday and leave three people without a project by Monday. And I learned something they don’t teach in leadership courses: the layoff isn’t the problem. Grown adults understand that a business sometimes has to cut. What they don’t understand, and never forgive, is the way it’s done.
There’s an idea from Fast Company that strikes me as one of the few sensible things ever written on this: progressive transparency. It sounds like a TED talk, I know. But the concept is simple and brutal. When there’s turbulence, you say three things. What you know. What you don’t know. And what’s coming.
Seems obvious. Almost nobody does it.
The norm is the opposite: dead silence for weeks, closed-door meetings everyone can see, and then the white lie. “Nothing’s going to happen, we’re solid.” Until it happens. And that’s when the culture you bragged about on your website goes straight down the drain, because your team just found out you lied to their faces with a smile. Workplace trust, broken like that, doesn’t get bought back with a bonus.
A white lie inside a company isn’t white. It’s a check you write today and pay back with interest the day it’s discovered.
The botched layoff: the cost nobody adds up
Let’s get into the trenches, where I live. A layoff can be done a thousand ways and almost all of them are bad. But there’s one winning combo I’ve watched repeat until it’s boring:
- Out of nowhere, without a single prior conversation to warn anyone.
- By email. Or worse: a calendar invite with no subject line at 5:45 p.m. on a Friday.
- Handed off to HR, so the person who made the call never has to look anyone in the eye.
- And the gold-standard classic: “it’s not you, it’s the situation.”
That line. “It’s not you, it’s the situation.” The same one you used at seventeen to dump someone without feeling bad. It worked so-so back then, by the way.
The problem with the combo isn’t that it’s ugly. It’s that it’s expensive. Brutally expensive. Because what nobody puts in the cost-cutting spreadsheet is what comes next.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes: you fire one person badly and within three months two or three more walk out on their own. Good people. People who weren’t on any list. People who cost a fortune to replace and who walk out the door with the know-how tucked under their arm.
Why do they leave? Because they ran the numbers. They saw how you treated the one who left and understood the real contract: here, the day you’re surplus, they treat you like a piece of furniture. And nobody with options on the market sticks around once they’ve seen that.
A botched layoff triggers more voluntary departures than the cutback itself. And those don’t make the press release.
The “we’re a family” fraud
And now the one that really gets under my skin. “We’re a family.”
They drop it in the interview, bake it into the company values, repeat it at the Christmas party with a drink in hand. “We’re a family here.” And it sounds lovely until the first bad quarter rolls in.
Let me tell you something: no family fires you over a rough quarter. Your mother doesn’t send you a registered letter because you had a bad year. Your brother doesn’t hand HR the job of telling you the “family unit” no longer requires your services.
A family is an unconditional commitment. A company is a conditional agreement, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem isn’t being a company. The problem is dressing up as a family to collect a family’s loyalty and then paying it back with a company’s cold shoulder.
Calling it a family does exactly one thing: it makes the betrayal hurt more. So that on the day of the layoff, on top of the blow, the person feels you played them for two years. That’s emotional manipulation with a paycheck attached.
If you want real loyalty, don’t ask for it with cheap metaphors. Earn it by treating people well, especially when they’re no longer useful to you. Right there, exactly there, is where people see who you are.
Firing someone right isn’t the problem: cowardice is
Let me wrap up, I tend to ramble.
Letting people go is legitimate. Sometimes it’s the only responsible thing you can do to save the rest of the ship. Nobody with half a brain crucifies you for making a hard call when the numbers don’t add up.
But there’s a world of difference between firing someone and firing them like a coward. The coward hides. Sends the email. Offloads the dirty work. Lies until the last day. Drops the “it’s the situation” line and heads off to lunch with a clear conscience.
The one with a spine sits down across from the person. Faces them. Explains the real why, no boilerplate. Helps where they can. And leaves the door open like a professional, not like someone who throws a person out the window and then brags about culture. There are decisions that, just like the ones that always demand a human in the room, can’t be handed off to an automated email.
Your team, trust me, doesn’t remember the layoff. Cutbacks happen, the market shifts, we’ve all watched clients and projects fall through. What your team remembers, and what decides whether they’ll follow you when things get ugly, is the cowardice or the courage with which you did it.
That’s the real evaluation of your leadership. And you don’t get to grade it. The ones left watching do.
So the next time it’s your turn, before you open Outlook and offload the dirty work, ask yourself something: when this is over, do I want a team that respects me or one that’s got my number?
You can’t have both at once. Firing someone right, with your face and the real reason out front, is the only version your team will ever remember in your favor.
P.S.: if your “culture” handbook has the word family in it more times than the word severance, you already know where to start cutting.
