She sat down in our coaching session carrying something heavy.
I could tell before she said a word. Sandra, (not her real name) had only been in her leadership role for a few months, a role, she'd admitted early on, that her predecessor had quietly avoided taking seriously. She'd inherited a team with unclear expectations, low accountability, and the kind of low-grade dysfunction that builds up over years of being managed by someone who'd checked out. She had walked in and started changing things. Setting standards. Having the honest conversations her predecessor never had. And slowly, it was working. Her team was responding. One team member had even commented on how different things felt - how they finally knew where they stood.
And then the numbers came in.
The company was forecasting a significant loss at year-end. Costs were exceeding revenue. The message from leadership was clear: the team needed to shrink. Out of 40 people, 1/3 would have to go.
She looked at me and said, quietly, "I don't want to do this to them."
Lesson one: when a leader's first instinct is to protect her people, that instinct is worth listening to.
It would have been simple, in that moment, to treat the directive as an order. To open a spreadsheet, rank the team by performance, and start working through the list. That's what many leaders do, not because they're callous, but because it feels like the only path available. The decision has been made upstairs. The numbers don't lie. People have to go.
But Sandra kept asking a question that I think more leaders need to ask before they reach for that spreadsheet.
"Have we actually explored every other option?"
Because here is the truth about mass redundancies that rarely makes it into the boardroom conversation: they are expensive. Not just emotionally, but also financially. The retrenchment process itself carries legal requirements and compliance costs. Recruitment fees, when the market eventually turns, typically run at 15 to 20 percent of annual salary per hire. Then there's the onboarding time, the knowledge transfer, the months before a new person is truly productive. And all of that assumes you can even find someone with the same institutional knowledge as the person you let go. Often, you can't.
There's also the invisible cost, the one that never appears on a balance sheet, of what happens to the people who stay. Survivors of layoffs carry the weight of watching colleagues lose their jobs. Productivity drops. Trust erodes. The culture you've been carefully building cracks at the foundation.
When you add it all up, the savings from a mass layoff frequently evaporate within a year. Sometimes they result in a net loss.
Lesson two: before accepting a headcount directive, a leader owes it to the organisation, and to the people, to model the full cost of the decision, not just the short-term salary saving.
We talked for a long time about a different frame. Not "who do we cut?" but "how do we make sure fewer people have to bear everything?"
There's a principle I come back to in situations like this: it comes from a video that I watched years ago from Simon Sinek about how leaders create psychological safety. In that video, he said one sentence which has stuck with me ever since “we all suffer a little rather than some suffer a lot.”
It sounds simple. It isn't. It requires a leader who is willing to have harder conversations, with more people, about a situation that is genuinely difficult. It means sitting with your team and telling them the truth about the company's finances. It means asking them to consider options they didn't ask for, a temporary salary reduction, a four-day week, a period of unpaid leave, in service of keeping their colleagues in jobs.
It means trusting people with reality.
And here is what experience has shown, again and again: when you trust people with reality, they almost always rise to meet it. Not everyone. But most. Because most people, given the choice between shared sacrifice and watching a third of their team disappear, will choose to share the weight.
The famous example that often gets cited in these conversations is a car manufacturing plant in detroit that, during a severe downturn, offered its workforce a period of unpaid leave rather than mass redundancies. The workers agreed. The plant survived. And when the market recovered, the company had retained the skilled workforce it needed to rebuild quickly, while its competitors were scrambling to rehire.
The principle scales. From car factories to professional services teams to small businesses navigating a difficult quarter. The approach changes; the principle holds.
Lesson three: a people-first strategy is not a soft strategy. it is a strategic one and it requires a leader brave enough to build the case and present it.
That's the part Sandra needed to hear most: that her instinct to fight wasn't naive. It was correct. But instinct alone doesn't change a boardroom's mind.
To make the case, she would need to do the work. Model the scenarios with her finance team - what does a ten percent salary reduction across forty people save, compared to fourteen full redundancies? Identify which team members are truly critical: the ones whose departure would create client risk, compliance gaps, or knowledge loss that simply couldn't be replaced. Build a risk analysis that put a number on what the company stood to lose if those people walked out the door.
And then walk into the room prepared to advocate, fight, refuse to agree – whatever it takes.
Not to beg or make an emotional appeal, but to present a strategy; a credible, financially grounded, people-conscious alternative, and to stand behind it.
Lesson four: advocacy without evidence is just emotion. a leader who wants to fight for her people needs to give the decision-makers a reason to listen.
There's something I want to say about what this moment meant for Sandra specifically, because it matters beyond the numbers.
She had come into a role that no one had wanted. She had inherited someone else's mess and started the slow, unglamorous work of cleaning it up. She had begun to earn her team's trust, not through grand gestures, but through consistency, honesty, and the willingness to have difficult conversations with kindness. Her team was starting to believe in her.
And now, in only her first few months, she was being handed the thing that most quickly and permanently destroys a team's belief in its leader: the feeling that when things got hard, leadership chose the numbers over the people. How she handled this moment would define her, not just in the eyes of her team, but in her own understanding of what kind of leader she wanted to be.
Leaders who come through moments like this with their integrity intact don't do it by making it easy on themselves. They do it by being honest about what's happening, fighting hard for the outcome they believe is right, and, if the outcome is still painful, ensuring that every person affected is treated with dignity, fairness, and genuine human care.
Lesson five: a crisis is not an interruption to your leadership - it is the clearest expression of it.
I don't know yet how Sandra’s story ends. She still has the work ahead of her: the financial modelling, the conversations with leadership, the hard conversations with her team. The outcome isn't certain. But I know this: the fact that her first response was to ask "how do we protect these people?", rather than "how do I execute this cleanly?", tells me something important about the kind of leader she is becoming.
Organisations that treat their people well in hard times build something that outlasts the financial cycle - a reputation, a culture and a team that knows that when things get difficult, their leader will fight for them before she concedes.
That's the kind of leader worth becoming, and it's the kind of organisation worth building. That’s Intentional Leadership.