Leading Greats #177

You get pulled aside by your VP and your direct lead right after lunch.

The conversation moves fast.

The company has been strained by weak performance across several global subsidiaries, and the direction from above is to cut a few thousand roles.

Yours is one of them.

You are told there will be a generous severance and a transition package to soften it.

“It is not personal. It is a business decision.”

That sentence stung, and it should have.

But there was something underneath the sting you may not have named at the time.

Your VP stayed in the space with you.

You could watch his face.

You could ask the question you actually wanted answered, and he had to answer it to you, not to a policy.

Whatever else that meeting cost you, it gave you a door to close.

That part is going missing now, faster than most leaders realize.

A layoff message can be written in seconds.

A restructuring can be turned into clean talking points before the coffee gets cold.

AI will draft it, organize the reasoning, and imitate the cadence of an executive who has done this before.

What it cannot do is sit in a room and take the question back.

A message with no one behind it does not close anything. It just gets delivered.

Most executives I coach misread authenticity as one of three things.

= Saying whatever crosses your mind.

= Staging vulnerability for effect.

= Mistaking "brutal honesty" for a substitute for preparation.

None of those are it.

Authenticity is the discipline of being present for the decision you handed someone, particularly the one they will not like.

Your VP did not need a script that day.

He needed to hold still long enough for you to see the cost land on him too.

The numbers back this up more than I expected when I first went looking.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 78 percent of employees trust their employer to do the right thing, the highest of any institution measured.

But 73 percent say it is the CEO's job to help close the trust divide, and only 44 percent think their CEO is doing it well. A 29 point gap between what a CEO owes and what a CEO delivers.

Gartner's research found something sharper still. Employees are 4.3 times more likely to trust a leader who explains the reasoning behind a decision.

None of it gets fixed with better delivery.

It gets fixed with fewer exits.

Take the question you were hoping to avoid. Say the hard part vocally instead of routing it through a policy.

You may never know if that VP found it hard to sit there.

What you do know is that he did.

Not a kinder script. A person who held still.

The question is not whether the message was accurate.

It is whether the person delivering it stayed long enough to give you something to close.

Sources:

2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer.

Gartner, "4 Key Actions to Build Employee Trust," 2025.

The opening scenario - was me receiving my first corporate downsizing. True.

If you are the one who has to deliver a decision like this, and you are searching for the words that will hold up once you are across the table:

I have been there. I can help.

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Founder | CEO | Executive & Leadership Coach, MBA, PCC

Leader | Advisor | Speaker | Writer

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