📓 protect peace, deliver chaos

🔍 promotions & layoffs 

✍🏾What’s the best way to protect our peace and sanity, and minimize our guilt when delivering difficult news (such as demotions and layoffs)? It’s not as difficult when  dealing with this situation periodically to an individual, but mass notifications take a bigger toll on us in multiple ways.

Context: Government / social services.

📣Niesa Vinson, Human Resources Director @ Catalyst Dental Allies:

Delivering tough news like layoffs or demotions is never easy, especially on a larger scale. If it were me, the process I follow to ease the guilt, start by simply acknowledging that it’s difficult. Don’t carry the weight alone—talk it through with trusted colleagues. Always lead with integrity, hold space for grief or questions, and treat each person with respect of course.

📣Julie Leonard, Vice President, Qualitative Research @ MarketVision Research:

I think showing your heart, acknowledging that this is hard and these are people who will be missed — both within those painfully difficult meetings as well as in talking with those who remain (equally challenging!) is essential. Honoring the sadness and loss involved and talking about how to move forward together has helped with my own emotions as well as those on the teams. Be sure you have someone close you can talk about your own feelings with safely.

📣Rebecca Dobrzynski, Senior HR Business Partner @ RAI Institute:

I’m so sorry that you are having to do this en masse. If you’re at the point where you are just delivering the message, then a few things might help for taking care of yourself:

1. Block off the rest of the day to decompress and rest. You’re not available unless there is an actual emergency because now it’s time to curl up and feel your feelings.

2. Do something physically grounding. If you have a movement practice or like to scream into a pillow or have a dance party in your kitchen to some rage-y music, now is the time. Your body is likely flooded with cortisol from the stress leading up to these notifications and from absorbing other people’s reactions, so you need to allow yourself to work through a physiological response. Bonus points if you can follow expend energy and then do something comforting, like take a hot shower or bath, eat your favorite food, or stare at a body of water or some trees.

3. Remember (and remind your fellow messengers) what is and isn’t in your control. You likely weren’t the person who made these decisions. You can’t control whether other people cry, yell at you, or lash out in some way. You can control how you show up in the process (hopefully with clarity and empathy), but the rest is not your burden to bear.

4. Make a list of ways you’ve contributed positively to your place of work and read it every day, then add forward-looking items that you plan to tackle when you are back on track. Don’t let these tough times outweigh the good you’ve been able to do.

If you are still in the process leading up to notifications, I’m a fan of having scripts/talking points/answers to likely questions, even if they don’t get distributed or published somewhere. Give the same answer and talk track to remaining employees who ask questions, defer to other leaders as needed, and get really clear on what you can and can’t share (and why). Scripts reduce brain power needed to respond in the moment and help ensure consistency for everyone on the receiving end. This includes being honest about the fact that you may not have a specific answer or can’t share it for [insert reasons here].

Safe Space members can join this discussion here. Not a member yet? Apply to join here.

✍🏾Making the jump from Director to Head of/VP of People, what do you see as the most critical skills and experience to make that leap?

Context: Small Consulting Firm (15 people)

📣Maleea Meden, HR Director @ World Centric:

This is a tough question to answer without knowing a bit more. Is this an HR Consulting firm, so the VP of people would be providing consulting services, or is this role for the team of 15? It’s challenging for me to envision a team of 15 people needing a VP of People unless there are immediate plans to scale the business rapidly. In that case, I think it’s valuable to have scaled HR in a fast-growing org. If you’re operating as a VP-level consultant, then I think it depends on the types of clients and what their needs are.

📣Kayla Lopez, Head of People @ American Financial Resources, LLC:

It’s a great question- but my answer will be a little less great (sorry!). It is largely dependent on the organization, including its business strategy, and what skills you currently have/had as a director. There could be skills I would list that you may never utilize due to size or strategy, or even some that you are already acing.

📣Sondra Norris, OD/OE Consulting:

Deceptively hard question to answer with only a little context and because “skills and experience” are not sufficient to describe how to successfully progress in leadership levels. So a generic answer is in order. As Kayla Lopez mentioned, there are many different applications of the titles “Director” and “VP” depending on many factors.

Charan, Drotter, and Noel do an EXCELLENT job of describing The Leadership Pipeline in their series of books which allows for planning and skill development outside of the notion of titles and more in line with what the role is designed to accomplish in the organization.

What follows is directly from their book, “The Leadership Pipeline: Developing Leaders in the Digital Age” and should help clarify what a VP, functional leaders should be able to do.

They talk about the three primary elements to consider in transitioning through the passages in the leadership pipeline:

1. Work values: What people believe is important and so becomes the focus of their effort and gets the highest priority. These need to be spelled out and differentiated clearly.

2. Time application: The new job to be done requires time to be allocated to these requirements and not to the old ones.

3. Skills: The capabilities required to execute new responsibilities.

Let’s assume what we’re talking about here is that the VP is the Leader of the HR FUNCTION. Functional leaders are responsible for setting the function’s direction, for producing function strategy, and for building the function’s capability. Because they report directly to the business leader or the enterprise leader, they provide function expertise to the business team. Accordingly, their peers are now other function heads.

Accordingly, the job to be done includes:

1. Helping the business team succeed (participate actively in defining and executing the overall business strategy)

2. Developing and executing functional strategy (includes pushing the functional agenda into the future, seeking short- and long-term competitive advantages)

3. Driving functional excellence

4. Building the function (includes establishing an organizational structure that allows function-wide initiatives to reach the rest of the organization at the desired speed)

5. Taking ownership of developing functional talent (includes creating space within the function for talents to develop)

6. Developing leaders (includes taking a structure approach to support leaders becoming better leaders)

7. Following through on performance of leaders

8. Select leaders

Underneath each of those ⬆️ 8 things is a whole mess of skills and experience.

Safe Space members can join this discussion here. Not a member yet? Apply to join here.