Layoff Journal Week 19 - Refresh
Note: This week’s newsletter is a departure from the format of the previous 18 weeks. I’m playing with the structure and content to see what resonates. Let me know what you think.
There have been a lot of firsts with this layoff. My first layoff. My first time spending 18+ weeks searching for a job. My first weekly newsletter. As we roll into August, I want to try something else new. The feedback I’ve been getting from readers of this newsletter, on the whole, seems to indicate two things: 1) People appreciate my honesty, the reality of my position, and updates on my work to find a new role, and 2) People have been encouraged by the upbeat attitude and the helpful reminders and links. Those aren’t going anywhere.
All of that is good, but it was getting hard to avoid drifting into mostly meaningless self-help content, and as much as I enjoy that from time to time, just getting a dose of it in my email every week doesn’t seem like something I’d sign up for. Since the last 13 years of my professional career have been in leading teams and organizations, I wanted to mix some of that content in too. I am going back to publishing chapters of my book on running innovation teams. So, here goes everything. I hope you like it. Either way, let me know.
Refreshing Numbers
8,231 additional people were laid off in July, according to Layoffs.fyi, continuing the downward trend since January.
Over 50 tech unicorns were founded during the 2007-2009 recession. Source
28% of Americans have been laid off in the last two years (notably not including the COVID layoffs of 2020). Source
Encouragement - A Refreshment For Your Soul
While vacation was a great time with family, it was also exhausting. We walked five to eight miles daily on top of lots of standing around looking at things and figuring out where to go next. Keeping all four kids satisfactorily fed, rested, hydrated, and safe took a huge physical (and emotional) toll on me. I was ready to get home and get “back to work,” even if that work was job searching.
I’ll confess: I didn’t read this article. I skimmed it (skim time ~1 min, read time ~9 min), but it had what I was looking for: reminders of some good ways to practice “self-care.” Now that I’m back, I’m scheduled for a massage, and I went for a long walk this morning (both for the exercise and the time away,) and I’m about to pick up a novel for the first time in I don’t remember how long. It’s time to get my batteries fully charged; expecting that I’ll be starting a new role this Fall, and I want to start with high energy.
Please take some time this week to do something for yourself.
Refreshing Teams
I’ve heard many rumors about the post-layoff reorgs (at Indeed and elsewhere), and I’ve been through a few big reorgs in my career, and the biggest thing I’ve learned from them is that reorgs hurt. They hurt a lot. Morale can plummet. Productivity can be destroyed. Even profits and revenue can be negatively impacted by reorgs.
Of course, experienced managers would only take on a reorg knowing that it will tank their next three, six, or twelve months of metrics because they sincerely believe that the other side of the reorg will more than pay for that investment. But the truth is that I’ve never seen a team stop to measure the loss and gains from reorgs. Not that it’s easy to measure, of course. And even if you did measure it, how do you use those measurements? How do you compare intangibles like morale and happiness with tangibles like retention, revenue, and user experience?
I’m sure there are times when a complete reorg is necessary, just as I’m sure there are times when a whole system rewrite is needed too. But, having much more firsthand experience with system rewrites, I believe in incremental rewrites whenever possible, and I have seen how incremental reorgs (or micro-reorgs if you’ll allow it) avoid much of the “big bang” reorg pain.
Here’s the micro-reorg process in three simple (albeit not particularly easy) steps:
Create a shared understanding of what is valuable across the team (especially leadership.)
Regularly assess which projects are producing positive ROI vs. those that are not.
Adjust staffing levels to maximize organizational ROI as often as possible.
Micro-reorging several times per year by moving a few percent of the team to better projects/products opens up the possibility to extract more value from key projects and right-size projects that are overstaffed and gives new opportunities to team members as they move to new teams. You have to set expectations upfront of course, and make sure not to move anyone around so often that it negatively affects their career growth.
We ran a program like this with 40-80 engineers over 6 years, and while it wasn’t perfect, we avoided full team reorgs the entire time (assuming you don’t count COVID’s impact in early 2020, which I don’t.)
Career Refresh
At the moment, I’m in the early stages with one sizeable multi-national company and various stages of interviews with three or so startups in Austin. I’m torn between looking for a company the size of Indeed again or jumping back into the wild west that is “startup land.” So, I’m toying with both sizes and looking to see what connects. My passion aligns more with the startup side, but I worry about the financial impact of putting everything in one startup basket again.
Additionally, I’m hitting the networking circuit again hard now that I’m back in Austin. So, if we haven’t caught up in a while, let’s chat and reconnect.
Refreshingly Fun
Final Words
If I can help with your search, please get in touch with me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not tainted by any outside influences.
Liking the addition of a section on leadership/management insights!