Six Leadership Lessons from a Layoff Announcement

Summary

What HubSpot's memo gets right about delivering bad news, and how every leader can use it (whether you're cutting jobs or not). Drawing on HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan's layoff memo, Matt pulls out six communication habits -- leading with the news, closing the information gap fast, showing the reasoning behind the decision -- that apply to any hard conversation, not just layoffs.

Every one of your employees holds a big bowl. That bowl is filled with what they believe to be true about their job, their team and their future.

If you don’t fill that bowl, someone else will fill it for you. Rumors, untruths, the worst-case version passed along in Slack DMs and group texts you’ll never see.

If you aren’t filling it proactively and clearly, I promise you won’t like what’s in the bowl. Better to fill it yourself with truth, directness, empathy and respect.

That bowl matters every day, and never more than on the day you deliver bad news.

HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan had to deliver bad news at scale, telling employees the company is cutting about 7 percent of its team, nearly 660 people. Her full note is public, and it’s worth reading closely even if you never have to write one like it.

To be clear, a well-written memo doesn’t make anyone’s mortgage payment. Nearly 660 people are having a really hard day, and so are the families around them. Nothing below is meant to make that lighter.

But how a company says goodbye tells everyone (the people leaving, the people staying and every candidate it will ever try to hire) what it believes about people. And the mechanics of this one apply well beyond layoffs.

No matter the size of the company, people matter. You are responsible for supporting families, careers and much more. Even the people unaffected think about that immediately when they read news like this.

When I read Rangan’s note, six leadership lessons stood out clearly to me. Each one is a way to fill the bowl before someone else does.

1. Skip the runway

Rangan gets to the news in her first sentence and the number in her second. No preamble about the journey, the market or the macro environment before the reader learns what’s happening to them.

Too much of the bad-news communication I see does the opposite. It builds three paragraphs of context first, mostly to make the person delivering the news more comfortable. It’s written to make the company look better, which is not something anybody needs to hear in that moment.

This “skip the runway” approach works well elsewhere too: for the board deck with a missed number or the client call about a campaign that underperformed. Lead with the miss. The context lands better once people know what it’s context for.

2. Shrink the limbo

Impacted employees in the U.S. got an email within 15 minutes of the announcement. Employees outside the U.S. heard within the same window about what happens next, with the process varying by local requirements.

The detail that made this announcement different: U.S. employees who were NOT impacted also got confirmation within 15 minutes.

Limbo is where the bowl sits empty, and it never stays empty for long. The all-hands where everyone is refreshing their inbox, the Slack DMs asking if anybody has heard anything, the manager who knows and can’t say. Every hour (every minute!) of that costs trust you don’t get back, and it costs it with the people you’re counting on to stay.

HubSpot’s memo also promises every departing employee a 1:1 conversation with a manager within a day, and acknowledges that an email can’t answer every question. Hard news delivered only in writing can feel like being processed, and a person on the other end of a call changes that.

3. Show your math

HubSpot published the six criteria it used to assess every role: strategic need, layers and spans, protecting revenue capacity, capability, capacity and leadership. Then this line: “The reduction was the outcome of that work, not the starting point.”

You can be skeptical of that sentence (plenty of people will be) and still see why publishing the criteria matters. It gives people something to hold the decision up against.

The alternative is the passive-voice classic, “difficult decisions were made,” which leaves everyone to invent the reasons themselves. They usually fill the bowl with something worse.

4. Name the rumor (and then live up to it)

The memo says plainly that the cuts aren’t driven by AI efficiencies, and that this isn’t simply a cost-cutting exercise.

Naming the AI piece is really smart, especially in this moment. Almost every tech layoff gets a “replaced by AI” headline within hours, and leaving that unsaid lets the internet fill the bowl for you.

When you tell people what something isn’t, you’re making a promise they’ll check against what you do next. Where HubSpot invests and hires from here will say more about this decision than anything in the memo.

5. Get specific about support

Too many layoff announcements promise a “generous” package and leave it there. HubSpot spelled it out: 20 weeks of base pay plus a week per year of service (up to 30 weeks), five months of health coverage (a COBRA lump sum in the U.S.), six months of outplacement support and the option to keep their laptop and work-from-home gear.

The laptop detail is my favorite line in the whole note. It costs the company very little, and it spares hundreds of people from boxing up a monitor and hunting for a FedEx drop-off the same week they lost their job.

Specifics signal that someone did the work to take care of people before the announcement went out. And the people staying are reading that list just as closely as the people leaving.

6. Talk to the people who stay

The note’s final paragraph is for the survivors. It acknowledges they’re saying goodbye to friends, managers and teammates and asks them to make space for that and support each other. Then it promises time together the following week on what comes next.

That paragraph matters more than it may appear. A Leadership IQ study of more than 4,000 employees at 318 companies found 74 percent of layoff survivors said their own productivity dropped afterward. Research from University of Wisconsin professor Charlie Trevor found that cutting just 1 percent of a workforce led to a 31 percent jump in voluntary turnover the following year.

The people who stay are quietly deciding whether to leave on their own terms, and what’s in their bowl will decide it. Next week’s conversation is HubSpot’s best chance to fill it.

Bad news comes in every size

Many leaders will never write a memo like this one, and I hope you never have to. But all of us deliver bad news regularly: the renewal that isn’t happening, the budget that got cut, the promotion that went to someone else, the number you’re about to miss.

The instinct in every one of those moments is the same one behind bad layoff memos. Delay it, pad it, explain it before you say it, then get off the call as fast as possible. Doing the opposite is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is sometimes part of the job.

Fill the bowl yourself. Say the hard thing in the first sentence, take real care of the people it lands on and stay in the room afterward. Be that leader.

If you’re one of the 660

First, I’m sorry. This is a really hard day, and nothing will fix that.

When you’re ready, use everything HubSpot is giving you. Six months of outplacement support is real help, and so is the runway your severance buys. Take full advantage of both.

Then lean even harder on your network. The people who love you, have worked with you and have watched you do great work want to help right now. Let them. Many of them just don’t know how yet. I know it’s hard to ask, but please ask. They (we, I) want to help.

Your network has a bowl too. If you don’t tell people what you’re looking for, they’ll guess (and might guess wrong). Be specific about the role, the kind of company and the people you’d love an intro to, then start the conversation.

There are a ton of jobs out there and still a very active hiring market. The next gig is far more likely to come from a conversation with someone who knows your work than from a job board.

Be proactive, reach out early and let the people who love you help you get that next gig.

This post originally appeared on Matt Heinz’s Substack.