After the Layoff: What Good Leadership Looks Like

Executive Summary:

This is the third piece in a series I didn't plan to write as a series. The first, The Organizational Trauma of Layoffs, was about naming the damage: what actually happens to the people and systems inside a company when a layoff hits, and why the industry keeps pretending it doesn't. Layoffs aren't my specialty. I'm an organizational and media operations expert. But the unplanned, wild success of that article, and how often it gets googled by people in this industry and beyond, inspired me to write a follow-up for my Streaming Wars column, Myths in Streaming. That entry, What Are Middle Managers Even For?, looked at a specific version of that mistake: streaming companies cutting the people who hold operations together and calling it "organizational agility." The promise was that decision-making would get faster. It actually got slower, and now many of those positions are starting to slowly get hired back.

This third article answers another question I've been asked after both of those: OK, fine. So what do we do about it? Which is actually where my real lens comes in. I work with streaming companies that are hemorrhaging revenue before it reaches the profit line, helping them optimize their operations and build frameworks that allow them to consistently do more with less without sacrificing quality. Unfortunately, this often means I'm coming in right before or right after a round of layoffs.

The timing matters. CBS News cut 6% of its workforce in March 2026. WME cut 3% the same week. Lionsgate, Axios, Universal Music Group, and Netflix's global product team all announced cuts within days of each other.

This comes after more than 17,000 entertainment, news, streaming, and broadcast jobs vanished in 2025, an 18% spike from 2024's already punishing numbers. Consolidation is increasingly cited as the driver. The Paramount/Skydance merger alone is expected to produce another wave, on top of the damage that's already been done. And let's not forget the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition of Paramount, which will compound consolidation cuts further still. The industry is doing this on a loop.

We keep treating the symptom as the treatment. And it isn't working.

The Reframe

Before I get to the playbook, I want to be clear about what I'm not arguing. I am not anti-layoff. That framing is too simple, and I've been inside too many companies to pretend that headcount decisions are always avoidable. They're not. Markets shift. Technology changes. Audience habits evolve faster than most organizations can adapt. Sometimes a company genuinely needs fewer people than it has. Denying that is its own kind of dishonesty.

Companies need to innovate. They need to evolve, to grow, to have some appetite for risk. And every once in a while, failures happen. The idea of having to lay people off to save the company is not, in itself, criminal.

But there are three things I think most leaders get wrong when layoffs happen, and getting them wrong makes everything so much worse.

Principle 1: A layoff is not a strategy.

It is an admission that something failed. A bet that didn't pay off. A model that didn't scale. A market that moved faster than the plan. There is no shame in that. Failure at scale is often just the cost of swinging for something real. But there IS shame in dressing it up as "optimization" or "right-sizing," as if the company identified an exciting new efficiency rather than hitting a wall.

The first honest thing a leadership team can do after a layoff is name what actually happened. Not in HR language. In plain English. This failed. Here's what we learned. Here's what we're changing.

That kind of clarity is not a weakness. It is the only foundation you can build anything on. And lies are often found out, especially in an age where information exists literally everywhere. Consider how many of the layoffs in 2024 and 2025 were blamed on AI. We now know that almost none of them were directly caused by AI. Companies are actually struggling to implement AI because their operating layers are messy. And in many cases, their operating layers are messy because they were hasty to lay off. When you blame something that isn't the real reason, people find you out, and your reputation doesn't easily recover. Maybe that's acceptable when you're a CEO with a $15 million parachute in your contract. But most of the people who get shoved in front of the teams to deliver the news are not that.

Principle 2: The language matters more than leaders think.

"Affected by layoffs" is a phrase that makes my skin crawl every time I see it. In a private email. On a client's desk. On social media or in articles. Anywhere. It needs to be destroyed. Everyone in the building is affected by layoffs. So are their families. The people who lost their jobs were laid off. Say that. Use that word. It is accurate, and it is a matter of basic humanistic integrity to name the damage you are causing. It is deeply disrespectful to take away somebody's job, turn their life completely upside down, and then not even say what you did.

Corporate euphemism isn't compassion. It's avoidance. And everyone still in the building can tell the difference. When leadership hides behind carefully constructed language, the message the remaining team actually receives is: this is how honest they'll be with us going forward. That message sits. And it shapes every conversation about the company's future from that point on.

The leaders who have a real shot at rebuilding swiftly after a layoff are the ones who show up with courage. Who stand in front of their teams and say, plainly and without a PR filter: we failed here. That is not a legal script. It is a choice. And most leaders don't make it, because it requires them to be accountable in a way that feels personally exposing. I understand that impulse. It is the wrong impulse. What you have done to the people who were laid off, the people who remain, and the families of both is deeply personal. That is why leaders get paid the big bucks, to be crass. Show up. Don't use legal exposure as an excuse for cowardice. I'm saying this as a person who has been on both sides of the table.

Principle 3: Trust is the real casualty, and rebuilding it is the real work.

A layoff breaks the psychological contract between employer and employee. That's not a metaphor. It is a measurable collapse in engagement, loyalty, and willingness to take risks. Research on organizational trauma consistently shows that the damage doesn't stop with the people who leave. The people who stay are often more destabilized, not less. More overworked, not less. Survivor's guilt is real. Anxiety about the next round of layoffs is real. Distrust of leadership is real, and it persists long after the stock price recovers. This leads to fear of innovation and a lagging bottom line.

You cannot fix that with a town hall. You cannot fix it with a pizza party or an all-hands where the CEO says "we're through the hard part." You rebuild trust with time, consistency, accountability, and a real internal communication strategy that feels transparent. By showing the team, repeatedly and over months, that leadership has actually learned something, changed something, and won't pretend the damage didn't happen.

The companies that recover fastest are not the ones that immediatly galvonize and try to just move on. They are the ones that slow down long enough to be honest about what happened. They let the grief process happen. And then do the slow, unglamorous work of demonstrating that they care about their teams.

The Playbook

If you are a leader inside one of these organizations right now, whether you just made cuts or you're anticipating them, these are the four moves that actually matter.

Move 1: Diagnose before you cut.

Most companies don't do this. They cut by department percentage, or by seniority band, or by how long somebody has been there, or by what their job description says on paper. When was the last time anybody's job description sitting in their HR folder was actually accurate? They do it anyway. They remove a percentage and hope the remaining structure holds.

Before any headcount decision, map the operating model, not what's on paper. Follow how decisions get made all the way through your value chain. Where does work actually happen? Who owns what? Where are the dependencies? What specifically breaks if you remove a given role? And understand who possesses the most institutional knowledge, and why that knowledge is stuck in the head of one person. That question never gets discussed, and it absolutely needs to be. Is that person a cornerstone of your organization, or are they a bottleneck? Figure it out. Do the work. Measure twice, cut once.

This isn't an academic exercise. It's the difference between a cut that tightens an organization and a cut that destroys the capacity to execute. None of this damage is "quiet" or surprising. It didn't sneak up on anyone. People weren't paying attention.

In my executive roles, I've been on both sides of this table. As an advisor, I've done operational diagnostics before headcount decisions, and I know that work saves millions in downstream damage. Without it, everything else is guesswork. How much time do you have for wrong guesses?

Move 2: Redesign the work, not just the org chart.

This is where most post-layoff planning fails. Leadership reduces headcount, redraws the boxes on the org chart, and expects the work to continue at the same volume and quality with fewer people. It doesn't. It can't. This is physics.

If you're going to operate with 20% fewer people, the work has to change. Can you still operate with 20% fewer people? Hopefully you knew that before you made the cuts. But probably so, yes. Which workflows need to be consolidated? Which approval layers are actually adding value versus adding latency? Which manual processes can finally be prioritized on your technical roadmap to be automated for real?

The goal is a right-sized operating model. Not a shrunken version of the one that already wasn't working.

Contraction is not just an opportunity to redesign. It means that redesign is critical. And most operating models need to be completely rethought, not slightly retooled. This is an opportunity to get lean, to get competitive, and to do it while leaking a lot less revenue.

Instead, most companies spend the period after a layoff putting out the fires that the layoffs themselves caused. They waste the opportunity to redesign the entire operating model.

Move 3: Protect the connective tissue.

Middle managers, senior individual contributors, and cross-functional coordinators are reliably the first to go in a cost reduction. They're expensive, and it's difficult to quantify their value. Often they do jobs that other people simply don't understand, because other people belong to a vertical and these people, by definition, do not. But these are the people who can see things that nobody else can see. It's a real shame that they automatically get cut.

I wrote about this at length for The Streaming Wars in January, but I'll say it again here: these are the people who make the system work. They translate strategy into execution. They catch errors before they compound. They hold institutional knowledge that took years to build and can't be documented in an offboarding call. When you cut them, you don't get a leaner organization. You get a flatter one where decisions bottleneck at the top. And you get a more siloed one, splitting the company into a bunch of little whack-a-mole organizations that can't coordinate across boundaries. When you start cutting cross-functional people, you need to understand where they're adding value in a real way. You have to be extra thoughtful about that.

If you must reduce, protect the roles that connect systems, teams, and decisions. Cut the roles that duplicate effort, not the ones that prevent chaos. And make sure that when you say you're building leaner decision processes, you are actually following the lifecycle of how decisions get made, rather than just cutting middle management and leaning on the company line.

Move 4: Build the operating model you'll need in 12 months, not the one you're surviving today.

Contraction might be temporary. The operating model you build during contraction is what you'll be running on when growth returns. And it will return. It always does, eventually, in some form. Whether that form involves human beings, AI, automation, vendors, consultants, or partners, if you are trying to grow your company in any direction, you are going to have to grow your operation.

Companies that cut without redesigning end up hiring back into the same broken structure about 18 months later. Different job titles, same dysfunction. It's a tax, paid in turnover, retraining costs, and corporate reputation. Every time a company goes through this cycle, it ends up hiring worse people, because the best people are going to companies that don't do this and staying there. It is really hard to recover your corporate reputation when you keep acting like this.

Use contraction as the forcing function to build the model you should have built during the growth phase, when you had the money and the momentum and somehow never found the time.

For the People Left in the Building

I want to shift gears and talk directly to the operators, managers, and ICs who survived the last round and are now doing more work with fewer people, carrying guilt they didn't earn and fear they didn't ask for. I've been that person. This part is for you.

1. Name what you're feeling. It's not dramatic. It's accurate.

Survivor's guilt is real. So is grief for colleagues who are gone, anxiety about the next round, and a deep distrust of anything leadership says right now. These are normal responses to an abnormal event. You are not overreacting, and you are not being disloyal by having them. The company may be signaling that everything is fine now, that it's time to move forward. It may not be fine. You are allowed to know that, and you are allowed to not be fine. You might have a family. You have a life outside this building. The ripple effect of what just happened extends well beyond your desk, and that weight is real too.

2. Get clear on what you can and can't control.

You cannot control whether there's another round. You cannot control the strategy, or make leadership be honest if they won't be, or fix a broken operating model from the middle of it. What you can control is how you show up for your team, what standards you hold for your own work, whether you let fear flatten your judgment, and whether you keep investing in your skills and your network. Agency isn't about controlling the outcome. It's about deciding how you move through it.

A note for the mid-level managers and directors who are trying to make their teams feel okay: your teams are going to be hurt. They're going to feel betrayed. They're going to be going through grief. And you cannot really do anything about that. What you can do is take care of yourself the best way you can, show up as fresh-faced every day as you possibly can, and make space for people to feel frustrated, to express themselves, and to grieve. You can control whether or not you're galvanizing your team too soon. You can control whether or not you're letting them have a voice in what changes moving forward. But you cannot control how other people feel. I need people to hear that, because so many folks in mid-management are incredibly empathetic, and they go under an enormous amount of stress when their team is hit with layoffs.

3. Document everything. For yourself.

When an organization is in chaos, the people who stay clear-eyed about what's actually happening are the ones who come out of it stronger. Keep a running log. What are you working on? What problems are you solving? How are those problems tracking up to corporate KPIs? What are you learning? What are you building? Not for your performance review. For you. So that when the dust settles, you have a clear record of what you survived and what you're worth. Not just to that company, but to the industry and to yourself.

4. Protect your limits. The work will expand to fill every hour if you allow it.

After a layoff, the implicit expectation is that everyone works harder to compensate. That expectation is the company's problem cosplaying as your responsibility. You can be excellent and still have limits. In fact, the best operators I work with know and understand that burning out doesn't make you loyal. It makes you less effective, less present for your team, and less employable. You don't owe this company your health. You don't owe this company your sleep. You don't owe this company your well-being. And what you really don't owe this company is doing a bunch of invisible work that they are not even aware of. It creates giant holes in the system that they cannot see and fill the right way when you are constantly compensating for their shortcomings in strategy. Sometimes, advacating for yourself is the same thing as advacating for the long-term health of your employer.

5. Don't stop building your external network.

The people who feel most trapped after a layoff are the ones whose entire professional identity lived inside one organization. Stay visible. Stay connected to people outside your company. Your loyalty should be to your career, not your company. Your next opportunity, whether it's inside this company or somewhere else, will come from the relationships you maintained when things were hard. They also come from the relationships you maintained when things were easy. Not the ones you let go because you were exhausted or uncertain or just didn't want to reach out.

The through-line for all five of these: you did not create this situation. But you do get to decide how you move through it. Employees have a lot more agency than they are generally told. The people who come out of these moments strongest are the ones who refused to let someone else's shortcomings define their trajectory.

The Close

The streaming and media industry has normalized layoffs as a management tool. So has tech. The numbers make that impossible to dispute: 17,000-plus jobs gone in 2025, more cuts already in the first quarter of 2026, and consolidation still accelerating. Cutting headcount has become the default response to pressure, the move that buys time and signals decisiveness to Wall Street, regardless of whether it actually addresses what's broken.

But a layoff is not a plan. It is not a minor correction, and it is not a strategy. It is a reckoning. And what comes after it determines everything.

After working with media companies before, during, and after layoffs, I can say from experience that the companies that will emerge from this era in the strongest position are not the ones that cut the deepest or moved fastest to a town hall. They're the ones that used contraction to get operationally honest with themselves, with their employees, and with their shareholders about how their business actually works, where the inefficiencies live, what they need to build for the next phase, and how to make themselves more resilient.

The question I started with, what do we do about it, has a less satisfying answer than most people want. You do the diagnosis. You redesign the work. You protect the people who hold the system together. You tell the truth about what happened, plainly, without the PR filter. And you rebuild trust one consistent action at a time, because there is no shortcut for that part, and because your best workers are the ones who can most clearly see whether or not you are acting with integrity.

The companies that are willing to do this work are unfortunately getting rarer. But they are also the ones worth building. And from sitting in their offices, I know they are the ones that will win.

Integration Therapy helps streaming companies recover leaking revenue and build operations that hold up under pressure.

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