Having led teams big and small across marketing, sales, operations, and account management, I’ve come to enable business efficiency and growth through four lenses: people, process, technology, and data.
Hire and motivate the best people by building a strong culture. Drive focus through go-to-market strategy and execution with the right mix of strategic and tactical processes. Scale the work with a lean, effective tech stack. And inspect what we expect with KPIs that actually matter.
But right now, I’m worried we’re failing—especially on the first one: People.
To me, leadership means helping employees become their best—individually and collectively as a team—in pursuit of business goals.
And I have to ask: is that actually happening in most workplaces today?
Lately, I’m not so sure. I keep hearing horror stories from very talented folks across my network. So much so that my head is spinning—people being mistreated by companies, regardless of whether they’re long-time employees, new hires, laid off former employees, or in job search.
Yes, maybe the negative stories travel further. And yes, we’re living through a period of real economic and geopolitical stress, that we inevitably feel in the executive ranks, and impacts our emotions and actions. But somewhere in all this, we seem to be losing our common sense—and maybe even our moral compass—when it comes to how we lead.
A few examples:
Downsizing as the new growth strategy
It doesn’t take a Nobel economist to know that laying off our way to profitability isn’t sustainable. Growth comes from building great teams who create great products and deliver exceptional service to customers.
And yet, layoffs have become business as usual. Some companies handle them with empathy and transparency. Many don’t.
I’ve heard stories of terminations via Slack, promotions one day followed by abrupt firings 48 hours later, new hires let go at barely the 6-month mark because of a leadership shakeup. This is not “rightsizing.” This is chaos.
Recruiting becoming a brand risk
We seem to be normalizing bad recruiting behaviors. Ghosting candidates after verbal offers. Rescinding signed offers. Online job applications with more friction than a space capsule reentering the atmosphere. Interview “project assignments” that feel suspiciously like free consulting.
Bad candidate experiences don’t just hurt people—they damage our employer brand. Word gets around. And even when the candidate accepts the job, they may show up less committed from the start.
Leaders who’ve stopped coaching
With mounting pressure to do more with less, and higher expectations than ever, many leaders are stretched thin. As a result, coaching falls by the wayside. So does real performance feedback. Career conversations get punted. Inadvertently, we demotivate our teams.
And newly minted managers—some of whom have never had good coaching themselves—are left to their own devices. That’s not how we build the next generation of leaders.
The end result here? We are creating a lack of trust. And as someone smarter than me said at the last CMO Super Huddle conference not long ago, “If employees don’t trust you, they’ll never give you their best.”
That’s a business risk. Full stop.
And then there’s AI.
I use GenAI daily. I’m a fan. But I’m also wondering, as the popular relationship therapist Esther Perel recently pondered in her podcast: what happens to our human relational skills as we grow more comfortable engaging with machines? Will we forget how to engage well with… each other? How much worse can it get?
I’m not naive. I know the business pressures. I know we need to hit revenue targets, be efficient and tech enabled. But I wonder if there is a point of diminishing returns.
So, what’s a team leader to do?
We may not control every business decision, but we do influence how we treat our people. We can start here:
1. Prioritize performance and career development
Not just the usual once a year performance review. Let’s set quarterly check-ins. Build 1:1 feedback loops. Use regular work satisfaction pulse surveys to gauge morale. These small actions build trust, alignment, and engagement. We can make the time for it and commit.
2. Communicate like grown-ups
Give people the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable. Avoiding hard conversations might feel mutually protective in the short term, but it leaves our team in the dark—and less effective.
Check out the Chicago Booth Review podcast “Don’t avoid workplace conflict”—some great insight there.
3. Don’t default to layoffs
Explore alternatives: different roles, scoped-back responsibilities, even comp adjustments. If a layoff must happen, we can opt for clarity, empathy, and integrity. Chicago Booth Review podcast “How to Make the Best of Layoffs” has some useful guidance on this.
Let’s be decent humans. It costs nothing to treat people well. But it costs everything when we don’t.
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
