Success in the face of layoffs

I had the somber duty this week of informing two very talented and very respected employees they were being laid off. I won’t use evasive terms such as downsized, eliminated, rightsized or realigned. This was 2 people being laid off – it is a slack-jawed approach to call it anything else. While I am still relatively new to my role as the Director of Technology at Gazette Communications, it is not the first time I have had to let somebody go and not the first time I’ve had to let someone go who was not a performance or conduct problem (those types, what I call knuckle-head firings, are easy).
Since laying off those employees, I have spoken with each and every of my department staff. They deserved to hear it from me that I made and executed the decision. We did not discuss the specifics of decision nor the specifics the actual layoff conversations, but I did let them know that it was necessary in order to get our workforce down to the right financial level. With the knowledge it could be perceived as cold and calculating, I wanted to ensure they knew I owned that decision to the fullest extent. At the same time, I think they all walked away knowing the layoffs were something from which I garnered no joy, no amusement and certainly no personal gain.
Now we move on. That’s what we have to do or we risk becoming stagnat and irrelevant…thus easily unemployed. So we move on, but it is vastly easier said than accomplished. My team is smarting from this week and they would be right in harboring feeling of uneasiness about their job security. The cold, grim reality is there never really is any job worth doing that is 100% secure. I live large chunks of life often through the lenses of analogies.  During the baseball post-season, it is common to see batters shorten up their stroke and become more selective in their actions, almost to the point of paralysis sometimes. Reggie Jackson was Mr. October because he relished the post-season pressure and actually turned it up a few notches in those situations. If anything, he took a grander approach to his work, knowing he would be a grand success or grand failure. He was a stellar performer all year, so it is hardly amazing he was then able to be bold in the playoffs and succeed. I think he thrived off the knowledge that while others around him were shortening their stroke and being careful, he had an opportunity to take command of the situation by being bold and aggressive.
Silly analogy? Not applicable? Maybe a little insulting given the layoffs? I would disagree with those conclusions. We need to continue to act, to question, to explore, to play, to experiment, to learn, to network, to implement with speed, to listen and to realize that fortune really does favor the bold.