This month, we’ve been exploring Managing Employee Disengagement: why good employees lose motivation, how checking out can look different across personality types, and what a change in engagement can tell you.
As that conversation continues, I also wanted to pause and invite you into what’s coming next.
I’m beginning to plan our September topic, Leading After Layoffs, and I would love to hear what you want to understand before the series takes shape.
Most conversations about layoffs focus on the decision itself: who makes the cut, how the news is delivered, what the announcement should say.
But what about everything that comes after?
You are still leading a team, but it is not the same team. The people who remain may be grieving colleagues, questioning their own security, or absorbing the work of those who left. And you may be carrying your own doubts about the decision while everyone looks to you for steadiness.
Personality adds another layer here, because people rarely process this kind of upheaval the same way. What reassures one person can feel hollow to another.
I’d love for your questions to influence where this next series goes. So before I build anything out, I’d like to hear from you.
If you feel comfortable doing so, share what you would like to see covered in the comments below. You might be leading through the aftermath of layoffs right now, remembering a time you stayed behind after one, or simply wondering how you would handle it if it happened on your team.
If you aren’t sure where to start, here are a few prompts you can riff off of:
Have you led a team through layoffs? What surprised you most about the weeks and months that followed?
If you have ever been one of the employees who stayed, what do you wish your leader had understood or done differently?
What questions do you have about rebuilding trust when people are wondering whether they might be next?
How do you keep a team moving forward when the workload grows but the team does not?
How would you like to see personality incorporated into this conversation?
I’ve opened up commenting on this post so everyone can respond.
I truly do read every response, and what you share will directly shape the situations, questions, and personality differences we explore throughout the series.
And if you have another leadership topic you would love to see covered in the future, all paying subscribers are invited to join the Leadership Council, where you can submit ideas directly.
I’m especially drawn to this topic because so much of the guidance out there treats the layoff as the ending.
For the leaders who stay, it is a beginning.
That is the part I want to explore with you: not how to put a positive spin on a painful moment, but how leaders can rebuild trust, care for the people in front of them, and find their own footing at the same time.
Until next time,
Carly from the 16Personalities team
When your leader peers have been laid off as well as some of your team members, and your team isn't just absorbing work from the people it lost, but you're absorbing work from other teams that disappeared or merged into yours too - how's best to handle that? Are there some ways you can optimise how you serve each line report based on their personality? What if you don't have as much time per person because you're managing lots more people than you used to?
When leading a team, how do I handle the (often unspoken) expectation from my chain of command for my team to get the same amount of work done with less people?