If your company has been through a layoff recently, you’re in crowded company. According to Gallup, about 21% of U.S. employees said in early 2026 that their employer is letting people go – up from just 8% in mid-2022.
Most of the attention goes to the people who leave. But if you’re a manager, your real work starts with the people who stay.
The research on layoff survivors is sobering. In a Leadership IQ study of more than 4,000 employees who kept their jobs after a layoff, 74% said their own productivity declined afterward – and 69% said the quality of their company’s product or service dropped too.
Gratitude for still having a job rarely shows up the way leaders expect. Guilt, anxiety, distrust, and quiet job searching often show up instead.
And managers are usually handed this moment without a script. You may not have made the layoff decision – you may not even agree with it – but you’re the one standing in front of the team, fielding questions you can’t fully answer, redistributing work no one asked for, and trying to restore trust that took a hit.
The upside: leading well after a layoff is a skill you can learn, and it starts with what you say in that very first meeting.
Say hello to our new 5-Day Leading Well After Layoffs Challenge – a practical series designed to help you steady your team, rebuild trust, and reengage the people still in the room.
The challenge starts MONDAY (August 31). Be sure you’re subscribed to participate.
What You’ll Get From This Challenge
Each day tackles one piece of leading after a layoff, in the order your team will need it. By the end, you’ll have a plan for the weeks when your leadership matters most.
By participating, you’ll learn how to:
✅ Lead the first conversation after a layoff – including what not to promise and how to say “I don’t know” credibly
✅ Recognize workplace survivor syndrome and the different ways guilt, fear, anger, and detachment can show up
✅ Rebuild trust through honesty and follow-through – not perks or pep talks
✅ Reset the workload before redistributing it, so a smaller team isn’t set up to fail
✅ Reengage your people without forcing positivity they don’t feel yet
Here’s What to Expect
Day 1: What to Say to Your Team After Layoffs – Get the words for that first meeting: what you can answer, what you can’t, and how to acknowledge the colleagues who are gone.
Day 2: Help Your Team Process What Happened – Learn to recognize workplace survivor syndrome and why the same layoff can produce guilt in one person and detachment in another.
Day 3: Rebuild Trust Without Making Promises You Can’t Keep – Discover what actually restores a sense of security after a layoff. (Hint: it isn’t reassurance.)
Day 4: Reset the Work Before Redistributing It – Decide what should stop, pause, or simplify before anyone absorbs a departed colleague’s to-do list.
Day 5: Reengage the Team Without Forcing Positivity – Find out what meaningful reengagement looks like when morale boosters would only backfire.
After the challenge, we’ll dive deeper into each personality Role. A layoff lands differently depending on who’s processing it, so we’ll dedicate an article to each of the four Roles – the Analyst who needs the decision to make sense, the Diplomat carrying survivor guilt for the whole team, the Sentinel whose stable ground just shifted, and the Explorer whose quick adaptation can hide real stress.
How to Join This Challenge
If you’re a paying subscriber, you’re already set – the challenge will arrive in your inbox automatically.
Free subscribers will have access to Days 1 and 2, plus previews of the rest. To participate fully, you’ll need to upgrade your subscription.
Still a free subscriber? Take advantage of our Big Birthday Bonanza to save up to 63% on an annual subscription!
(We haven’t done a promotion like this before, and we don’t know if we’ll ever run it again. So if you’ve been on the fence, now is the time to upgrade.)
Upgrading will give you access to this Leading Well After Layoffs Challenge plus our complete leadership development archive, including articles on:
Managing employee disengagement
Human leadership in the age of AI
Adjusting to management as a new leader
Mastering 1:1 meetings
Leading multigenerational teams
Leading well as an Introvert
The top 5 leadership challenges each personality type faces
Leading through uncertain times
Managing stress at work
Leading remote (or hybrid) teams
Managing up to your boss
See You Monday
I’m looking forward to digging into this one with you. This challenge is built to be practical and doable – the kind of guidance you can use in your very next team meeting, whether your layoff happened last week or last quarter.
And if your team hasn’t been through a layoff? You’re in the right place too. The skills we’ll build – communicating honestly when you don’t have all the answers, rebuilding trust, resetting an overloaded workload, reengaging people without forcing positivity – apply to nearly every hard season a team can face, from a reorg to a leadership change to plain old uncertainty. And should a layoff ever land on your team, you’ll be the rare manager who already has a plan.
Talk soon,
Carly from the 16Personalities Team