The list is finished. Your name is not on it. Theirs are.
And on the other side of it you still have to lead the people who watched you do it.
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What is actually happening
The guidance you will get is about risk. Keep it short, stick to the script, do not apologise, have someone from people operations in the room, do not get into a discussion.
All of that is designed to reduce the company's exposure, and none of it is designed for the two things that actually matter to you. Every person on that list will carry that ten minutes for years. And every person not on the list is watching closely to learn what you are, because they are working out whether to trust you with their own future.
This is not damage to be minimised. It is the last conversation that person will remember you by, and the first one the survivors will judge you by.
A conversation held in dread will be remembered as cold. That is not who you are, and it is what will land.
What becomes possible
You cannot make this painless and you should stop trying. What you can do is make it clean and human.
That means the person hears it in the first thirty seconds rather than after two minutes of context, because the context is unbearable when you know what is coming. It means you can stay in the room with their reaction without retreating into policy language. It means you do not perform a sorrow that makes them comfort you, and you do not go cold to protect yourself.
And it means that afterwards you can stand in front of the people who remain and speak about what happened without flinching, which is the moment your leadership either survives the week or does not.
One story
A composite, braided from several people we have worked with. Details are changed.
Nineteen people across two teams, three weeks' notice, and he had been given a script by the company's counsel that he described as reading like a parking notice.
His rehearsal problem was interesting. He had built two versions of himself for the conversation. One was the professional, who got through it fast and said nothing that could be quoted. The other was the friend, who would have apologised for twenty minutes and made the person console him. He could feel both were wrong and had no third option.
The third option took work. It is roughly this: say the decision in the first breath, do not decorate it, then stop talking and let the person have whatever reaction they have without managing it. Then be genuinely useful about what happens next, in detail, because that is the part they will need on Monday.
He did nineteen of them in two days. Four of those people have since asked him for references and two have tried to hire him. The part he did not expect was the effect on the people who stayed. He said the team came back faster than anyone predicted, and he thinks it was because they had watched him do it without hiding.
To do it with integrity, and to keep the trust of the people who stay.
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