Reduction in force.

The situation

Sometimes a company has to become smaller. A funding environment shifts, a strategy changes, a business line closes. It is one of the hardest decisions a leadership team takes, and one of the easiest to get wrong.

How a company lets people go says more about it than how it hires. Done carelessly, a reduction damages the people leaving, the people staying, and the reputation the company hires with for years. Done well, it is still painful, but it is fair, lawful, and honest.

What it looks like in practice

• Leadership knows a reduction is coming, but there is no real plan beyond a target number
• Decisions are being made on spreadsheets, without role-by-role thinking about skills the company still needs
• Managers who have to deliver the news have never done it before, and the wrong sentence in that room becomes a legal problem
• Notice, consultation, and severance obligations differ across the countries where the team sits
• The people who stay are watching closely, and nobody has thought about what to say to them

How I help

I partner with leadership teams through the whole arc: selection criteria that are defensible and fair, sequencing and timelines, statutory notice and consultation requirements in each jurisdiction, and severance terms that treat people decently. I help prepare the managers who will have the conversations, down to the words, and I help plan the support people receive on the way out: references, notice pay, and where possible, a bridge to what is next.

Just as much work goes into the people who remain: what they are told, when, and how the company rebuilds trust and focus afterward. The aim throughout is simple. Humane, lawful, and clear.

And if you need a neutral party in the room, I can support the notification conversations themselves, leading them or sitting alongside your managers. Someone outside the reporting line often makes a hard conversation go better for everyone in it.