>I take full responsibility for choosing that original path forward, and for the resulting changes today, which will be so difficult for our team.
What does "take full responsibility" mean? Is he laying himself off instead of the employees? Is he paying the employees he's laying off out of his pocket? Is he resigning so this doesn't happen again?
I'm confused how you can just say "I take full responsibility" without actually taking any responsibility. It seems like the laid off employees are taking responsibility.
1. We are laying off underperformers to strengthen the company (Has happened)
2. We are laying off poorly performing divisions (again, indirectly foisting the responsibility on the employees, because their division is underperforming)
3. We are laying off to cut costs and keep the company profitable (This may be the truth, but it treats employees like they are replaceable cogs in the machine they can throw out and bring back in any time).
4. Making the employees quit by themselves by creating toxic work environments (recently, forcibly enforcing back to office rules to shed all employees who cannot make it back or prefer remote).
5. Just layoff without any reason, not worrying about the mental health of the leaving employees or the ones who remain.
Just owning up his responsibilities means, the relieved employee atleast does not have to add the stress of "did-I-do-something-wrong" to his/her list of woes. This can sometimes be debilitating.
It also adds to the confidence of the existing employees that the company will do right by them, if it comes to letting them go in the future.
Ideally, no one should get laid off. But companies cannot be forever profitable and the government or no other body is going to bail them out. Considering that, this seems to be a more mature way of handling a terribly difficult situation.
Trust me, as someone who got laid off at 1.5 months into the first job, the way that was handled was a jarring experience. I would vastly prefer the above response.
As you spend more time in the industry, you see lots of badly handled layoffs and some better managed ones. You hear the stories of other veterans and learn a little more.
At some point you realize it is something everyone inevitably goes through and just a part and parcel of working in the private sector. You learn to plan ahead financially and mentally to handle such surprises.
Nowhere here do I talk about quitting (other than in the context of the forced one),
So employees will know in the future that the CEO will say it was their fault, but that they are the one that has to deal with the consequences of poor management. Got it. I hope everyone there "quiet quits" after this. Patreon is a cesspool of far-right grifters.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the expression, but usually when English speakers say they "take full responsibility" for a tragedy or unfortunate occurrence, they mean from a moral and blame-based standpoint, it's rarely related to the finances of those affected.
The laid off employees are the ones ultimately worse off by the outcome, that goes without saying, what you're missing is that this is different from being morally or strategically responsible for why the situation played out this way. That's the ownership the CEO is trying to take.
That's what they think they are saying. What it actually means is "It is my mistake that I admit is mine, you get fucked, I keep my chair and take zero actual consequences for it"
I mean if it's helpful to you, people can deconstruct the meanings of their colloquialisms so it's more clear, but for most English speakers it's not really necessary. Are you ESL?
If I told someone "we'll be working on this report til the cows come home", I wouldn't expect that it's necessary to explain that the expression doesn't actually have anything to do with cattle, and instead just means I'm expecting this to take a long but indeterminant amount of time. If someone found it clever to point out what I _actually_ meant, I wouldn't find their input very helpful, just socially unintelligent and annoying.
Usually it's more helpful to just research what an expression means, rather than trying to argue about what you personally think it _should_ mean.
That only works if expression isn't purposefully vague or misleading, which most of corpo PR speak is.
"Taking responsibility" (taking care of the kid) of condom breaking is a bit different than "taking responsiblity" (doing absolutely nothing of substance) in corporate world.
Right, so one one might use a more specific expression if they were talking about the parental responsibilities of their own future child. Again, you're trying to argue against the well-understood meaning of a colloquialism that most English speaking adults understand.
Your observation that words being said in the corporate world may be interpreted differently than in the bedroom is not a meaningful one and just comes off as uneducated, if I have to be honest. Communication in the corporate world is often deliberately vague, congratulations on your groundbreaking discovery.
It means ‘there are layoffs because of poor management decisions and it isn’t your fault if you’re being laid off and it isn’t your fault if you feel you pushed the company towards these management decisions that ultimately led to your colleagues being laid off’.
I don't know if it this is the case here but I have seen real power struggles with the boardroom (and the then-CEO departing because the board says so). I was "fun" knowing that the company imploded pretty much after that because they removed the golden eggs from the company.
It is sort of fun to watch someone shoot themselves in the foot over and over while thinking it is someone elses fault. However, they also hurt a lot of people in the process and so it would be even more idealistic to watch them lose everything for a while until they may actually be capable of feeling real guilt and remorse and not just some PR campaign.
how about cutting executive pay first? That is what usually happens in Japanese companies if leadership doesn't live up to expectations.
During covid lawmakers cut their own salary by 20%. A little bit of honor in a culture when ordinary people are taking hits goes a long way, rather than lipservice and PR.
It wouldn't "make a difference" more than it would be signaling taking responsibility.
I'm not necessarily for that but perhaps reducing his bonus this year is better way of sharing responsibility, if people really want or need one.
What does him resigning achieve? Everyone still gets laid off. The board hires another CEO. Maybe they're better, maybe they're worse. Maybe they save a little bit of money. Nobody who was laid off today gets their job back.
The knee-jerk "oh yeah you should quit if you feel bad!!1" reaction is ill-informed and boring, but unfortunately very predictable.
The next CEO is more responsible with the money. If you earn high, stakes should be high, else there is no stopping from making decisions that are harmful to all the parties: investors, employees and the company itself.
Taking personal responsibility and resigning fixes lots of things.
>>oh yeah you should quit if you feel bad
He should quit for making wrong decisions, for which he had many many weeks to months to deliberate upon. And also had the choice to not continue with the bad decisions for nearly the same time if not more.
Instead of saying things like "there are a lot of coasters" and "some of you don't belong here" it is refreshing to see someone actually say "I made a choice, and it did not work out. It was no-one else's fault but mine."
I've been through a bunch of layoff, and most of them are steeped in legal noise, mainly because in the UK layoffs need to follow a legally proscribed route. so the explanations are normally a lot less honest.
I always interpret it to mean "if you're going to hate anybody, hate me". It's deflecting blame away from his staff. "Full responsibility" is a bad term for sure.
What does "take full responsibility" mean? Is he laying himself off instead of the employees? Is he paying the employees he's laying off out of his pocket? Is he resigning so this doesn't happen again?
I'm confused how you can just say "I take full responsibility" without actually taking any responsibility. It seems like the laid off employees are taking responsibility.