You Didn’t Make the Layoff Decision. So Why Does Your Team Experience You as Part of It?
Middle managers are expected to represent decisions they did not make, absorb reactions they cannot resolve, and keep delivering results while trust collapses around them. The way forward begins when leaders stop trying to control the entire situation and identify the narrow band of responsibility that is genuinely theirs.
This article is adapted from Chapter 5, “The Middle Position,” in Twice Cut: Rebuilding Trust When the Layoffs Don’t Stop. The chapter examines the difficult position occupied by managers who stand between executive decisions and the employees who must live with their consequences. It continues the narrative-driven format and practical leadership approach established in Article 3.
Terrence had a script by the second round of layoffs.
He did not think of it as a script.
He thought of it as leadership.
The organization had provided managers with approved talking points explaining why the restructuring was necessary. Market conditions had changed. Customer demand had shifted. The company needed to become more efficient, more focused, and better positioned for long-term growth.
Terrence understood the logic.
At least, he understood the version of the logic that had been shared with him.
He had not participated in the executive meetings where the final decisions were made. He had not selected the positions that would be eliminated. He had not seen every financial assumption behind the plan.
But he had been given enough information to explain the decision confidently.
So he did.
When an employee asked why one department had lost six people while another had lost only one, Terrence explained that the company had reviewed each function separately.
When someone asked why hiring had continued just weeks before the announcement, he said conditions had changed quickly.
When a senior employee questioned whether the reductions would actually solve the underlying problem, Terrence repeated that leadership had developed a sustainable operating model.
He believed most of what he said.
The parts he did not fully understand, he delivered with the confidence expected of a manager.
The meetings remained orderly.
Nobody raised their voice.
Employees returned to work.
From an operational perspective, Terrence believed he had handled the situation well.
Then the third round arrived.
This time, the team did not challenge him.
Nobody asked why the cuts were happening.
Nobody questioned the timing.
Nobody asked whether the restructuring was finally complete.
The questions had not been answered.
They had disappeared.
Terrence initially interpreted the silence as acceptance.
Perhaps the team had finally understood the business reality.
Perhaps people had become more resilient.
Perhaps his previous explanations had helped them recognize that these decisions were difficult but necessary.
Then he began noticing what the silence looked like outside the layoff meetings.
Employees who had once asked him for context began checking with people in other departments instead.
Potential problems reached him later.
Project plans became shorter.
Team members stopped asking what decisions meant for the next six months and concentrated only on what had to be completed that week.
Terrence had not persuaded the team.
He had taught them that asking him would not produce information they could safely use.
The script had ended the meetings.
It had also weakened the reason anyone would come to him with a real question.
When the third announcement arrived, Terrence made a different choice.
He stood in front of the team and said:
“Here is what I know. Here is what I do not know. I was not in the room where this decision was made, and there are parts of it I would not have chosen. I can explain what has been confirmed about our immediate work. I cannot tell you whether another round will happen, because I do not have information that would make that promise honest.”
Nobody thanked him.
Nobody visibly relaxed.
There was no sudden breakthrough.
But during the following weeks, something small changed.
An employee who had barely spoken to him since the second round asked a serious follow-up question about how a client responsibility would be reassigned.
It was not a question designed to expose a contradiction.
It was not a procedural request for proof.
It was a question that assumed Terrence might know something useful.
Terrence noticed it immediately.
The team was not trusting him again.
Not yet.
But someone had decided he might once again be worth asking.
The Position Nobody Applied For
Most managers leading teams through repeated layoffs did not create the conditions producing them.
They did not decide that growth projections had been too optimistic.
They did not approve the acquisition that failed to deliver.
They did not set the cost-reduction target.
They did not determine which roles would be eliminated.
Many managers learn about the decision only shortly before their teams do.
Sometimes the advance notice is measured in days.
Sometimes it is measured in hours.
Yet the manager still stands at the point where the decision becomes real.
An executive approves a workforce reduction in a distant meeting.
A spreadsheet identifies the positions.
Human resources prepares the process.
Legal reviews the language.
Communications approves the announcement.
Then a manager sits across from an employee whose mortgage, family plans, health insurance, and professional identity may be altered by what happens next.
The organization may understand the manager as a messenger.
The employee usually does not experience them that way.
To the employee, the manager is the visible face of the decision.
That may feel unfair.
It is also structurally predictable.
Most employees have no meaningful relationship with the executive committee.
They do not attend the meetings where tradeoffs are discussed.
They cannot ask the spreadsheet why one role remained and another disappeared.
They cannot challenge the financial model directly.
They can see their manager.
They can hear their manager’s words.
They can remember what their manager said after the previous round.
The manager becomes the interface between the institution and the person affected by it.
And interfaces are often experienced as the source.
Your Team Does Not Fully Separate You From the Decision
Managers frequently try to create distance between themselves and a decision they did not make.
They say:
“This came from above.”
“I found out when you did.”
“This was not my call.”
“I fought for the team.”
“You know I would never have chosen this.”
Some of those statements may be completely true.
But truth alone does not determine whether the statement helps.
When employees are frightened and angry, they are rarely evaluating the organizational chart.
They are evaluating whether the person in front of them can still be used as a reliable source of information, protection, and judgment.
A manager’s attempt to establish innocence may answer a question the team is not asking.
The team may already understand that the manager did not personally select every position.
Their concern is different.
What did the manager know?
When did they know it?
What did they say before the announcement?
Did they repeat assurances they could not verify?
Will they continue defending decisions they do not understand?
Will they tell the team when their information is incomplete?
Will they protect employees from the operational consequences where they can?
The question is not simply whether the manager caused the decision.
The question is what the manager will do from the position they occupy now.
This is the difficult reality of the middle position:
You are not the decision.
But your team will never experience you as entirely separate from it.
The more energy you spend proving that separation, the less energy remains for the responsibilities that are genuinely yours.
Three Demands Press on the Manager at Once
After repeated layoffs, the middle position creates three demands.
Each one is legitimate.
None can be completely satisfied.
1. Represent a decision you may privately disagree with
Managers are expected to communicate organizational decisions responsibly.
That does not mean they must personally agree with every choice.
It does mean they cannot openly sabotage the organization while continuing to lead inside it.
This creates a narrow line.
On one side is false ownership.
The manager speaks as though they designed the strategy, reviewed every option, and fully endorse the outcome.
They borrow certainty from the organization and present it as their own.
On the other side is public disownership.
The manager distances themselves so aggressively that employees are left with no leader at all.
They imply that senior leadership is incompetent, suggest that the decision makes no sense, or position themselves as another victim standing helplessly beside the team.
False ownership damages credibility because employees eventually discover that the manager’s confidence exceeded their knowledge.
Complete disownership damages stability because it tells the team that nobody in the room is willing or able to lead.
The useful position is neither defense nor abandonment.
It is honest representation.
The manager can explain what is known without claiming authorship.
They can acknowledge what they do not understand without undermining every decision.
They can say that a choice was made without pretending they would have made it the same way.
That may sound less authoritative than the traditional leadership script.
In a vigilant team, it is often more credible.
2. Absorb the team’s reaction
Employees need somewhere for their anger, fear, grief, and disbelief to go.
The manager is usually the nearest available surface.
A question about workload may carry anger about the layoffs.
A complaint about a deadline may actually be a protest against the organization’s priorities.
A challenge to the manager’s wording may be connected to something a different executive said six months earlier.
A normally measured employee may speak sharply.
Someone may quote the manager’s earlier reassurance back to them.
Another person may become silent in a way that feels more punishing than anger.
The manager absorbs all of it.
Knowing that the reaction is not entirely personal does not prevent it from feeling personal.
The words still reach the manager’s body.
The silence still fills the manager’s room.
The employee’s disappointment is still directed toward the person sitting in front of them.
Some managers defend themselves.
They explain that they did not know.
They describe how hard they fought.
They remind the team that managers are under pressure too.
Others absorb the reaction so completely that they begin treating every employee emotion as a problem they must solve personally.
Neither response works for long.
Defensiveness turns the team’s pain into a debate about the manager’s intentions.
Overabsorption turns the manager into an emotional container with no limit.
The manager’s responsibility is to receive the reaction without requiring the team to revise it immediately.
That is different from agreeing with every accusation.
It is also different from carrying every emotion home as a verdict on personal worth.
3. Keep delivering results
The work continues.
Customers still expect answers.
Projects still have deadlines.
Reports still must be completed.
Senior leadership still reviews performance.
In many organizations, the same team that lost people is expected to maintain the commitments established when those people were still employed.
The manager is therefore asked to do two kinds of work simultaneously.
They must lead through the emotional and trust consequences of the layoffs.
They must also produce operational results with fewer people and less attention.
Neither demand pauses for the other.
This is where many managers become trapped.
They believe the only way to protect the team is to personally absorb more work.
They attend more meetings.
They take over unfinished assignments.
They shield senior leadership from delivery risks because they do not want the remaining employees blamed.
They work longer hours to prevent the reduction from becoming visible in the output.
For a while, this can look like commitment.
Eventually, it hides the true cost of the decision.
The organization sees the same results with fewer people and concludes that the old staffing level was unnecessary.
The team sees the manager deteriorating and learns that survival requires unsustainable effort.
The manager becomes evidence against the capacity argument they should have been making.
Keeping the business moving is part of the job.
Making the consequences of reduced capacity invisible is not.
Why Trying Harder Does Not Resolve the Middle Position
Managers often respond to impossible conditions by increasing effort.
If employees distrust the decision, explain it more thoroughly.
If the team is angry, become more available.
If the workload is too large, work longer.
If results decline, push harder.
But the middle position is not an effort problem.
It is a boundary problem.
The manager is spending energy across three areas:
What was decided above them.
What the team directs toward them.
What they can actually do next.
Only the third area reliably converts effort into leadership value.
The decision itself may be outside the manager’s control.
The team’s emotional response may be outside the manager’s control.
The manager’s communication, follow-through, workload decisions, escalation, and daily treatment of employees are not.
This is the narrow band of leadership available inside the middle position.
It may feel small compared with everything pressing against it.
It is not insignificant.
It is the only area where the manager’s effort can consistently become evidence.
Why Defending the Decision Usually Backfires
Managers frequently defend decisions because they believe leadership requires alignment.
They worry that visible uncertainty will frighten the team.
They fear that acknowledging disagreement will make them appear disloyal.
They assume employees need a unified explanation.
So they take the organization’s rationale and strengthen it.
A statement that began as “This restructuring is expected to improve efficiency” becomes:
“This is the right decision for the business.”
An estimate becomes a conclusion.
A projection becomes a promise.
A strategy the manager did not design becomes a position they are expected to defend in detail.
This creates borrowed confidence.
Borrowed confidence feels useful in the moment because it makes communication cleaner.
The manager sounds decisive.
The meeting moves faster.
Questions are answered.
But borrowed confidence creates long-term exposure.
Employees remember who delivered the claim.
They rarely remember which executive presentation originally contained it.
If the prediction fails, the credibility loss settles on the manager who spoke with certainty.
That is what happened to Terrence.
His explanations were not necessarily dishonest.
They were simply more confident than his access justified.
Over time, employees recognized the gap.
He sounded like the source of the decision.
But he could not answer like someone who had actually made it.
The team eventually stopped testing the gap.
It routed around him.
Why Disowning the Decision Also Fails
Once managers realize that defending the decision is damaging, they may move to the opposite extreme.
They tell the team:
“I think this is a mistake too.”
“Leadership has no idea what this will do.”
“I tried to stop it.”
“There is nothing I can do.”
This may create temporary closeness.
Employees may appreciate hearing that their manager shares their frustration.
The manager may feel relief after dropping the corporate language.
But complete disownership creates a different credibility problem.
It asks employees to view the manager as powerless.
If the manager cannot influence the decision, cannot explain it, cannot protect the work, and cannot establish what happens next, employees may reasonably ask what leadership function remains.
The manager has joined the team emotionally but abandoned the position operationally.
Shared frustration is not the same as useful leadership.
Employees do not need the manager to pretend the decision was wise.
They also do not need another colleague narrating how little power anyone has.
They need someone who can identify the part that remains actionable.
The honest position may sound like this:
“I was not part of the final decision. I have concerns about the effect on our capacity, and I am documenting those concerns. The decision has been made. What I can influence now is how we reset priorities, which commitments we challenge, how responsibilities are reassigned, and how quickly I return with answers to the questions that remain open.”
That statement does not defend the decision.
It does not disown leadership responsibility.
It locates the manager accurately.
The Narrow Band You Actually Control
The manager cannot control everything the team wants changed.
But several important responsibilities remain fully within reach.
The boundary of your knowledge
You control whether you present an assumption as a fact.
You control whether you say “I know” when you actually mean “I expect.”
You control whether you promise an outcome that depends on people above you.
You control whether uncertainty is named clearly or covered with confident language.
This matters because employees are already trying to determine how much weight each statement deserves.
Helping them distinguish confirmed information from expectation is not a sign of weakness.
It reduces the amount of private interpretation they must perform.
A useful communication structure is:
What I know
The facts that have been confirmed and can be described precisely.
What I expect
The current working assumption, clearly labeled as an assumption.
What I do not know
Questions that remain open.
What I will do next
The action within the manager’s control, including when the team will receive another update.
This structure does not remove uncertainty.
It prevents uncertainty from being disguised as knowledge.
Your follow-through
Large promises are dangerous after repeated layoffs.
Small commitments become more important.
“I will send the revised priorities by Thursday.”
“I will ask whether the customer deadline can move.”
“I will return with an answer even if the answer is that no decision has been made.”
“I will schedule individual workload reviews this week.”
These commitments may appear minor compared with the organizational instability surrounding them.
That is precisely why they matter.
The team is not only evaluating the importance of the commitment.
It is evaluating whether the manager’s words still predict behavior.
Every completed follow-up reconnects those two things.
Every missed follow-up separates them further.
The workload you protect
A manager may not be able to restore eliminated positions.
They can refuse to pretend that the original workload still fits the reduced team.
They can identify what stops.
They can reduce scope.
They can challenge deadlines.
They can document capacity loss.
They can force a choice between resources and commitments rather than allowing employees to absorb both silently.
Workload protection is one of the most visible forms of post-layoff leadership because it changes the team’s lived conditions.
A manager who speaks compassionately but allows every old priority to remain has provided acknowledgment without protection.
A manager who removes two low-value reports, delays a nonessential project, and escalates a staffing risk has created evidence.
The action may not solve the larger problem.
It demonstrates that the manager sees the consequence and is willing to make it operationally visible.
The honesty of your position
You control whether you inflate your authority.
You also control whether you hide behind your lack of authority.
You can say:
“I did not make this decision.”
But the sentence cannot end there.
The useful continuation is:
“Here is what remains mine.”
That may include:
Communicating accurately.
Resetting priorities.
Protecting respectful treatment.
Escalating capacity risks.
Returning with answers.
Refusing to make promises unsupported by evidence.
Managing the work fairly.
The middle position becomes more sustainable when the manager stops measuring leadership by whether they can reverse the decision.
Leadership is measured by whether they use the authority that remains honestly and consistently.
Use a Control Inventory Before You Communicate
When a manager is overwhelmed, every problem begins to feel equally urgent and equally personal.
It helps to sort the situation before trying to solve it.
Create three columns.
Decided above me
Place organizational decisions here.
The number of positions eliminated.
The financial target.
The timing of the announcement.
The approved severance package.
The executive rationale.
Whether another restructuring will eventually occur.
These issues may deserve escalation or challenge.
But the manager should not confuse influence with control.
A decision can affect you deeply without belonging to you operationally.
Reactions I absorb
Place the team’s responses here.
Anger.
Silence.
Distrust.
Questions you cannot answer.
Disappointment directed toward you.
Skepticism about positive news.
Complaints about previous assurances.
These reactions are real information.
They should be heard.
But they cannot be forced into resolution.
You cannot require the team to trust faster.
You cannot make someone feel safe through managerial effort alone.
You cannot argue an employee out of the memory of what happened last time.
Actions actually mine
This is the working agenda.
What will you communicate?
What will you stop promising?
Which workload assumptions will you challenge?
What question will you escalate?
When will you follow up?
Which meeting can be canceled?
Which responsibility must be reassigned clearly?
Where is an employee carrying an unfair burden?
What can you make more predictable this week?
The first two columns explain the pressure.
The third column identifies the leadership.
This separation is not an attempt to become emotionally detached.
It is a way to stop spending finite energy on outcomes that effort alone cannot produce.
Do Not Ask the Team to Prove You Are Innocent
There is a subtle temptation in the middle position.
The manager wants the team to understand.
They want someone to say:
“We know this was not your fault.”
“We know you tried.”
“We know you are under pressure too.”
Sometimes employees will say those things.
They may even mean them.
But the manager cannot make that recognition a condition of leading well.
The team is already carrying the consequences of the decision.
It should not also be asked to manage the leader’s need for moral separation from it.
This does not mean managers should suppress every feeling.
They need somewhere to process anger, guilt, and uncertainty.
But that place may be a trusted peer, mentor, coach, therapist, partner, or private journal.
The team cannot become the primary audience for the manager’s defense.
When a manager repeatedly explains that the decision was not theirs, employees may begin feeling pressured to comfort them.
The direction of care reverses.
The people with less authority become responsible for reassuring the person with more.
That weakens the very leadership relationship the manager is trying to protect.
What Terrence’s New Sentence Actually Changed
Terrence did not gain access to executive decision-making before the third round.
He did not receive better information.
He did not suddenly agree with every part of the restructuring.
He did not obtain proof that another round would never happen.
The circumstances were largely the same.
His position inside them changed.
“Here is what I know” established the boundary of confirmed information.
“Here is what I do not know” removed the performance of certainty.
“I was not in the room where this decision was made” described his actual access.
“There are parts of it I would not have chosen” acknowledged distance without asking the team to join him in attacking leadership.
“Here is what I can tell you about what happens next” returned attention to the actions that were genuinely his.
“I cannot promise another round will not happen” prevented a new withdrawal from an already damaged credibility account.
Terrence did not become more powerful.
He became more precise.
That precision created a reason to ask him a question again.
The First Sign of Recovery May Be Disagreement
Managers often look for warmth as evidence that trust is returning.
They want meetings to feel lighter.
They hope employees will become more enthusiastic.
They watch for smiles, volunteering, and visible optimism.
Those signs may eventually appear.
They are not always the first ones.
The first sign may be an objection.
An employee challenges a project assumption.
Someone raises a risk early.
A team member asks a difficult question instead of checking privately with colleagues afterward.
A high performer explains why a deadline is unrealistic.
These moments can feel uncomfortable.
They are also evidence.
The employee has decided that speaking into the leadership relationship may once again produce value.
Silence protects the employee.
A real question creates exposure.
The person asking it is taking a small risk that the manager will respond honestly, act usefully, or at least avoid punishing the challenge.
Terrence’s employee did not tell him that trust had improved.
They asked him a question that required trust to be possible.
That was enough.
The Middle Position Is Not a Fairness Question
Managers can spend months asking whether it is fair that employees associate them with decisions made above them.
The answer may be no.
It may also be irrelevant to the work that follows.
The team experiences the organization through the manager.
That experience creates responsibility even when it does not create fault.
Responsibility and fault are not the same thing.
Fault looks backward and asks who caused the damage.
Responsibility looks forward and asks who can influence what happens next.
A manager can reject unfair blame without rejecting responsibility.
They can acknowledge:
“I did not create this situation.”
And still decide:
“I will lead accurately inside it.”
This is not accepting guilt for someone else’s decision.
It is accepting the reality of the position.
You are standing where decisions and consequences meet.
You cannot control the pressure coming from above.
You cannot control every reaction coming from below.
You can control what happens in the narrow band between them.
That is where your credibility will be judged.
Not by whether you explain the restructuring perfectly.
Not by whether the team immediately forgives the organization.
Not by whether you work hard enough to make reduced capacity invisible.
Your credibility will be judged by whether your words match your knowledge.
Whether your commitments predict your behavior.
Whether you make the workload honest.
Whether you describe your position without performance or escape.
Whether people who bring difficult information are safer after doing so.
Whether you become useful even before you become fully trusted.
Stop Trying to Win the Case
The middle manager often feels as though they are standing trial.
The team is the jury.
The organization supplied the evidence.
The manager’s previous statements are being quoted back.
Every new announcement feels like another opportunity to prove that they meant well.
But the objective is not to win the case.
You may never convince every employee that you handled the earlier rounds correctly.
You may never receive acknowledgment for the decisions you challenged privately.
You may never be able to explain everything you knew or did not know at the time.
Trust will not return because the team finally accepts your defense.
It will return, if it returns, because your current behavior becomes consistently usable.
Terrence’s team did not need a better explanation of his intentions.
It needed a more accurate experience of his leadership.
That experience began when he stopped borrowing confidence from decisions he did not own.
It continued when he stopped asking the team to treat him as separate from the organization.
He accepted the middle position without pretending it was fair.
Then he led from the part of it that was actually his.
The result was not immediate loyalty.
It was a question.
A real one.
That question meant an employee had allowed Terrence’s answer to matter again.
After repeated layoffs, that is not a small development.
It is the beginning of restored usefulness.
And usefulness often returns before trust has a name.
You may not have made the decision.
You may disagree with it.
You may have warned against it.
Your team may still experience you as part of it.
The leadership question is no longer whether that is fair.
It is whether you will exhaust yourself defending what is not yours, abandon the position because you did not choose it, or work honestly inside the narrow band that remains.
The decision came from above.
The reaction is coming from below.
Your leadership lives between them.
That is the middle position.
You did not apply for it.
But now that you are standing there, accuracy matters more than innocence.
Adapted from Twice Cut: Rebuilding Trust When the Layoffs Don’t Stop by Byron K. Veasey.
Available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H8RQ4TN7
About the Author
Byron K. Veasey is a career strategist and leader in data quality engineering focused on helping professionals navigate job searches, burnout, and career reinvention.
He writes Career Strategies, a Substack newsletter read by over 4,900 professionals navigating today’s evolving job market.
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