Wayfair lays off 13% of its workforce weeks after telling employees to work harder::Wayfair is laying off 1,650 employees, amounting to 13% of its global workforce, as the online home goods retailer struggled to rebound following its success amid pandemic lockdowns.
I’m suggesting that the current leaders earn their pay through definable metrics. If the company is growing why are they shedding workers? It’s an indication that management either over-hired before or is stupidly firing people now. Both are bad.
Terrible metrics are used by many companies which encourage short term profits over the long term health of the organization. I’ve seen managers make decisions to cut expenses which look good on a P&L in the short term but have terrible consequences for the organization that only become apparent two or three years later. Usually after the person who made the decision has collected their bonus and moved onto another organization.
The sad thing is those people are promoted or recruited over more stead fast leaders who can actually grow an organization because their metrics look good.
I can 100% guarantee you that 99% of all C-suites are held to very definable metrics as a large part of their compensation.
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Amazing. Coherrent argument.
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You didn’t answer the very simple questions I asked about growth.
Ah fair enough.
If the company is growing why are they shedding workers? I mean, I don’t know, but some avenues I can imagine are: Their growth is happening in areas that aren’t people-intensive, their profit margins are lower than their competitors, they don’t have the right people to meet their strategy, they hired in anticipation of some trends continuing and they don’t, etc etc. Or a combination of the above.
I’m not saying that their leadership is blameless. I’m only saying that from the data I have, their leadership isn’t automatically to blame either.
Leadership is always to blame if there are problems. That’s what being a leader is.
Here’s an easy way to tell who to blame: if their recent projects were a success, who would get the accolades?
The executive leadership team, most likely. No one would say “they don’t automatically get credit”. So they should get the blame when things go poorly.