Of course your CEO doesn’t really care. Ask the Red Sox.
The Red Sox fired their manager Alex Cora and a bunch of his coaches this weekend. Cora had previously won a World Series with the Red Sox in his first year as manager, but the firings happened after the team started this year with a losing record of 11 wins and 17 losses.
This is going to happen at your job one of these days. So pay attention.
These things are true
This is what happens at work. It’s nearly universal.
- You and the members of your team feel like family. You spend a lot of time together on a task that matters. You like your boss; they care about you.
- Your senior leaders regularly make statements about the value of loyalty and celebrate the most loyal employees.
- When things are going poorly, the company is going to let people go.
- The fault for things going wrong is with the decision-makers at the top, not the rank-and-file workers.
- The people let go are the rank-and-file workers, never the decision-makers at the top. Owners and CEOs don’t fire themselves. (In the rare cases where they are ever forced out, they leave with impressive golden parachutes.)
- Money trumps “family.” Workers may feel loyal to the company, but ultimately, the company’s leaders are only loyal to the shareholder.
Every worker learns this
The owner John Henry and Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow assembled a team that couldn’t win. Their strategy was flawed. But they’re still around, and their manager Cora isn’t. As Dan Shaughnessy wrote in the Boston Globe, “It wasn’t Alex Cora’s fault the Red Sox roster stinks, and he shouldn’t have been fired over it.”
But naturally he was.
The players are shocked. Of course they are. They’re in their 20s. Most of them have never seen their manager fired before.
All the hundreds of thousands of people laid off from jobs in the last year feel the same way.
“We were working on something that mattered. We were loyal to the cause. We worked long hours. We did what you asked.”
Is that a relief pitcher talking or a laid-off software engineer? They both sound the same. Both have just learned that loyalty only goes one way.
The one thing that has changed
It used to be that layoffs happened when company was doing poorly.
Now they happen when companies are doing well, because the leaders feel they can accomplish the same thing with fewer people and more AI. That will make them more profitable, and shareholders expect it.
No job is safe. Except the CEO’s, of course.
Truth spoken there.
Every employee needs to treat themselves like an independent consultant. Their consulting gig could end at any moment / and sell consulting gig’s eventually end…
So they need to have money in the bank to carry them over in the time between one gig ending and they start a new one.
So they need to spend their money while on any gig like their income stream could be ended, perhaps even abruptly, at any time.
So they can rarely, if ever, ‘coast’ at work. Because the employer has no loyalty to the worker, every.single.day is a competition with other employees to try to be the *repetetive* standout that is *less likely* to get the axe, is *slightly more likely* to get any kind of extended retention period with employer who’s letting them go (so they can earn income while looking for the next gig), etc. this, in turn, means they must learn how to take care of their own mental and physical health health as they run a marathon of daily sprints.
I could go on, but for those who have to learn to think in terms of being the owner of their own personal consulting practices, that’s what is – and has been for decades now – required.
The economic cushion is one part of it. The other part is the sociological cushion.
As a society, we’ve allowed personal and community identities to be gutted. We identify with our jobs and try to make community with people we’re forced into cutthroat competition against. That no longer makes sense.
Taking care of our mental and physical health must include disengaging from work and putting our emotional eggs in a different basket. Friends, neighbors, religious congregations, communities of interest– these need to take precedence over work, and yes that means actively “stealing” energy and attention even during the workday, relegating work to the status of chore instead of relegating personal life to “what I do in my spare time.”
In 2019, I was recognized as one of the top half-percent of employees in a 300,000-person Fortune 50 company. I was feted at a lavish affair in Las Vegas, along with the other winners. The next year, I was laid off when the entire federal proposal team was deemed unnecessary.
Oh, how this rings a bell for me. All staff gathered for Monday stand-up meeting. Told how important they were, how much they were valued… Thursday, there’d be a round of redundancies and they were out the door Friday. Poor CEO never understood why people never believed what he said on Monday. I learnt something very valuable: you’re only of use until they decide you’re not of any use.
(Of course, there was a downside and this may happen more frequently in the future. The bosses didn’t think, so the crucial person with the crucial code was shoved out the door. He offered to do a deskfile but his boss said, “Nah, we don’t need that.” Crucial person and his wife took off for their timeshare in the sun and waited for the call. “Ah, George, do you have the codes for X?”)
The whole team player/we’re a family construct is so false. Loyalty doesn’t come into it.
Our government did the same thing in 2025. Got rid of several thousand employees (they aren’t political appointments in the way that happens in the US and we can’t “fire” here like the US, so it’s a process that has to be followed). Look how much money we’ve saved, they crowed. We’re heading for round 2 because there’s an election in November.
Wait for AI to come for the bosses.
This reminds me of the ageism exercised in hiring, usually couched in politically correct language. The employer doesn’t want to hire an experienced (and therefore “older”) candidate, because the candidate won’t be around for 40 years of loyal service. Yet the employer is looking to hire candidates for two to four years. The employer has no interest in a “loyal employee” to whom the employer may ultimately owe a pension, usually provided after ten years of service. And most companies today don’t offer pensions anymore anyway. As a result, employees come and employees go, through a revolving door, costing a company more money than it realizes – the expense of training the individual to the specifics of the job and the necessary teamwork, then letting the employees go after a few years, taking with them valuable “tribal knowledge.”
My father, who worked for General Electric for 45 years, begged his bosses to give him some young, new engineers to mentor, to take his place when he retired. They never did, and when he had to retire for health reasons, they actually called him, as he lay in the hospital from a heart attack, asking if he could come in to train some new guys. (One of those “doh!” and “duh!” moments.)