Speaker 1: I'm recording this Tuesday, April fifteenth, twenty twenty five, Tax
Speaker 1: Day day, where we pay the government to provide services,
Speaker 1: to protect and defend, to provide for the common defense
Speaker 1: and the general welfare, and a lot of us are
Speaker 1: questioning that lately, and in the continuing spirit of our
Speaker 1: week of citizen ing with these short stories. Today's story
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with money in hard times,
Speaker 1: which I'm not bringing up for any particular reason, just
Speaker 1: apropos of nothing. But let's say that there's hard times
Speaker 1: and a company or organization has to let people go.
Speaker 1: What's the best way to do that? Uh. John Alexander,
Speaker 1: who I'm partnered with on this, shared this thought with
Speaker 1: me as he prepared to launch today's story that it's
Speaker 1: in the toughest of times that the thesis that all
Speaker 1: of us are smarter than any of us and can
Speaker 1: achieve better things together than we can alone, that's when
Speaker 1: the point is really proven. And so the story we're
Speaker 1: sharing today is about layoffs that are done in a
Speaker 1: group way, where the whole organization helps a company figure
Speaker 1: out how to cut its costs, and if layoffs are required,
Speaker 1: who gets let go. It sounds radical, It sounds and
Speaker 1: we're so used to like the burden of the leader
Speaker 1: that has to go. We've seen these videos of CEOs
Speaker 1: crying after they've laid off half their staff on Zoom.
Speaker 1: They don't have to bear it alone. There is another
Speaker 1: way to do it, and they can share that burden
Speaker 1: and that opportunity to lead with the people. You can
Speaker 1: citizen even in a spa es actually in the darkest
Speaker 1: times with the toughest decisions. So please listen to this.
Speaker 1: As I've said in the other of these mini drops,
Speaker 1: the visuals for these are available on Instagram, my instagram,
Speaker 1: Baratunde or how to Citizen or the Citizens Guy, and
Speaker 1: I'm also cataloging these on substack. We don't have a
Speaker 1: how to Citizen substack, which is my personal one newsletter
Speaker 1: dot baritunda dot com. So the show notes for this
Speaker 1: will have a link to the visual for this story,
Speaker 1: and I'll make sure that the show notes for the
Speaker 1: previous ones are also doing the same. But on the
Speaker 1: chant that you don't want to click on a Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg property, we'll find another archival location for it, may
Speaker 1: end up being substack, And yeah, let us know what
Speaker 1: you think about all this and head over to stories
Speaker 1: dot howdositizen dot com in order to sign up for
Speaker 1: the emails where we're releasing these every day. We have
Speaker 1: a little form and we're asking you, do you know
Speaker 1: stories like this? Are you a part of stories like this?
Speaker 1: Do you want to hear more stories like this? And
Speaker 1: we will take appropriate action together? How about that? All right?
Speaker 1: In the meantime, check out these consent based layoffs. Radical beautiful.
Speaker 2: Layoffs are a really complicated and charged topic. It can
Speaker 2: be incredibly dehumanizing depending on how you go about it
Speaker 2: for everybody involved, and it can also not be My
Speaker 2: name is Kate Sase Sassoon, and I'm a consultant who
Speaker 2: generally helps any organization that's trying to co own or
Speaker 2: co operate some kind of shared asset do it together better.
Speaker 2: We looked at each other and said, oh, we're going
Speaker 2: to have to cut the budget, which means we're going
Speaker 2: to have to fire our friends. I wanted to provide
Speaker 2: a different pathway forward, so I presented to them the
Speaker 2: idea that we could and probably should do this in
Speaker 2: a participatory fashion. We need to consult with every single
Speaker 2: member in the organization. What we need from everybody is
Speaker 2: what is your red, yellow, and green in terms of
Speaker 2: money and capacity, and we're going to see if we
Speaker 2: can make those numbers plus our financial productions match. And
Speaker 2: so we sat down, we looked at the math. Some
Speaker 2: people went down in pay but then got a commission,
Speaker 2: and some people went on a month by month contract.
Speaker 2: We actually only had to completely let go of four people.
Speaker 2: They felt like more complete, full humans. They felt respected,
Speaker 2: they felt seen, they felt heard. Everybody had a strong
Speaker 2: voice in how the company collectively faced a financial shortfall.
Speaker 2: I think that the concept of hey, you could involve
Speaker 2: your team in your layoffs is absolutely replicable across every
Speaker 2: single kind of organization. It doesn't have to strip you
Speaker 2: of your bond with these people and with the work.