Both Sides of the Desk

Hello, Friends!

Welcome back to The Human Leader Project. This is one I've wanted to tell for a long time, and it starts on one of the hardest days of my working life. If this time of year has you worried about your job, or about someone else's, I'm thinking of you as you read it.

We start here.

In December 2008, as Wells Fargo was taking over Wachovia, my sales partner and I were handed a list of names. I was a district manager in Southern California then. I was one of a group Wachovia had moved out west three years earlier to build something new, and we had spent those years having a once-in-a-career run together, full of fun and challenge and the feeling that we were doing something exceptional. The list was the part of the merger none of us had moved across the country for.

My partner was John, the same John some of you met in the Celine Dion essay. Some of the names on the list were his people and some were mine, and he and I spent one day delivering the same message to more than twenty people across our district.

One of the names belonged to a branch manager I had hired into her role three years before. I had watched her grow into it, and somewhere in those years I had come to care deeply for the people on my team, her among them. John and I sat down with her, and I began telling her that her role was being eliminated. About halfway through, I started to cry.

I wasn't proud of that. I remember feeling it come and thinking that the moment was supposed to be about her, and the least I owed her was to get through it cleanly, and I couldn't. I remember her face. She told me it was okay that I had cried. I apologized to her again anyway, and then I hugged her, and then I went to the next person.

I knew, that day in December, that my name could be on the next list. It took until July.

By then all of us in the group could tell something was coming, even if none of us knew exactly what. When I got to the office that morning, I knew my boss would be there, and so would someone from Wells Fargo's HR team. My peers and I sat outside her office and went in one at a time.

When it was my turn, she looked fairly somber. She was the same leader who, a few years earlier, had asked to see my calendar. She told me my role was being eliminated as part of the merger, and then she told me she was so sorry that this was where they had landed. I could see it had genuinely affected her to say it. Over three years in California she had become a friend, and I knew she was not happy to be the one telling me. Seven months earlier I had been the one doing the telling, and I recognized what was on her face.

John went in right after me. When he came out with the same news, we stood together for a few minutes, the two of us who had spent a day in December going from one person to the next, and consoled each other briefly. Then we had to get on with the day.

We had been given thirty days' working notice and told not to tell anyone yet. I had already scheduled a meeting that afternoon with my fifteen branch managers, every one of whom had lived through December with me. So I went straight into a two-hour meeting with them, in person, and spent it acting as though nothing had happened to me that morning.

The thirty days ended in August, and then there was the job search.

I can't see a single morning from that stretch clearly. What I remember is the routine. Every day I either sat in my home office looking for jobs or fully leaned into Starbucks camping, and some days I did both. Having the routine mattered, because it gave the days a shape.

What I didn't have was any sense of how common this was. Large organizations do this. Mergers come with lists, and I had helped deliver one. I took it personally anyway, completely, as if the decision had been a judgment on my worth and on who I was. In December I had watched someone I hired hear the same news, and I would never have told her it said anything about her. I couldn't give myself the same courtesy.

Ten years later, in 2019, I was a year into a role as an HR business partner, and the business I supported needed to reduce its headcount. My job was to help my clients through it: the population affected, the numbers needed, how we would select, and the adverse impact analysis that checks whether a selection falls harder on one group than another. I sat at my desk in meeting after meeting with the business and with our legal and compliance partners, making sure we got it right. Through all of them I kept thinking that every line we moved was someone's life. I had been handed a list of my own people once, and I had been on one. I was determined that this time we would handle it with as much care as we possibly could.

One of the leaders I supported had a relatively small team, and I knew everyone on it well. They were high performers from end to end. Nobody's performance made the decision for us, and there was no easy pick. We were choosing among top performers, and there was no easy answer.

In the end we went with functional criticality and with whose work could most easily be absorbed by the people who stayed.

Functional criticality is a question about the job. Absorbable is a question about the work. Whoever's name came out of that conversation was one of the best people on a very good team, and the decision said almost nothing about them. I wish I could say that sitting in that chair settled 2009 for me. It didn't. It helped me understand it a bit more.

The branch manager I hired went on to find a similar role at another bank.

What helped me, that morning in July, was that my boss was deeply concerned about my wellbeing, truly, and I could see it on her face. The decision was going to be the same whether she felt anything or not. The thirty days and the paperwork were going to be the same. The only part of that morning that said anything about who I was came from her.

A list can be careful, fair and defensible, every criterion checked by legal and compliance, and it still can't tell anyone what they're worth. It was never built to. Whoever is on it will take it home and treat it as if it said everything about them. Some part of me still does, seventeen years later.

If you are the one hearing it, I can't talk you out of taking it personally. I couldn't talk myself out of it. What I can tell you is that I have sat on the other side of that decision, and the people we had to choose between were some of the best we had.

And if you are the one across the desk, it is going to cost you something, as it cost my boss in July and me in December. It should. But by the time you sit down, the list will already have said everything it can, and most of what you have to say was said long before. I believed my boss that morning because of three years in California, and all the moments in them when she had shown me her care and her commitment to me. Whether the person across from you knows it wasn't easy, and whether they leave knowing they mattered, will come from how you made them feel on all the days leading up to that one.

"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." — MB

If someone came to mind while you were reading, send this to them.

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