Hey, it's Laura and Jason.
Welcome to Issue #8 of The Weekly UNLOK, where human potential meets organizational performance.
"THE WORK THAT NEVER SHOWED UP ON THE ORG CHART"
FROM LAURA
I am so lucky to get to work with the COOLEST people. Like, seriously, coolest. Executives who make me believe that our collective future is bright.
One of my exec coaching clients is an amazing HR executive. Twenty-five years of navigating PE-backed companies, international manufacturing, and has the kindest of hearts.
And she’s exhausted. Like, beyond exhausted.
Her company went from seven HR people to three, in a matter of months.
Three people are now carrying what seven were doing.
Somebody removed the line items from the org chart and called it efficiency, but the work didn’t just evaporate.
She is working 60+ hours a week and is still giving 120%. The achiever in her won’t let her do anything less.
She’s being the umbrella (she called it that) - you know, the front line shield between what the executive environment has done and what the people on the floor feel.
She is holding the line while moving backwards every day.
You’ve probably been that umbrella. Or you’ve had one. Or you’ve been the one who cut a role and never saw who absorbed the work.
The umbrella is always the last to speak up, because it feels like complaining.
She still has a job, so she tells herself to be grateful and just get the work done.
But she said something that I think paints the picture perfectly…
“You can’t just cut your way into profitability. It only works for a few cycles. And then you’re done.”
She’s been in organizations long enough to know what the end of the cycle looks like, and she’s living inside one right now.
FROM JASON
Lets be clear… layoffs can be necessary. To pretend otherwise isn’t facing reality.
But when they do happen, they test how well you’ve done the organizational work to actually get the cost savings you’re looking for.
Most headcount decisions look clean on paper.
The numbers make sense. The remaining team is strong. Leadership feels good about the call.
But all too often, ninety days later, things start breaking.
A vendor relationship goes sideways because the person who managed it is gone, and nobody knew there was a relationship to manage.
A client goes cold because the one person who held the history of that account walked out the door with it.
This is what happens when the invisible work never got mapped.
I recently heard about a leader who was let go from his organization.
By all accounts, he was the person who kept everything moving.
Seventy hours a week.
Deeply involved in every decision. His team could not take a step without him.
When he was laid off, nobody knew what to do.
Leadership didn’t know half of what he’d been carrying. The team didn’t know how to own anything, because he’d never let them.
He hadn’t built a team. He’d built a dependency.
Every decision ran through him because he’d never told anyone how he made them.
Every task got assigned because he’d never given his people real authority and trust.
He was both the bottleneck and the safety net, and it took his departure for anyone to see the full cost.
Leaders like this are not unusual. Versions of him exist in most organizations.
The difference between an organization that weathers a departure like that and one that falls apart after is whether anyone did the work of making the invisible visible.
That work starts with two simple questions: who owns what, and what guides people when they have to make a call without running it upstairs first.
Most organizations have never answered that cleanly. Perhaps accountability was assigned, but not the real authority and context to act.
When that’s true, you don’t actually have a team. You have a group of people waiting to be told what to do.
The organizations that hold together under pressure are the ones where people know what they own, understand how decisions are supposed to get made, and have real permission to act on their judgment.
That’s the organizational work that makes a headcount decision survivable, and doesn’t burn up the savings you thought you were going to get.
And it’s the same work that makes everything else run better in the meantime.
The ninety-day breakdown isn’t inevitable. But it requires doing the work before you need it.
YOUR TURN
Inner Game: Think about a time you absorbed work that was never officially yours after a team was cut or restructured. Did you share it with anyone? What did staying silent cost you and the organization?
Outer Game: What work in your organization right now is invisible on the org chart but essential to how things function? Who's carrying it, and what's the plan if they stop?
We’re here for the ripple effect ✨,
Laura & Jason
P.S. - Have a story to tell? Reply back and let us know. We're collecting more evidence from those who have lived it.
BEFORE YOU GO: HOW WE CAN HELP
FOR COMPANIES: If your best people are running at capacity while your headcount reports show efficiency gains, the gap between those two realities is a performance problem worth measuring. Book a strategy call.
OR... [Take the free self-assessment →]
FOR INDIVIDUALS: Laura works personally with a small number of senior leaders navigating transitions and invisible load. Book an activation session and let’s get into it.