The Litmus Test of Leadership: And How Eclectic Leaders Pass It

I want to ask you something before we get into this. Think about the best leader you have ever worked with. Now think about how they handled the hardest conversation they ever had to have with someone on their team. I would wager that is the memory that actually defines them for you, not the strategy offsite, not the quarterly all-hands, not the vision they articulated so well. It is the hard moment. It is always the hard moment.

Anyone can lead when the numbers are up and the team is firing. You know that. I know that. What I often think about, and what I think more leaders need to sit with honestly, is what kind of leader you actually are when you have to take someone's livelihood away. That is the question nobody prints on the values poster. And that is the litmus test.

Right now, AI is administering it at a scale and a speed that most leadership programmes never prepared any of us for.

What a Litmus Test Actually Is

In chemistry, a litmus test does one thing cleanly and without sentiment: it tells you the truth. No ambiguity, no middle ground, no room for a well-worded explanation of why the result does not mean what it clearly means. Blue or red. Acid or alkali. The test does not care how polished the solution looks in the flask.

I think leadership works exactly the same way, and I think most leaders know this somewhere, even if they would rather not look at it too directly. You can spend years building a reputation on town halls and away days, on cascaded vision statements and carefully worded culture values, on the kind of 'we are a family' messaging that sounds warm until the family needs to downsize. All of it, every bit of it, will sit on the scale against the moment you have to look someone in the eye, or more likely draft the email, that ends their employment.

In that one moment, your people, the ones you are keeping and the ones you are losing, learn exactly who you are. And the language you choose in that moment is not a formality. It is the test itself.

The AI Accelerant

In the first quarter of 2023 alone, tech giants including Google, Meta, Microsoft and IBM let go of some 167,400 employees. I want you to sit with that number for a second. That is not a statistic about market cycles. That is 167,400 mornings where someone woke up employed and went to bed wondering what comes next.

And the way it happened, that is what I cannot stop thinking about. At Google, employees discovered they had been made redundant not through a conversation or a scheduled meeting, but because they found themselves force-logged off every device simultaneously, overnight, with no warning whatsoever. One worker described trying to check whether a colleague had been let go by sending them a message, knowing that if it failed to deliver, that was the answer. Think about that for a moment. The confirmation of your job loss is a message that bounces.

At Meta, partners of employees were awake at 4 a.m. watching their spouses refresh inboxes, waiting to find out whether a notification email arriving in that narrow window meant the end of the family income. The guillotine, timed to the minute, dropped into a personal inbox before the sun came up. You might be reading this thinking that sounds extreme. I promise you it is not. It is documented. It happened to real people with real families and real mortgages.

Now, I am not making the argument that redundancies are inherently wrong. Markets shift. Businesses overextend. The pandemic created a hiring reality that evaporated almost as fast as it was built, and I think most reasonable people understand that. What I am arguing, and I feel strongly about this, is that the manner of departure is always a leadership choice, even when the decision to let someone go is not. By 2024, 152,922 employees had been laid off from 551 companies in the tech sector alone, with AI repeatedly cited as a structural driver. This is not a temporary disruption you can wait out. It is the operating environment, and the litmus test is coming for every leader in every industry whether they feel ready for it or not.

The Language Problem

Here is where I want to get specific, because this is the part that I think matters most and gets talked about least.

The language surrounding redundancy is almost universally designed to protect the organisation rather than honour the person leaving it. And I wonder if most leaders even notice they are doing it. Consider the phrases you or your organisation probably reach for instinctively: restructuring, right-sizing, workforce optimisation, a difficult but necessary decision. Every single one of those phrases centres the company's logic and the company's narrative. Not one of them acknowledges the human being sitting on the other side of the email.

Sundar Pichai, announcing Google's 12,000 job losses, wrote that the company had hired for a different economic reality than the one it faces today, and that roles were being eliminated following a rigorous review. I read that and I think: nobody eliminates the roles. People do. Decisions do. It is a masterclass in passive construction, and I suspect it was very carefully written precisely because of that. The roles are simply being eliminated, as if by some impersonal market force rather than by a series of deliberate choices made by people in rooms. And if it just happens like weather, then nobody is responsible for how it feels to be rained on.

You might think that is unfair on Pichai specifically. Maybe it is. But I would ask you to read back your own organisation's last redundancy communication and count how many times the company is the subject of the sentence, and how many times the person losing their job is. I think you will find the ratio uncomfortable.

Research is unambiguous on this point: the manner in which a redundancy is communicated is critically relevant to how employees experience it, and treating people with genuine respect and dignity throughout the process has a profound impact on trust and on the emotional toll the separation takes on everyone involved. A generous severance package delivered via a revoked access badge and a 4 a.m. email is not an act of care. It is compensation for an insult, and the people receiving it know the difference even if they cannot articulate it in the moment.

The language you use when someone loses their livelihood is not an HR formality. It is the only leadership act in that moment that cannot be undone. Choose it accordingly.

What the Data Says About the People You Leave Behind

I want to be honest with you about something. This next section is the one that most leadership training skips over, I think because it requires sitting with discomfort rather than reaching for an action plan, and leaders are generally much better trained for the latter.

Research into grief following job loss documents a consistent pattern: separation distress, identity confusion, difficulty imagining a new future, and a persistent yearning for what has been lost. I know that sounds clinical when you write it out like that, but what it means in practice is that for a lot of people, losing a job is not just losing an income. It is losing a version of themselves. The person who was a Googler, or a Meta employee, or part of a team they had spent years building, does not just lose a salary. They lose the language they used to describe who they were.

And it does not stop with the people who leave. According to the 2023 Mental Health in Tech Report, 38% of tech leaders reported increased anxiety or depression following layoffs, with more than 7 in 10 saying the redundancies had negatively affected their own health. Of those who kept their jobs, 71% reported a decline in work motivation and 65% said they felt overworked in the aftermath.

I often think this is the argument that lands differently with leaders who are not moved by the moral case, and I do not say that as a criticism. Some leaders need the numbers. So here are the numbers. Research by Mark Murphy found that 74% of employees who survived a corporate layoff reported their own productivity had declined since the event, and 69% said the quality of the company's product or service had declined as a direct consequence of how the layoffs were handled. The assumption that a clean, efficient, quietly brutal redundancy process protects business performance is not just morally questionable. The numbers actively contradict it.

What Eclectic Leadership Looks Like Here

I want to show you what getting this right actually looks like, because I think without a real example it is too easy to dismiss as idealism.

When Airbnb laid off 25% of its workforce in 2020, it made a series of choices that most organisations would have called commercially unnecessary. Laid-off employees received a minimum of fourteen weeks' severance, twelve months of healthcare coverage including mental health support, accelerated equity vesting, outplacement support, and were permitted to keep their company laptops.

Airbnb converted its own internal recruitment team into a dedicated placement team to help departing employees find their next role, and created an alumni talent directory specifically to connect former staff with new opportunities.

These are not gestures. They are structural commitments, designed into the process before the first conversation happened. And you might be thinking: that is Airbnb, they could afford it. Maybe. But I would ask you to consider what it cost them not to cut those corners, compared to what it cost their competitors in productivity, morale, and employer brand to cut them without a second thought.

Two years later, Airbnb was receiving record-breaking job applications, and Brian Chesky was reported to have asked whether any of the 1,900 people let go in 2020 could be brought back. That is not a PR outcome engineered after the fact. That is what happens when you treat people, at their most vulnerable, as though they still matter. Because they do. They always did.

The Eclectic Leadership approach to redundancy is not a checklist to be completed before the lawyers sign off. It is four things working at the same time: transparency, because people are adults and they deserve to know the truth before the access badge disappears; linguistic integrity, because the words you choose either honour or diminish the person in front of you and there is genuinely no neutral option between those two; relational accountability, because how you end a professional relationship shapes how every remaining employee reads your character for years afterwards; and structural compassion, which means severance, mental health support, outplacement, and real practical help are the floor, not a discretionary extra for organisations that can afford to be generous.

I often ask leaders this question, and I would ask you the same: before the process gets handed to Legal and Finance, when did you last ask what does this person need in order to leave with their dignity intact?

Three Moves Worth Making Before the Next Wave Arrives

Start with your language. Pull up your most recent redundancy communication, or the template your organisation currently uses, and read it as though you are the person receiving it rather than the person who wrote it. I genuinely think this exercise alone changes something for most leaders. Count how many sentences centre the company's rationale versus the person's experience. If the ratio is ten to one, you already know you have work to do, and you have the advantage of knowing it before the pressure is on.

Then separate the process from the message. The legal paperwork and the human conversation are not the same thing, and I think one of the most common mistakes leaders make is letting the former crowd out the latter entirely. One is a formality that protects the organisation. The other is a leadership act that defines you. Running them simultaneously, or worse, letting the paperwork become the conversation, is how you fail the litmus test without ever realising it was being administered.

Finally, think about timing and agency. I know that revoking access before a conversation feels like an operational necessity in a lot of organisations. I understand the security logic. But I want you to consider how it lands for the person on the receiving end, someone who has given years to the organisation, who perhaps had no indication this was coming, who discovers through a failed login that their professional identity has been removed while they were asleep. That experience is a decision someone made. An eclectic leader makes a different one, even when it is operationally inconvenient, because the inconvenience is temporary and the impression it leaves is not.

The town halls, the away days, the carefully worded values framework, the team-building exercise in a field in Oxfordshire where everyone learned something about themselves, none of it will be what your people remember when this moment arrives. What they will remember is whether you found the words that acknowledged what was actually happening. Whether you treated the people leaving as though their departure mattered. Whether the goodbye was worthy of everything that came before it.

That is the only question the litmus test is asking. It has always been asking it.

Find Your Purpose

I wonder, while you are thinking about how you lead in the moments that matter, have you ever stopped to ask what your purpose actually is? Not the version on the LinkedIn profile. The real one. The one that shapes every decision you make, including the hardest ones. Your purpose can be more than one thing. It can change over time. But not knowing what it is? That is never good for you or the people you lead. Find yours at rononiti.org/find-your-purpose.