One day, we were told everything was fine.
A week later, I got a recorded phone message telling me the business I’d been building was shut down, effective immediately.
Years ago, I was part of the direct-sales division of a large consumer brand. We were growing a healthy sales organization until one of the company’s most successful field leaders got miffed, took her ball and left the playground... for a competitor.
She took about half her sales organization with her.
*GULP*
I was in her organization. Interestingly, she didn't invite me to come with her... probably because she knew I'd decline. But being on the inside of the issue meant that I knew more than the general sales force about what was going on. What I didn’t know was what it meant for those of us left behind.
It was stressful, wondering how the home office was going to deal with these "orphaned" teams that had no leader to just roll up to (because they left, too!). Would we get to pick? Be reassigned? What about the clients that were orphaned? Who would serve them?
We had lots of questions and very few answers.
It took a couple of months to shake things out. But when our regional leader came to town to reassure our team that everything was fine, we felt less shaky. Plans were in place to restructure the sales force. She introduced us to our new leader, who also came to town, bearing gifts: a book of inspirational quotes to help us "keep our eye on the prize."
We were told that we could look forward to a long, continued relationship with the company if we kept doing the same level of work we'd always done.
Then came the recorded message the following week: We had about 30 days to wrap up the businesses we’d built under their brand.
And then came the kicker:
The company wanted us to help transition our customers into another division so those customers could continue buying the company’s products.
For free.
Wait... You’re not going to pay me anymore? But you want me to help preserve the customer relationships that still have value to you?
You can probably imagine how well that went.
Many in the sales force just walked away, pitching that book of quotes in the trash as they went.
In direct sales, many of the consultants start their business because they genuinely love the products; they aren’t just sales reps, they're evangelists, true believers.
The products were still there, still available, but the incentive to keep actively serving customers was gone. And the company was, intentionally or not, banking on that brand loyalty to carry the transition on the backs of those loyalists.
They basically withdrew every ounce of goodwill they had banked with those evangelists. The account balance was now zero.
Now, I’m not saying that any company should keep an unsustainable division alive.
I wasn’t in the executive meetings or have access to their financials. I'm sure there were legal, contractual, financial, or operational constraints I knew nothing about. I was, after all, just a part of the lowly sales force.
Maybe closing the division really was the right call (though, they re-opened it years later).
But what bugs me is how we, the humans affected by that decision, had to experience it.
The home office team was pink-slipped the morning we got that call. People walked in, thinking they had a job, only to be told to pack their bags and split.
Yes, even my sales manager, who had traveled to town to re-assure us, got a pink slip. She never saw it coming. None of us did.
It’s easy to talk about “values-aligned business” when all your values are getting along nicely.
Integrity? Great.
Take care of your people? Absolutely.
Make enough money to keep the lights on?
Oh, right. That one too!
But we need to remember that businesses are collections of humans working with other humans, on behalf of still other humans, trying to accomplish something that creates value for yet other humans.
And sometimes what is good for one of those groups makes life harder for another.
That’s business reality.
Raise wages and maybe prices have to go up.
Hold prices down and maybe margins get thinner.
Keep every employee during a downturn and you may put the whole company at greater risk.
Cut jobs to protect the company and actual human beings lose their income.
There isn’t always a neat little win-win answer waiting behind Door Number Three.
But here’s the thing I want you to remember:
Values-aligned decisions don’t eliminate tradeoffs. They force you to look at who is absorbing them.
Somebody still has to foot the bill.
The question is whether you’ve bothered to even notice (or care about) who that is.
A friend of mine recently rented a room in a new town while she got her bearings.
When she arrived, the place was filthy.
She immediately knew she wasn’t staying there long and found an apartment surprisingly quickly.
She was on a month-to-month agreement, so technically she could wait to tell the landlord she was leaving.
Why give notice before she had to?
Except... the landlord was probably going to get contacted for a reference anyway. And giving notice sooner would give them more time to advertise the room and find another tenant.
My friend didn’t owe it to the landlord to keep living someplace that didn’t work for her just so the landlord wouldn’t lose rent. But she could make the transition a little easier for another human.
So she did. She told her landlord she'd found a great deal she couldn't pass up and would be out by the end of the month, then thanked her for the opportunity to have a space to land when she first got to town.
Years ago, I faced a harder version of the same question when I needed to lay off my assistant.
I gave her eight weeks’ notice.
That was not without risk to me. She could have found another job the following Tuesday and left me scrambling. But I never wanted HER to feel like she'd been caught off guard. I could afford to give her the time to find an alternative arrangement. So I did.
I’ve said for years:
Do what you can, as you are able.
That does not mean bankrupt yourself trying to save everybody.
It does not mean martyr yourself for the sake of being “nice.”
It means start with reality.
What can you actually do? What resources do you actually have? What options are legitimately available?
If you genuinely cannot do more, then don’t.
But if you can do more? Then, I think you should be a good human and do it.
This doesn’t mean leaders should announce every half-baked possibility the minute somebody whispers it in a conference room.
Sometimes you really don’t know what’s going to happen, or there are things you legally can’t disclose.
Sometimes saying too much too early creates unnecessary problems to solve.
But uncertainty can still be communicated honestly.
“We’ve lost a significant portion of the business and we’re evaluating what that means.”
“We don’t know yet whether this model is sustainable. We need to see X results over the next 90 days. We’ll tell you what we know when we reasonably can.”
That’s very different from having your regional manager fly in to say, “Everything is fine!” when everything is decidedly not fine.
Truth gives people information.
Time gives them agency.
Time lets somebody update their résumé, cut expenses, find another client, or talk to their partner.
It also gives them an incentive to brainstorm possible solutions to help the company (those believers always want to be part of seeing you win!)
You may not be able to protect people from the consequences of a difficult decision, but if you can give them enough runway to make some decisions of their own, that matters.
Trust has value.
Trust is why somebody gives you the benefit of the doubt when the plan goes sideways. It’s why an employee hangs in through a rough quarter or a vendor gives you a little grace when cash flow gets wonky.
It’s why a sales person leaving your company takes extra care transferring that customer relationship instead of doing the absolute minimum required and saying, “Welp. Good luck with that!”
Companies rely on goodwill, but it's not an unlimited resource.
That direct-sales company wanted people who had just lost their livelihoods to help preserve customer relationships for the benefit of the company.
Could they have paid us a finder’s fee for each successful transfer or a small commission on the customer’s first few purchases? Could they have just told the truth and given us more warning?
I don’t know what was financially or legally possible.
But did they even explore those options? We will never know.
Instead, from where I sat, the company seemed to rely mostly on the brand loyalty of the sales force and the hope that we’d want to give our customers some continuity.
That’s asking the people absorbing the cost of your decision to also help make the decision work better for you.
I'm sure there’s an algorithm somewhere that can make the “most efficient” option look perfectly justifiable.
But if the efficiency depends on somebody else quietly absorbing the cost, that is still part of the math.
Ignore that long enough and you create a different kind of friction.
People stop volunteering the extra effort or giving you the benefit of the doubt. They stop trusting you.
Ultimately, they leave.
This is why I think leaders making consequential decisions need to ask a question that sounds almost ridiculous:
Who goes home and eats beans tonight (this week/month) because of this decision?
I’m not asking because I think leaders should never make decisions that hurt somebody.
Sometimes you have to close the division to protect the viability of the organization.
Someone may still go home and eat beans.
But before you shrug and call that outcome inevitable, consider what that seemingly silly question is really asking:
And maybe most importantly, can you tell the difference between:
“We can’t do more.”
and
“We’ve decided not to do more because this option is easier for us.”
Because those are not the same damn thing.
The real test comes when two things you can't protect two things you genuinely value.
That’s when leadership stops being an exercise in picking the “right” value and becomes an exercise in taking responsibility for the tradeoff you’re choosing.
You might not be able to keep everyone from eating beans tonight, but you should damn well know who you’re handing the can opener to.