Your team is smaller, quieter, and a lot more anxious than it was a week ago. And the instinct in that moment is almost always the same: get back to business as fast as possible. Ship the projects. Hit the numbers. Move on.

I understand the instinct. But it's backwards — and it quietly costs you the trust you have left.

Here's why. Columbia's Joel Brockner has spent decades studying the people who keep their jobs after a layoff, and his findings are consistent: survivors experience guilt, anxiety, and a real drop in trust toward leadership. It doesn't stop at feelings, either. It shows up as reduced morale and reduced productivity. And the closer people were to those who were let go, the harder it hits. So when you stand up and pivot straight to the Q3 roadmap, you're not projecting steadiness. You're telling a grieving team their experience is inconvenient to you.

The alternative isn't a grand gesture or a culture reset. It's five fairly ordinary things done deliberately:

• Name it out loud. Acknowledge what happened before you talk about anything else, then make honesty recurring: here's what I know, here's what I don't know yet, here's when I'll update you.
• Rebuild trust through consistency. Trust returns through dozens of small kept promises — remove the blocker you said you'd remove, revisit the workload you said you'd revisit — not through one big moment.
• Make delegation a conversation. Name the work that's now unowned, say plainly what continues, what gets delayed, and what stops, then ask your team what you're missing before you finalize anything.
• Recognize effort, not just outcomes. In a field experiment led by Christiane Bradler, a simple signed thank-you note measurably improved performance — for the recipient and for coworkers who saw it — so be specific about who stepped up and what they did.
• Give the team something to work toward. Ask what priorities matter most now, what work creates the most value, what you can realistically commit to, and what you need to let go of — then name a few priorities everyone can remember.

None of that requires authority you don't have. It requires you to stop treating the layoff as finished business and start treating it as the environment you're now leading in. Because for the people who stayed, this isn't the end of something. It's the beginning of figuring out whether they can still count on you.

I walked through all of this in more detail — including exactly what to say in that first team conversation — in this week's video

or article or podcast​

Here's some more resources I recommend:

How The Pixar Braintrust Was Formed: In 1998, Pixar lost two months of Toy Story 2 to a stray delete command. Ten weeks later, four colleagues watched the recovered footage and cut more of it than the computer had — and the verdict held even though none of them had the power to enforce it. That's the origin of the Braintrust, and it runs against what the research finds: across six hundred measurements, criticism made performance worse more than a third of the time, and the predictor wasn't harshness but where the note landed. If someone on your team already sees the problem and keeps giving you the eighty-percent version, the fix isn't asking for more honesty. It's lowering what honesty costs. Click here to watch now.​

Building Trust as a Team: Most teams treat trust as something that just happens over time. But trust is actually built through specific, repeatable behaviors—and teams that leave it to chance usually end up with people who quietly hold back their best ideas. In my LinkedIn Learning course, I break down the two types of trust every team needs, the trust-respect cycle that keeps collaboration strong, and practical ways to build it—from finding commonalities to modeling vulnerability. If you manage a team—or you're part of one—this is worth your time. Click here to get started.​