Chad Silverstein reflects on the emotional burden of leadership decisions that negatively affect team members—such as downsizing, reorganizations, or selling a company. He emphasizes that leadership often requires making painful choices that ripple through employees’ lives, and shares a personal example of selling his company after two decades and still feeling the impact on long-term employees.
Chapters
Making a hard decision that sends ripples throughout your team that you know is going to impact people, negatively, hurt them, or terminate them from your company for whatever reason it is. Maybe you're downsizing, maybe you're selling your company, maybe you have to make a tough decision regarding their department or their role. But the, the excitement of being a leader and being promoted to be a leader, it's a great thing, but it's not for everyone. And no one really talks about how hard it is and when you have an impact on other people's lives. Every single time you make a decision, and many times as a leader, depending on, you know, when and where you find yourself on your journey, you're going to have to make a decision that's going to be really hard, that's going to hurt people, or even harder and hurt more people. So having to decide between worse and worse sometimes can really. It can really get you as a leader that it's not a fun place to be. And that's why we always talk about running to be. Run away from being a leader. You don't really want to be a leader. It sounds great. It's a nice title to stamp on your LinkedIn profile. But at the end of the day, you know, if you have what it takes to actually deal with hurting people and not doing it on purpose and not doing it with bad intentions, but just because you have to make that a hard decision and it's gonna. It's gonna hurt. My personal one was when I sold my company, I didn't realize how hard it would be and how much of an impact it would have on so many people. I sold my company over a year ago and even yesterday received notice from somebody who's deciding that, you know, they stayed there and they want to leave. And I still, I can still feel the pain because they were with me for a very long time. They had a great job, they had a very secure salary. And here I am making a decision that's best for me and my life to move on and sell my company after more than two decades. But I just, I left things in my wake. And it's a real hard thing as a leader to deal with that when you care so much about people that helped you get to where you are.
