The Company That Laid People Off by Email Didn't Have a Communication Problem. It Had a Lineup Problem.
Every year there's a new version of the same story: a company lays off hundreds or thousands of people in a single mass email, or worse, a five-minute video call, and the internet spends a week appalled. The postmortems always focus on tone "they should have been more compassionate," "the wording was cold." Tone is not the disease. Tone is a symptom of nobody being properly positioned to handle the moment.
The Pattern
Layoffs are one of the highest-stakes moments a business ever executes, and they're routinely handled by whoever happened to be closest to the org chart's top box, regardless of whether that person has any business being the face of it. This is a Business Batting Order failure, putting your cleanup hitter in to bunt because nobody thought about who should actually be at the plate for this exact situation.
Batting order isn't about hierarchy. It's about matching the person to the moment. The person best equipped to announce a painful, high-emotion transition is rarely the same person best equipped to run quarterly board strategy, but companies default to rank instead of fit every time.
The Operator Move
Before any hard moment in a business, such as layoffs, a client firing, or a public mistake, I ask one question first: who is actually the right person for this specific moment, independent of title? Sometimes that's the CEO. Often it isn't. The founder who's brilliant at vision can be the worst person to deliver bad news with empathy, and vice versa. Building your Business Batting Order means having already answered, before the crisis hits, who bats in which situation instead of improvising it live, in public, under pressure.
Why This Matters at Your Size
You may never do a mass layoff, but you will have hard conversations the client you have to fire, the vendor you have to cut, the employee whose role you're eliminating. If you haven't already decided who's best suited to deliver news like that in your business, you'll default to whoever's most senior, which is exactly how you end up as the next example in someone else's blog post.
Business Batting Order matching the right person to the right moment, not just the right title is one of the core frameworks in my upcoming book, The Brown Box.