Just months ago, "The Crying CEO" guy became a viral meme for expressing too much empathy in a layoff.
It's fucking job terminations. You're GOING to be criticized no matter how you do them. The best approach is to just be robotic about it, and maybe throw in a platitude that amounts to, "It's not you, it's me".
Sure. But it's only "taking responsibility" if you demonstrate you're actually intending to either a) actually be accountable in some fashion and/or b) actually lay out how you'll change to make the bad thing not happen in the future.
"We need to layoff half of the company. I'm sorry and take responsibility. I have failed our employees and shareholders. Because of this, I am stepping down". That's taking responsibility.
"We had a major F-up. It was my responsibility. And here are the concrete steps I am taking to ensure it never happens again, along with the mechanisms you all have to hold me accountable. If these fail, the following bad thing will happen to me." That's taking responsibility
A company is bound to fire people in a well functioning economy or the alternative is every single employee will lose their job when the company goes bankrupt. Some people would rather bring every company down to the ground before firing a single person. In a well functioning economy what you then want is a short worker reallocation time.
Also if one of your options for "taking responsibility" is quitting, I guess your view of the world is that you would also fire any of your employees when they mess up, when whole industries have recognized the need for blameless cultures where making mistakes is part of the learning process.
You can fire people and/or let them go without claiming you "take full responsibility". That's ok, and exactly my point.
The phrase "I take responsibility" is never accompanied with any sign that the person does in fact take responsibility. It means more than just "Ooops, I did a bad"
He was not criticized for showing too much empathy. He was criticized for not actually showing empathy. He made it all about himself. You might want to look into how you misunderstood that so badly.
What? It wasn't for "expressing too much empathy", it's for being obviously staged. Like, who gets their hot-take emotional reaction on video and then uploads it? /r/whyweretheyfilming vibes.
Because there are a lot of people who just aren’t ever going to be satisfied with anything short of Zuckerberg feeling the pinch of not knowing whether he’s going to make his mortgage payment next month. It’s just people’s natural desire for punishment. I personally have a lot of disdain for zuck and what he’s built but the idea that he is ever going to experience enough misfortune to seem “just” as an offset for these layoffs is pure fantasy. If anyone is waiting for that, there is simply no path to satisfaction for them. Nothing except his own actions is going to stop him from being as billionaire as he wants to be.
Compare the Stripe layoff to the Meta one. The severance terms are very similar and I think the Meta offer is objectively better, if only slightly depending on tenure. Both the Stripe founders and Zuckerberg are both "taking responsibility" for the layoffs but without any resignation or personal financial burdens outside of just share price. This has basically zero chance of being a decrease in operating costs until well into 2023. Stripe and Meta seem to be on par with one another as far as how they handled their respective layoffs other than the Meta leak.
It's fucking job terminations. You're GOING to be criticized no matter how you do them. The best approach is to just be robotic about it, and maybe throw in a platitude that amounts to, "It's not you, it's me".