Wayfair lays off 13% of its workforce weeks after telling employees to work harder::Wayfair is laying off 1,650 employees, amounting to 13% of its global workforce, as the online home goods retailer struggled to rebound following its success amid pandemic lockdowns.
Ah fair enough.
If the company is growing why are they shedding workers? I mean, I don’t know, but some avenues I can imagine are: Their growth is happening in areas that aren’t people-intensive, their profit margins are lower than their competitors, they don’t have the right people to meet their strategy, they hired in anticipation of some trends continuing and they don’t, etc etc. Or a combination of the above.
I’m not saying that their leadership is blameless. I’m only saying that from the data I have, their leadership isn’t automatically to blame either.
Leadership is always to blame if there are problems. That’s what being a leader is.
Here’s an easy way to tell who to blame: if their recent projects were a success, who would get the accolades?
The executive leadership team, most likely. No one would say “they don’t automatically get credit”. So they should get the blame when things go poorly.