AI reshaping workforce: Leadership team responses

How does a global leadership team respond, when business success requires deep cuts in the workforce? As McKinsey said in January 2025, “leaders need to recognize their responsibility in driving gen AI transformation.”  How do you keep your best people to drive the transformation as you reshape your workforce in an AI world, while letting go their friends and colleagues?

Everybody knows AI is reshaping the workforce, particularly among white collar workers. There’s a bloodbath in the making for people doing jobs that AI can take over. It’s appropriate that the human cost of this gets a lot of attention. But spare a thought for those who stay. How do they regroup, stay engaged, creative and connected through the massive reorganization process going on all around them?

Our recent leadership team engagement with a top global consulting firm’s AI transformation gave us some rich insights.

Reshaping workforce to benefit from AI: business and personal dimensions

This particular team provides high-end internal services to enable their client-focused colleagues to win in an increasingly competitive and fast-moving global landscape. When we met them, they were gearing up for the enormously complex legal and HR processes involved in replacing a quarter of their human workforce with AI, and shifting another quarter to low-cost locations away from North America and Western Europe.

When we met the top twenty global directors of the unit they were terribly torn. Everybody agrees with the business case. And their competitors will eat their lunch if they can’t keep delivering more value, faster and at lower cost. But the human cost of the changes is big. The legalities of firing people dictate all kinds of leadership silence. But to the leadership team, this feels like withholding the kind of open human truth telling that has always been a hallmark of the business.

Spare a thought for all the other business leaders jumping through similar hoops. Got to stay competitive. Got to ramp up use of AI. Lower costs by letting people go. Don’t say too much in case you get lawsuits or public complaints about your company. Yet human trust is still the currency of engagement and a pre-requisite for creative productivity for those who stay.

Leading together through the pitfalls of reorganization

For those who stayed on after the job losses, the challenges are clear: how do we continue to collaborate for business success? How do we rebuild trust? How do we keep our best people motivated as they watch others being let go? Mish and Dino from the Enterprisecoach network were the people they turned to, to hold space for this group of top global leaders, while they grappled with the human dimension of their business strategy.

A lot of difficult things needed to be said. Many business leaders would balk at the frank talk that went on during our time together. Global directors spoke out, questioning how employees can trust leaders who are only telling them half of the story about job losses. Some spoke about the erosion of their own trust in the company’s values. But for this team, the benefits of such straight talk outweighed the costs. In this safe and confidential space truths were told and everybody felt the impact. The real human challenges were laid bare. Forged in the fire, this team of leaders found their collective will to move forward again in integrity.

Having the hard conversations

These scenarios are playing out in boardrooms all around the world. How open is the conversation in your business? Who gets included and who is outside the circle of trust? What are the silences costing you in terms of leader and employee engagement?

In bars, in social media and in private heart-to-hearts, harsh things are already being said about the leaders who are letting people go. Those conversations will go on regardless of official press releases. Getting better at sharing the impact of change inside the business can strengthen relationships amongst those who stay. Being inside the loop helps with motivation in difficult times.

We’re proud to hold space and design ways for people to have the hardest conversations, for the good of the business and its people.

Related post: how the process worked

For a taste of the power and richness of two coaches working together in service of a team, you are invited to read my co-coach Dino’s take on the same events. He also gives more detail about the way the the team managed to reclaim its power under overwhelming external pressure.