The Elevare Edge · Issue 15 · May 4, 2026
Your team is watching you right now.
Not because anything dramatic has happened yet. But because they have seen what is happening across the industry. The headlines are everywhere. More than 52,000 jobs cut in financial services so far in 2026.
And every person still sitting at their desk is doing the same quiet calculation: if it comes here, what will my leader do?
That question is already shaping how much your team trusts you. Before you have done a single thing.
What the data says
A report released last week by Lee Hecht Harrison, a global workforce research firm, surveyed more than 8,000 employees across major organizations. One in four say they lose trust in leadership as a direct result of watching a colleague get laid off.
Not because of the layoff itself. Because of how it was handled.
That distinction is everything.
What leaders get wrong
I have been in financial services for over 40 years. I have watched reductions happen at every level, in every kind of market. The leaders who damaged their teams the most were rarely the ones who made the hardest calls. They were the ones who disappeared afterward.
They announced the cuts. They let HR manage the aftermath. They moved on to the next agenda item.
And the people who remained, the ones leadership needed most, started quietly planning their exit.
Here is what actually breaks trust during a reduction:
Saying nothing when people need to hear something. Silence reads as indifference. Your team will fill that silence with the worst possible interpretation. Every time.
Letting HR carry the message. HR can support the process. HR cannot substitute for a leader showing up. When you hand the hardest moments to someone else, your team notices who was willing to stand in the room and who was not.
Pretending it is business as usual too soon. Moving fast past a hard moment is not resilience. It is avoidance. People need a beat to process before they can perform again.
Telling people they are lucky to still have a job. I have heard this said. It ends trust on contact.
What actually holds a team together
The leaders I have seen keep their teams intact through a reduction did a few things consistently.
They showed up in person or on camera, not through a forwarded email. They said what they could say, named what they could not yet share, and gave people a timeframe for when they would know more. They checked in on individuals, not just on the work. And they stayed visible for weeks after the announcement, not just the day of.
None of that is complicated. Most of it just requires deciding that your team's trust is worth protecting.
The question worth sitting with
If a reduction came to your team tomorrow, what would your people expect from you?
Not what you would want them to expect. What they would actually expect, based on what they have seen from you so far.
That gap between who you intend to be and who your team has experienced is where trust gets made or lost long before any hard decision arrives.
Where the Chaos Scorecard fits
Culture breakdown is one of the eight dimensions the Operational Chaos Scorecard measures. If your team is already operating in uncertainty, that pressure shows up in the results.
Take the free assessment and see where the gaps are before a hard moment reveals them for you.
https://www.elevaredynamics.com/scorecard
If something in this issue hits close to home, reply and tell me what you are navigating. I read every response.
To your success,
Rene Madden
Elevare Dynamics LLC
https://www.elevaredynamics.com/
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