What I am seeing looks like productivity from a distance. Inboxes are cleared faster, meeting notes turn into tidy lists of follow-ups within minutes, and long, intricate emails are answered without ever being read in full. Look closer and a different picture emerges.

The leader who cannot find the humanity in the people around them has usually lost contact with it in themselves first, and the exhaustion that so many of us carry home is often the hidden cost of managing a self that no one was ever invited to meet. Stop managing roles. Start Leading People.

The premise behind most layoffs is straightforward. Cutting people reduces payroll, payroll is a major expense, and therefore cutting people improves the financial position of the company. On a spreadsheet, in the quarter the decision is made, this logic holds. The difficulty is that the spreadsheet captures only the most visible costs and none of the ones that arrive later.