#1: The Block effect and the copycat risk
On February 27th, Jack Dorsey announced Block, parent of Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, was cutting 40% of its workforce which is around 4,000 people. The reason?? He tied it directly to AI, called it "a new way of working," and then we saw the stock jumped 24%.
Here's what I'm actually worried about, and what I'm already hearing from people in the field: other companies are going to point to this and say well we can do that too, right? They will use this example as reasoning. And not because their business case looks like Block's (it probably doesn't), but because the announcement made it seem like a good thing to consider.
What I found most interesting about this layoff is the CEO clearly states headcount was going to be cut regardless but rather than do it slowly over time, they choose to do it all at once. At least they recognized the damage slow cutting can have on morale and teams??? It doesn’t lessen the blow that is nearly 40% of people leaving immediately, but hey to each their own. Some orgs might have been fine with slow cuts rather than one big catastrophic one. I think it depends on your people, culture and the business.
📣 Why I consider this a force at play: we already have seen recording breaking number of layoffs and I hate to even say this, I think it’s going to get worse. Some companies will pull a Block and say we’re just following the lead of other companies. I’m watching the news for upcoming layoffs closely but I have already heard from HR folks that the Block example is coming up a lot in internal convos about workforce staffing and planning.
#2: The quiet decimation of middle management
This one gets less headline space but might be the one that matters most long-term. As companies run leaner, middle management layers are disappearing and with them, potentially the people who actually did the work of developing other people.
Bigger teams. Fewer managers. More on every manager's plate. And at exactly the moment we need to be preparing our workforces for an AI-transformed future, the people responsible for that preparation are burning out…
This isn't anecdotal. Gallup's research shows that manager wellbeing has been declining for years!!!! Managers report higher stress, lower engagement, and more role ambiguity than individual contributors. They're being asked to do more with less clarity and less support. And when managers are struggling, development doesn't happen. Coaching doesn't happen. Growth stalls. Team engagement dips.
Cutting middle management feels like efficiency to some. It often is, in the short term. What it costs you shows up 18 months later.
📣 Why I consider this a force at play: teams will continue to get bigger and bigger and managers could potentially collapse under the pressure. At every organization the single most important point of failure is your managers. They are directly responsible for a team’s engagement, productivity and effort. If the managers are bad your org will suffer.
#3: The AI obsession: peak hype, real disruption, total confusion
If I could get through a freakin’ newsletter without mentioning AI that would be GREAT. But alas, here we are where I can even escape a second scrolling without seeing something about AI.
And everyone has an opinion! Half the room says AI is revolutionizing how work gets done. The other half is quietly finding it doesn't actually save them that much time. Both are somewhat right, depending on the role, the tool, and whether anyone bothered to train people on it properly.
Here's the honest frame I keep coming back to: this is likely the single most disruptive shift to how work actually works since the introduction of email, or maybe Slack, the first time your job followed you everywhere and fragmented your attention permanently.
The question HR has to answer isn't is the AI hype real. It's: how do we help our organizations actually transform, not just buy tools and call it done?
That means workforce planning, reskilling, change management, the stuff HR is supposed to be good at.
📣 Why I consider this a force at play: The uncomfortable part is that most organizations haven't invested in HR enough to manage this workforce transformation well. So we're being asked to lead the most complex organizational transformation in a generation, with the resources of 2019. COME ON. Give us the tools and maybe we can figure out how to deploy AI correctly in our orgs and actually transform work. What a concept.
