The organisation had just made people redundant.
A significant number of volunteers from the Care Team I led were gone — not because they’d left, but because their roles had been eliminated. The ones who remained were grieving. Some were angry. Some were shaken in ways they hadn’t yet found words for.
And I was feeling every bit of it myself.
I had built this team from the ground up. Recruited and trained more than a thousand of people who had given their time, their emotional energy, and in some cases years of their lives to be ready to support passengers and families in the aftermath of aviation disasters. They had shown up for exercises. They returned for training year after year. They had trusted me — and by extension, the organisation — with something genuinely personal.
And now many of them were gone. And the ones who remained were watching to see what I would do.
The easier thing to do
The easier thing would have been to send an uplifting message. To talk about resilience and the importance of the mission. To acknowledge that things were hard while signalling that we would push through.
I have received that kind of message many times. I have watched people receive it. The effect is almost always the same — a brief, hollow comfort, followed by a deepening of whatever cynicism was already there. Because the message says we will carry on, but it doesn’t say anything true about what is actually happening.
I didn’t send that message.
What I sent instead
I wrote to every remaining volunteer and told them the truth.
I acknowledged what had happened — not in corporate language, but plainly. People they had served alongside were gone. That was a real loss and it deserved to be named as such.
I told them that I understood if their feelings toward the organisation had changed. That anger was reasonable. That grief was reasonable. That uncertainty about whether they still wanted to be part of this was reasonable.
And then I asked them something that felt risky to ask.
I told them I needed to know where their heart was. Not their obligation, not their contract, not their professional commitment — their heart. Because I needed to know, honestly and realistically, how many people would still respond if the call came.
I didn’t ask them to stay. I gave them genuine permission to leave — and trusted them with the truth about why I needed to know either way.
It was painful to write. I sat with it for a long time before I sent it. Because asking that question meant accepting that the answer might be fewer than I needed. That the team I had built might be smaller and more fragile than I had hoped.
But I knew it was the right thing to do. It was aligned with my values — with what I believed leadership actually required in that moment.
What happened
Many stayed.
Not because they had to. Not because they felt obligated. Because the email had done something that the uplifting message never could — it had met them exactly where they were. It had acknowledged what was real. It had trusted them with honest information and given them genuine choice.
And in return, they trusted me.
I was deeply touched. Not because I had managed to retain numbers — though that mattered operationally — but because of what those responses told me about what people need from leadership when things are genuinely hard.
They don’t need to be inspired past their pain. They need to be seen inside it.
What this has to do with your organisation
I think about that email often when I’m working with corporate leaders navigating loss — redundancies, restructures, the quiet erosion of trust that happens when an organisation has asked too much of its people for too long.
The instinct in those moments is almost always to lead with the message that things will be okay. To project confidence. To hold the line.
Sometimes that is what’s needed. But more often than people realise, what is needed is the harder thing — the honest acknowledgement that something real has happened, that the feelings in the room are legitimate, and the genuine question: where are you, and what do you need from me right now?
That kind of leadership is not weakness. It is the precise opposite. It requires more courage than the uplifting message. It produces more trust. And it creates the conditions for people to choose to stay — not because they have to, but because they genuinely want to.
The email worked not because of what it said. Because of what it didn’t say. It didn’t pretend. It didn’t perform. It didn’t minimise.
It just told the truth — and trusted people to meet it.