Redundancies, crises and moral distress: the weight of decisions that hurt others

“There are forty names on the list. With twelve of them, I know their children by name. On Monday at nine I have to tell them — and the decision was mine.”

This is a sentence many people in senior positions never say out loud. They say it in their heads, at half past eleven at night in the car outside the garage, not yet going into the house because they don’t know what face to show at home. The decision was probably carefully considered. It may even have been necessary for the company to survive and for the remaining two hundred people to keep their jobs. And still it gives no peace.

This piece is about the moral distress of people who have to make decisions that hurt others: redundancies, closing a plant, budget cuts, decisions in a crisis where every option is bad. I’m not writing it to relieve anyone of responsibility. I’m writing it because the weight of such decisions is real — and because it is almost never talked about.

When the decision is right and it still hurts

In public there are two images of a leader who makes people redundant. The first is the cold executor who doesn’t care. The second is the hero who “makes the tough calls” and moves on. Both are caricatures. In reality, most people in senior positions are somewhere in between: they know the decision is necessary, and at the same time they feel they have hurt people who did nothing wrong to them.

It is exactly this gap that is so hard. If the decision were wrong, you could regret it and put it right. If it had no consequences, you would forget it. Moral distress arises when a decision is both justified and painful — when you act in line with one value, say responsibility for the whole, and in doing so inevitably violate another, say care for the individual.

The consequences of redundancies don’t stop with those who leave. In 2004, Finnish researchers led by Jussi Vahtera published in the BMJ the results of following public-sector employees in ten towns. In the years after major downsizing, among those who kept their jobs, the risk of death from cardiovascular disease was roughly twice as high as where no downsizing had taken place. Redundancies, then, are an event that cuts through a whole system — and the leader who carries them out knows this, or at least senses it.

Moral distress: when you know what is right but can’t do it

The term moral distress was introduced in 1984 by the philosopher Andrew Jameton, writing about nurses. He described it as a state in which a person knows what the right thing to do would be, but obstacles — rules, the system, lack of resources — force them to act otherwise. How this shows up in healthcare is the subject of Moral distress in healthcare.

For people in senior positions the picture is a little different. Often there is no one above them forbidding anything. The obstacles lie elsewhere: in the figures, in the expectations of owners or voters, in the law, in time that isn’t there. And because they made the decision themselves, they have no one to point to. It is a particular kind of loneliness: being at once the person who suffers because of a decision and the person who made it.

Moral distress is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that you have values and that they still work. A leader who feels nothing while letting forty people go is not stronger. Either they are very well protected from their own feelings, or something in them has already gone numb.

Moral injury: when the wound stays

In 2009 a group of researchers led by Brett Litz proposed the concept of moral injury. They described it in war veterans: the lasting consequences left when a person commits, fails to prevent, or witnesses acts that deeply violate their moral beliefs. Such an injury shows itself less as fear, as in trauma, and more as guilt, shame, loss of trust in oneself and others, and difficulty forgiving oneself.

I need to be careful here. The concept was born in the context of war, and research is now extending it to healthcare and other professions. There is little research on moral injury in leaders, so it would be an exaggeration to call every hard decision an “injury”. But the concept is useful as a lens: it helps explain why some decisions still sting years later and why they don’t dissolve in the face of rational arguments. The question isn’t whether the decision was justified. It is what it did to the picture you have of yourself.

What happens to the people who carry out the decision

Organisational researchers have been asking for decades how redundancies are experienced by those who have to carry them out. The findings are surprisingly consistent.

In 2004 Judith Clair and Ronald Dufresne published a study with the telling title Playing the grim reaper. They described how people carrying out downsizing protect themselves through distancing: emotional (“I can’t let this move me”), cognitive (people become “numbers” or “costs”) and even physical (avoiding the corridors where they might meet them). Distancing is an understandable defence. But it has a price: you become colder even where you don’t want to be, and those let go experience you as indifferent, which deepens their pain.

Other researchers, among them Leon Grunberg and colleagues, observed more health problems and more sleep problems among managers who had carried out layoffs than among those who hadn’t. The body keeps a record, even when the mind says everything was done properly.

And the third finding, which seems to me the most important: Joel Brockner and colleagues showed that for people affected by redundancy, how it was carried out matters a great deal. A fair process, clear explanations and respectful treatment softened their reactions. That is good news for the leader, too. You can’t make the decision painless. But you can influence how it is carried out — and that is the space in which you can stay true to your values.

Guilt, shame and two bad paths

When someone carries a hard decision, they often end up at one of two extremes.

The first is numbness. You close the door on feelings because you can’t cope with them. You speak in technical language, stop making eye contact, are absent at home. Outwardly it looks as if everything is fine. Inwardly something builds up that later shows itself as cynicism, burnout or sudden outbursts. I wrote about the signs of an overstretched nervous system in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break.

The second is self-punishment. You don’t allow yourself pleasure, rest or relief, because you “don’t deserve it”. Decisions get even harder, because every new one reopens the old wound. Here guilt spills over into shame — from “I did something that hurt people” to “I am a bad person”. The difference between the two is crucial; more on it in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters and in the knowledge base under guilt and shame.

The healthy path lies somewhere in between: acknowledging that the decision hurt people, feeling it without drowning in it, and doing what is in your power to keep the harm as small as possible.

Nights that don’t end

Moral distress loves the night. During the day there are meetings, phones, tasks. At night the film starts rolling: faces, sentences you said or should have said, scenarios of what would have happened if you had decided differently. This kind of going over things that leads nowhere is called rumination.

Rumination feels like responsibility — as if it were right to think it through one more time. In reality it rarely brings a new insight. What it does bring is tiredness, which worsens your judgement the next day. Why thoughts run riot exactly when they should go quiet is something I explained in Overthinking at bedtime: why the mind starts the film just when it should be switching off.

A conversation at midnight

This is how a conversation at home might sound a few days after the redundancies were announced (composite, not a real person):

“Can’t sleep?”
“I keep thinking about Marjeta from accounts. She was there twenty-five years.”
“Did you do what you could?”
“For the company, yes. For her, I don’t know.”
“And what could you do for her?”
“…I could ring her. Not as the director. I could write her a reference.”
“That’s something.”
“It isn’t enough.”
“No. But it’s something that’s in your hands.”

In this short exchange an important shift happens: from the question “am I a good person?”, which has no answer, to the question “what can I do now?”, which does. Guilt that finds its way into action is lighter than guilt that stays in your head.

Exercise: a moral inventory of a decision

This exercise is for a decision that has already been made and still weighs on you. You need no more than half an hour. Write on paper, not on your phone.

1. Describe the decision in two sentences — what you decided and whom it affected. No excuses, no self-accusation. Just the facts.
2. Write down the values that were in conflict. For example: responsibility for the whole versus loyalty to an individual, honesty versus protecting confidential information. Moral distress almost always means two good things were at stake, not a good one and a bad one.
3. Divide the page into two columns: what was in my power and what wasn’t. Be honest in both directions. Don’t take the blame for market conditions, but don’t hide what you could have done differently either.
4. For the “in my power” column, write down one action you can still take now. A call, a letter, a reference, a change of procedure for next time, an apology. Small and doable.
5. Finally, write yourself a sentence as you would write it to a friend in the same situation. Not absolution, but an honest and warm word. If you struggle, look in the knowledge base under self-compassion.

If the exercise opens up more than you expected, that’s not a sign you did it wrong. It means the decision was harder than you allowed yourself to admit.

What you bring from home

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we know that two people can experience the same decision very differently — and that the difference is often written in the stories of their families. Christian Gostečnik describes how emotional patterns from the family of origin are unconsciously repeated in adult relationships, including at work.

Someone who as a child took responsibility for their parents’ moods may, with redundancies, feel personally responsible for every lost job — as if they should have saved everything on their own. Someone who grew up in a family where feelings weren’t talked about may reach for distancing quite naturally. For leaders in family businesses the story becomes even more tangled, because the people affected by a decision are sometimes relatives — the subject of When you have to let a relative go.

When you recognise where part of the weight you carry comes from, the weight doesn’t vanish. But it becomes easier to separate what belongs to the present decision from what belongs to an old burden.

The therapy room suits this precisely because you don’t make decisions there. You don’t have to defend the decision to the board, comfort staff or worry about how you look. You can say what weighs on you, including what seems unacceptable — that you felt relief when it was over, or that you are angry with the people you had to let go. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Where this doesn’t apply

I want to be honest here, because it’s possible to write about moral distress in a way that turns it into a convenient excuse.

Sometimes guilt tells the truth. If a decision was made unfairly, for personal reasons, or to people’s detriment without real need, guilt isn’t a symptom to be soothed. It is a signal that something needs putting right. Therapy isn’t a place to “process your way out” of such feelings, but a place where you can look at them and decide what you will do with them. I wrote about telling healthy guilt from excessive guilt in Healthy guilt and toxic guilt: how to tell them apart.

Your pain is not at the centre. The people who lost their jobs bear far heavier consequences than the person who told them. A leader’s moral distress is real, but it mustn’t become a reason for attention to shift from those affected to the leader.

Not every discomfort is a moral injury. Unease around a difficult conversation is normal and passes. But if for months you can’t sleep, lose interest in everything, or feel that as a person you are irreparably broken, that is a sign you need more than an exercise on paper. Turn to your GP, who can assess whether this is depression or another condition that needs treatment. If thoughts come that it would be better if you weren’t here, call the Mental Distress Helpline in Slovenia (01 520 99 00, 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline in Slovenia (116 123, around the clock), and in an emergency 112.

What to remember

• Moral distress arises when you act on one value and in doing so inevitably violate another. It isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign that your values work.
• Moral injury is a concept from research on war veterans — with leaders, use it as a lens, not a diagnosis.
• The two bad paths are numbness and self-punishment. The healthy path is to feel without drowning, and to act where you can.
• You can’t make a decision painless, but you can influence how it is carried out — and that counts.
• Guilt that finds its way into a concrete action is lighter than guilt that spins at night.