Meta laid off thousands of people last quarter. The press release used the words "strategic alignment."

Strategic alignment.

I want us to stop using those words. I want us to stop letting the corporate language do the work that it is doing, which is to make a human cost disappear behind a noun that sounds like a meeting topic.

When you lay off a person, you have not aligned a strategy. You have ended someone's paycheck, possibly their health insurance, possibly their identity, possibly their belief that the work they did mattered to the people who took it from them. You have changed the shape of their next six months in ways you may never see and they will never forget.

That can be the right call. Sometimes a company genuinely needs to contract to survive. Sometimes a role honestly no longer exists. Companies are not charities, and I'm not asking anyone to pretend otherwise.

I am asking that when we make these calls, we tell the truth about what we are doing.

This is what I notice when I work with leadership teams who are weighing layoffs, which I have done dozens of times.

The first risk we mitigate is letting the language hardens. Words like alignment, optimization, rightsizing, transition, and synergy crowd into the room. People stop saying "layoff" and start saying things that sound like spreadsheet operations. The shift in language is not innocent. It is what allows the group to make the decision without feeling the weight of it.

The second thing we slow down is timeline compresses. Once a number is set, the rush to implement begins, and the time that might have been spent on careful exit design gets squeezed. Severance gets standardized at the legal minimum. Notice periods get short. Manager training gets skipped. The team that stays gets a sterile all-hands message and a Slack channel that goes silent.

The third thing we pay attention to is that the people who stay learn something they will not forget. They learn what the company does when things get hard. They learn how it treats people on the way out. They learn whether the values on the wall mean anything when the spreadsheet says cut. And they recalibrate their own loyalty accordingly, often without telling anyone.

If you are a leader contemplating cuts, here is what I want you to hold.

Tell the truth in your language. Call the thing what it is. Layoff. Termination without cause. You will not change the decision by softening the word. You will change yourself.

Design the process like you mean it. Long notice periods when you can afford them. Real severance, not legal minimum. Outplacement support that is actually used, not just offered. Manager training so the people delivering the news are not destroyed by delivering it. Ritual closure for the team that stays, with space for grief, not just an FAQ.

Watch your verbs. We are letting people go. We are saying goodbye to. We are parting ways with. We are ending the employment of. The verbs you choose will shape what your team learns about you.

The most you can do is design your company so that you have to do this less often. The least you can do, when you have to, is honor the human who is leaving by telling the truth and paying the cost out in dignity.

That is not soft. That is operationally precise. It protects the team that stays. It protects the brand more than any reputation management firm ever could. It is also the right thing.

Watch your verbs this week. They are telling you something.