A few weeks ago, ESPN cut staff as part of a round of layoffs tied to its takeover of NFL Network. Chairman Jimmy Pitaro sent employees a memo explaining the move. It is a useful document, though not for the reasons he intended.
The memo’s language gives us a window into whether the organization created a larger plan, and how well that plan was thought through. When a memo comes out cold or vague, the words are telling of the process and plan. Too often, they reveal there wasn’t much of a plan at all.
Three things the ESPN memo reveals.
- The first flaw in the memo was the chairman’s lack of empathy. The chairman opened the memo detailing the process of integrating the NFL assets instead of addressing the layoffs and the impact on former employees. When your first instinct on the hardest day of someone’s year is to lead with the business win, it is a sign that people were not the center of the plan.
- The Solution: open with the people, name what the day means for them, and let the business rationale follow. A memo that starts with the human cost usually reflects a plan that did too.
- Passive voice is the second tell. The memo repeatedly refers to “job impacts,” framing job losses as something that happened rather than as the result of leadership decisions. When the words hide who made the call, it usually means no one wants to own it.
- The Solution: write in the first person and attach a name. “I made this decision” tells employees a person chose this and will answer for it, which is the difference between a leader and a press release.
- Third is clarity, or the lack of it. There is information in the memo, but not the information that matters to the person reading it. Employees want to know if they still have a job. That gap in understanding is the result of bad sequencing in the memo, when it was not yet settled who would hear what, from whom, and in what order.
- The Solution: decide the internal notification sequence before you draft a word. Who is told, by whom and when. Get that right and the clarity follows. Get it wrong and no phrasing saves you.
Here is where I want to push our profession. Some have defined our job as what to say and how to say it. That is half of it. The other half is what to do and how to do it, and sometimes what not to do. You cannot write your way out of a lack of a plan, or one that treats people as a line-item.
The solution is to build a better plan, and let the memo report it.
Two moves matter most: 1) In 2026, assume your memo leaks. Draft the internal message early and prepare a holding note, so a timeline that collapses by a week still lets people hear it from a leader first.
2) Plan for the people who stay, because they are watching all of it and deciding what kind of place this is now. Our 2025 research with The Harris Poll found that even under leaders employees rate as good, only 19% feel heard. A layoff widens that. Closing it takes managers who keep showing up in the ninety days after, not a single memo and then silence.
Do all of that and the memo mostly writes itself, because there is finally a plan worth describing. That is the outcome we should want - language that reflects a decision made with care and humanity.
David Grossman is an author, consultant, speaker, and one of America’s foremost authorities on leadership and change communication