Meta told investors last week that the company does not know what its optimal long-term workforce size will be. "I don't think anyone does," the company added. That statement was made on a public earnings call while 71,000 employees were listening. Eight thousand of them are being notified in less than two weeks. More cuts are planned for the second half of the year with no defined scope or timing.
The statement is accurate. Meta is spending up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year. The company is reorganizing teams around AI capabilities that are evolving faster than any headcount model can reliably predict. The uncertainty about long-term workforce size is real.
It is also incomplete, and the workforce knows it.
The Meta situation is not unique. It is the most visible current example of a distinction that every leadership team navigating significant change will eventually face: the difference between what it cannot say and what it has decided not to say. They are not the same thing, and the cost of treating them as equivalent shows up in ways that communications teams cannot fix after the fact.
Two Kinds of Uncertainty
The first kind of uncertainty is genuine. The decision has not been made. The outcome is not known. The regulatory filing has not cleared. The board has not voted. In those moments, saying "we don't know yet" is not a failure of communications discipline. It is the most honest thing leadership can say. A workforce that has been treated with honesty over time will extend the benefit of the doubt when uncertainty is real. They will wait. They will tolerate ambiguity. They will not fill the silence with the worst available interpretation, because the leadership team hasn't given them a reason.
The second kind is different. Leadership knows the answer, or enough of it to give the workforce meaningful clarity. It has decided not to do it. The reasons are sometimes legitimate. Legal exposure may constrain what can be said before a filing is made. Competitive sensitivity may require holding back details that would harm the business if disclosed early. A timeline may not be confirmed firmly enough to state publicly yet. These are real constraints, and a leadership team that names them honestly earns more trust than one that pretends they do not exist.
Sometimes the reason is simpler. The answer is hard, and the room is not ready to hear it. The leadership team has not aligned on how to frame it, counsel has not yet cleared the message, or the executives responsible for delivering it are not yet prepared to stand behind it under questioning. In those cases, "we don't know" is not honest uncertainty. It is a decision to withhold what is known, framed as a knowledge gap.
Why the Workforce Always Knows
The workforce knows the difference. Not always immediately. But faster than leadership expects, and with a precision that no all-hands talking point can obscure.
This is because employees do not evaluate what leadership says in isolation. They evaluate it against everything else they know: the decisions already made, the behavior they observe in the weeks before an announcement, the conversations happening in the margins of formal communications, and the gap between what leadership says publicly and what managers say privately when asked a direct question. A workforce that has been told "we don't know" while watching decisions get made around them will draw its own conclusions. Those conclusions are almost always more pessimistic than the truth, because the mind fills uncertainty with what it fears rather than what it hopes.
In Meta's case, the workforce is living inside a 27-day window between the announcement and the first round of notifications. The company acknowledged in its internal memo that this "leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity, which is incredibly unsettling." That acknowledgment is honest. The question the workforce is now asking is not whether Meta knows how many people AI will ultimately displace. It is whether the company is being direct about what it knows, given that the people listening are the ones whose futures are at stake.
The Communications Work That Precedes the Message
Most messages that fail do not fail because of how they were written. They fail because of decisions that were not made before anyone sat down to write. A leadership team that has not aligned on what it is willing to commit to cannot communicate with precision, because it does not yet know what it means. What comes out is accurate but incomplete, honest in what it says and evasive in what it omits. The workforce reads the gap.
The alignment work that prevents this is specific. It is communications work done at the level most leadership teams never reach, the work of getting a leadership team to answer three questions before anyone drafts a word.
The first question is what the organization actually knows. Not what it is comfortable saying, but what it knows. The distinction matters because leadership teams routinely conflate discomfort with genuine uncertainty. They say they do not know things they know. They say they cannot predict things they have already modeled. Making the actual knowledge state explicit, even in private, is the first step toward communicating it honestly.
The second question is what the organization has decided not to say, and why. The reasons may be legitimate. Naming the constraints explicitly within the leadership team is what allows a message to acknowledge them without pretending they do not exist. A workforce told "we cannot share the full picture yet because of regulatory constraints, and here is what we can tell you" receives something meaningfully different from a workforce told, "we don't know." Both may be technically accurate. Only one treats the audience as people who deserve to understand why.
The third question is what the workforce needs to hear to function. Not what leadership wants them to hear, and not the full truth if it cannot be shared. The question is what the workforce needs, at minimum, to continue doing their work with confidence that the organization is being straight with them. That floor is almost always higher than leadership assumes and lower than the full picture leadership is withholding. The communication that meets it is usually possible. Most leadership teams never identify it because they are focused on managing the message rather than serving the audience.
What This Costs When It Is Not Done
The cost of failing to make this distinction explicit is not always visible in the short term. A workforce that receives an incomplete message will usually continue to function. Productivity does not crater overnight. Resignations do not spike in the first week. The damage is quieter and longer-lasting.
It shows up in the Q&A at the all-hands when an employee asks a direct question and the answer does not match what people already know to be true. It shows up in the manager conversations, when frontline leaders are left to handle questions they were not prepared to answer. It shows up in the departure of the employees who had enough options to leave when the ambiguity became intolerable. Those are rarely the employees an organization can afford to lose.
It shows up most visibly when the full picture eventually emerges, as it always does, and the workforce compares what they were told to what was known at the time. That comparison is the moment credibility is either confirmed or permanently damaged. A leadership team that was genuinely uncertain and said so earns the benefit of the doubt when the picture becomes clear. A leadership team that withheld what it knew, for whatever reason, does not.
The Work Before the Room
I work with leadership teams on the communications work that happens before anyone drafts a word. Most leadership teams skip it. The message they produce reflects that.
It starts with getting the leadership team to name, honestly and privately, what it knows and what it has decided not to share. Most leadership teams have never done this explicitly. They move from internal deliberation to external communication without a clear-eyed accounting of where genuine uncertainty ends, and strategic withholding begins. The resulting message reflects that gap.
It continues with identifying the constraints that make full disclosure impossible or inadvisable, and naming them in a way that can be communicated to the workforce without revealing what cannot be revealed. A message that says "there are things we cannot yet share, and here is why, and here is what we can tell you" is a different kind of communication than a message that uses uncertainty as a shield. The first asks the workforce to extend trust. The second expects them not to notice the difference.
It ends with preparing the leadership team to stand behind the message under conditions it did not design. The Q&A goes sideways. A manager gets asked a direct question in a small group. An employee has already done the math and wants to know if the math is right. These are the moments that reveal whether the communications work was done. A leadership team that did the work can answer from the same understanding, with precision that holds up. One that did not will give different answers in different rooms. The workforce will compare them.
The organizations that handle their consequential moments well are the ones whose leadership did the communications work that made honest writing possible before anyone sat down to draft a word.
Meta's workforce receives its notifications on May 20. What they believe about the company afterward will be shaped by everything communicated in the weeks between the announcement and that date. That work is not ahead of Meta. It is already behind it.