On May 5, 2026, PayPal's CEO was less than three months into the role when he announced on a quarterly earnings call that 4,760 people, twenty percent of the workforce, would lose their jobs over the next two to three years. Investors heard it. Employees heard it. They heard it at the same moment, through the same channel, in the same breath as the quarterly revenue figures.
Someone made that choice weeks before the call. Someone decided that the earnings call was the right vehicle, and that investor sequencing and workforce sequencing did not need to be separated. That decision will follow every subsequent announcement this leadership team makes.
A workforce that finds out about its own restructuring from an earnings transcript carries that knowledge into every conversation that follows. The credibility that leadership spends in that moment has to be rebuilt through sustained behavior over time, while the restructuring itself is still unfolding.
The sequencing question is a leadership decision
Most restructuring announcements fail upstream. The writing is often adequate. The timing, the sequence, and the audience mapping are where the real damage happens, and those decisions get made long before anyone drafts a word.
The question that should have been asked at PayPal weeks before the earnings call is straightforward. Which employees need to hear this before it becomes public, and who has the credibility to deliver it to them directly? Senior leaders briefing their direct reports before a public announcement is not a courtesy. It is a strategy. It controls the information environment before the announcement does, and it gives the workforce a human point of contact rather than a transcript.
At PayPal, that question either was not asked or was answered incorrectly. The result is a workforce that now measures everything leadership says against what it cost them to find out this way.
A new CEO starts the clock on trust immediately
PayPal's CEO was less than three months into the role when the announcement went out. That window matters more than most leadership teams understand. A workforce builds its foundational read on a new leader in the first ninety days, and that read shapes how every subsequent decision gets interpreted.
A new CEO does not have a reservoir of established trust to draw from during a restructuring. The workforce watches every early decision for evidence of how this leader operates under pressure. An earnings call that delivers workforce news and investor news simultaneously gives the workforce clear evidence. That evidence is now the foundation of the relationship.
The communications framework a new CEO needs is not a messaging strategy. It is a discipline built into how decisions get made from day one. Someone needs to be asking, before each major decision, how it will land with the workforce, through what channel, and in what order. That discipline does not develop naturally under pressure. It has to be built before the pressure arrives.
Middle managers absorb what leadership does not prepare for
The people who carry the most weight with the workforce after a restructuring announcement are not the CEO and not the communications team. They are the managers who sit one or two levels above the people whose jobs are at risk.
Those managers walked into the day after the announcement with no preparation and a full calendar of conversations with people who had questions they could not answer. Organizations treat this as an inevitable byproduct of a difficult announcement. It is not inevitable. It is what happens when the communications strategy ends at the press release.
Preparing managers specifically means giving them something more useful than a FAQ document. It means equipping them with an honest account of what they know, what they do not know yet, and what they are authorized to say. That preparation has to happen before the announcement, which means someone has to build it before the announcement exists.
The cost arrives later than the announcement
PayPal's restructuring extends over two to three years. The damage from that sequencing decision will not be visible the day after the announcement. It will show up in the attrition data long after the announcement is considered old news, in the talent that quietly decides not to wait for the next round of cuts.
The organizations that come through restructuring with their workforce trust intact made different decisions earlier. They asked the sequencing question when the business decision was being made. They prepared their managers before the press release was written. That work requires someone outside the organization whose only stake is whether the workforce relationship survives what leadership is about to ask of it.
I do that work with leadership teams. Not after the decision. Inside it.