A Leader's Survivor’s Guilt

Recently at Topgolf, a large portion of the sales team was laid off. Good people.

People who worked hard. People who showed up every day with enthusiasm. People who rolled with constant change and constant corporate punches. People with talent, relationships, goals, families, bills, and lives outside of the office walls.

Much of it did not seem connected to them personally. Consumer behavior changes. Companies restructure. Priorities shift. Budgets tighten. Entire industries start moving in different directions and suddenly, good people find themselves caught underneath decisions they never had control over.

I was not part of that layoff. But ever since, I’ve wrestled with something I did not expect to feel so heavily.

Guilt.

Even writing this feels difficult, because I wasn’t the one laid off. Part of me wonders if I even have the right to talk about these feelings while others are carrying far heavier burdens right now. Because what right do you have to feel emotional when you were the one who stayed?

But I think that’s the strange thing about survivor’s guilt. The people who remain behind often carry emotions they feel almost ashamed to admit out loud. Relief. Sadness. Fear. Confusion. Gratitude. Anxiety. All existing at the same time.

You walk back into work and the building feels different. Certain voices are gone. Certain laughs disappear. Group chats go silent. Meetings feel hollow. You find yourself looking at empty spaces where people used to exist in your daily routine and your brain almost struggles to catch up to the reality that they are simply… gone.

Then the questions start.

Did I push hard enough for them? Did I train them well enough? Did I advocate enough? Did I miss something? Did I innovate as much as I could? Was there more I could have done?

As leaders, or just as humans who care deeply about people, we replay moments in our heads like film after a losing season. Every conversation. Every coaching session. Every missed opportunity. Every number.

You start searching for answers inside yourself because it feels easier than accepting that sometimes situations are bigger than any one person can control. That’s the dangerous part.

Survivor’s guilt quietly convinces you that you had more power than you actually did.

Sometimes companies make decisions from twenty thousand feet above the people living inside them. Spreadsheets replace stories. Efficiency replaces connection. Entire departments become percentages on a slide deck presented in a conference room somewhere far away from the actual humans impacted by the decision.

But no matter how corporate language frames it, these are still people. Not headcount. Not labor costs. Not reductions in force. People.

People sitting in their cars after meetings trying to figure out how they’re going to explain this to their spouse. People recalculating bills in their heads before they’ve even left the parking lot. People questioning their worth because a company changed direction.

That part stays with you.

And if I’m honest, beneath the guilt there’s another feeling most people don’t talk about enough. Fear.

Because layoffs remind all of us how fragile this really is. Titles feel permanent until they aren’t. Security feels stable until one meeting changes everything. One day you are planning next quarter’s strategy and the next day someone is carrying a cardboard box through a lobby they thought they’d walk through for years.

I think what hurts me most is this:

Many of the people who left were good at what they did. This was not some clean movie moment where the “bad employees” disappeared and the “great employees” survived. Life almost never works that way. Sometimes incredibly talented people still get caught in changing markets, shifting structures, or executive decisions they never touched.

And the people who remain behind are left trying to make sense of emotions that don’t fit neatly into professional conversation.

So maybe this blog is less about having answers and more about admitting that you can be grateful you survived and still grieve for the people who didn’t.

Those two things can exist together.

To the people currently rebuilding after hearing the sentence, “We’ve decided to move in a different direction…,” your value did not leave the room when your position did.

And to the people still standing inside the building quietly asking themselves why they remained…

Maybe the reason this hurts so much is because you genuinely cared about your people.

And in today’s world, that still matters.

— The Damaged Leader

Natalie's Notes:

In 2020, I was the one still inside the building grieving the loss of my team. I carried the survivor's guilt. I convinced myself if I worked harder, pushed more, got more creative, grew revenue, maybe I could bring them back. Their loss became my mission.

Then life sat me the other side of the table.

In 2025, I was laid off from a job I thought I loved until it was gone (read Shackled by Fear.) I was sidelined and listened to my team struggle to move forward. They carried the guilt, confusion, and trying to make sense of decisions that none of us made. Even while grieving at home, I found myself trying to help them process theirs.

And in 2026, I was laid off again. But this time, I felt release. Not anger, not panic. Gratitude for what was, and gratitude that it had ended.

Three layoffs. Three completely different lessons.

There are a lot of emotions in a corporate lay off. Through it all I have learned that we cannot build our identity around our titles, companies, or paychecks. No matter how safe you think you are, somewhere their is a spreadsheet with numbers attached to names. This can make you cynical, or it can make you clear.

As we continue to build our own company, I never want to become the person looking at the spreadsheet and forgetting the human attached to it. People matter, and that will remain the reason we exist.

Natalie