Comment by nostrademons

> A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.

> A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players

In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.

Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.

If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.