Leadership Memo: Here's Your Parting Gift

In early November, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins told staff that 1,271 people, about 22% of the company, would be affected by a restructuring. Some will lose their jobs, some will change roles, and some will be asked to relocate. Canva hasn't said how many fall into each group.

The package for the people leaving is unusually good. According to Canva's note and the coverage of it, everyone leaving gets at least six months' pay in every country, healthcare continued where Canva already provides it, career coaching, the one-year vesting cliff waived for recent hires, and their company laptop to keep. They can also apply for a US$10,000 grant to start a business or community project, with Canva taking no ownership in what they build.

That deserves real credit. Many people laid off this year got far less. It's also fair to notice that a package like this protects a company's reputation with future hires, customers and investors. Both things can be true.

But a well-wrapped exit is still an exit. And the package, however generous, sidesteps the question that matters most: whose decisions led here?

The decisions behind the "hardest moment"

Perkins called this the hardest moment in Canva's thirteen-year history. Her note gave two main reasons. Growth slowed for the first time in a decade, and as the company grew, work got split across so many teams that nobody owned a result from start to finish. Coverage adds that Canva cut its 2026 growth forecast from 30% to 20% in August, after delivering AI features reportedly cost more than expected.

Look at what kind of problems those are. A company doesn't end up with too many layers by accident. Someone approved each new team, each new manager and each hiring plan built on growth that didn't arrive. Someone decided how much to spend on AI features and what to charge for them. The people now leaving didn't make those calls. Many of them were hired to carry them out.

As far as public reporting shows, the restructuring came with no leadership pay cuts, no leadership departures and no statement from any executive naming a decision they got wrong.

Leaders almost always call layoffs a hard decision, and I believe most of them mean it. But it's worth asking what was hard about it, and for whom. The person who signs off on the cuts usually keeps the job, the salary and the house. The person on the other end goes home and tells their family. If a decision costs the people making it nothing they'll actually feel, it was a painful thing to announce. It wasn't a hard thing to live with.

The language that makes it nobody's fault

Read enough layoff announcements and you start to notice the words. Roles are "impacted." Teams are "streamlined." Companies are "rightsizing," "realigning," or in Canva's case "refounding." Perkins wrote that "small changes won't be enough." Earlier, when Canva cut most of its technical writing team, a spokesperson said the company was evolving its approach to technical content.

Notice what's missing from almost every one of those sentences: a person. "Roles were impacted" has no one doing the impacting. "Changes were necessary" doesn't say who made them necessary. The grammar is doing a job. It turns a series of choices, made by specific people at specific moments, into something that just happened, like weather.

That's not an accident either. At large companies, layoff announcements typically pass through communications and legal teams whose job is to protect the company. Protecting the company and telling the plain truth aren't always the same task, and when they conflict, the plain truth tends to lose. What's left is a message that sounds caring and says almost nothing about responsibility.

This isn't just a Canva problem

Canva is an Australian company, but the pattern is one American workers know well. US employers announced more than 617,000 job cuts through October of this year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Meanwhile, pay for the people running the largest companies has kept climbing. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found that CEO pay at the top 350 US firms rose 14% in 2025, to an average of $27.9 million, or about 325 times what a typical worker earns. In 1965, that ratio was about 21 to 1.

Those numbers don't prove any single layoff was wrong. They do show where the risk lands. When a company's bet pays off, the people at the top share heavily in the upside. When it doesn't, the people below them carry most of the downside.

And the research on whether layoffs even work is not kind to them. Wayne Cascio at the University of Colorado Denver has studied downsizing for decades and found that, as a group, companies that cut their way through trouble don't outperform the ones that don't. His summary: "You can't just shrink your way into prosperity." Wharton's Peter Cappelli has said there's no evidence that cutting jobs to improve profitability helps beyond a short-term accounting bump. Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer put it more bluntly: "Layoffs are definitely a confession of poor management."

If that's true, then the confession should come from management.

It can be done differently

Some leaders have shown what that looks like. When Stripe cut 14% of its staff in 2022, CEO Patrick Collison put five words near the top of the memo that most layoff letters avoid: "We, the founders, made this decision." He went on to say the company had been much too optimistic about growth and had overhired, and that he and his brother took responsibility for it.

When Zoom cut about 1,300 jobs in 2023, CEO Eric Yuan wrote that he was accountable for the company's mistakes. He cut his own salary by 98% and gave up his bonus for the year, and the rest of the executive team took 20% pay cuts and gave up their bonuses too. It's fair to point out that a salary cut means less to a founder whose wealth is mostly in stock. But the words still mattered. Employees knew whose call it was, and so did everyone watching.

Neither of those examples undid the harm. People still lost their jobs. But there's a real difference between "this happened" and "I did this." The first asks employees to accept a loss with no one attached to it. The second gives them the truth.

The fair counterpoint

None of this means a company should never lay anyone off. Markets change, sometimes fast, and generative AI has upended the design-software business in ways no one fully predicted. A company that refuses to adjust can fail, and then everyone loses their job. Cascio's own research suggests cuts tied to a genuine change in strategy tend to work better than cuts made just to save money, and Canva's restructuring may turn out to be that kind of change.

The argument isn't against ever making the call. It's against making it from behind language that hides who made it.

What owning it would look like

Accountability doesn't require a public apology tour. It could be one sentence: "I approved a hiring plan built on growth we didn't hit, and that's on me." It could be leadership taking a real pay cut or giving up bonuses in the same year they ask employees to give up their jobs. It could be a plain explanation of how decisions about hiring and spending will be made differently from here, so the same mistake doesn't repeat. Each of those tells the people who stay that the people at the top share the cost of being wrong.

Canva may still do some of this. The company held an all-hands meeting on November 10, and what was said there isn't public. But the announcement is the moment everyone learns who is paying for what, and that moment has passed.

If you run a small business

Most founders reading this will never lay off 1,271 people. But plenty will, at some point, have to let someone go because a plan didn't work: the hire made for a growth spurt that stalled, or the role created for a service that never took off. When that happens, you won't have a communications team to write around it. Good. Say it plainly. The plan was yours, the job existed because you created it, and it's ending because your bet didn't pay off.

Give the kindest exit you can afford, and own the decision out loud. People can usually accept losing a job to a bad bet. What's much harder to accept is losing one to a bad bet that nobody will admit making.

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