I listened to an interview with a senior executive from a well-known company. He said they had a policy of laying off the bottom 10% of performers every year, and rewarding the top.

It stayed with me. Not because it’s rare, but because so many companies do this and genuinely believe it’s good leadership.

Simon Sinek writes about this in Leaders Eat Last. His argument is simple: the reason humans survived thousands of years of hardship isn’t intelligence. It’s cooperation. When we lived in tribes, we survived because we trusted each other enough to leave camp and hunt — knowing the people behind us would protect what we loved. We treated the group as family.

That instinct hasn’t changed. Only the battlefield has.

The threats now are economic downturns, competition, shrinking margins. The organization is the tribe. Which means the leader’s job, like it’s always been, is to make people feel safe enough to fight together.

Mass layoffs didn’t exist before the 1970s. The practice took off in the 80s and 90s, and the executives who did it most aggressively were celebrated as management geniuses. By 2000, cutting the bottom performers had become standard practice.

But here’s what that policy quietly communicates to everyone still inside the building: we are not a family. We are competitors.

Imagine what that does to a room. Every single day, on top of fighting everything outside, you’re also watching your back inside.

Sinek tells the story of two companies facing the same economic crisis. Company A’s leadership chose mass layoffs to protect the numbers. Company B made a different call, no one gets cut, but everyone from the CEO down to the most junior hire takes four unpaid weeks off. The pain gets distributed across the whole organization instead of falling on a few people who had no say.

The moment Company B made that announcement, something shifted. People felt safe. And when people feel safe, they trust each other. And when they trust each other, they cooperate, not because anyone asked them to, but because that’s what humans naturally do when the threat is outside, not inside.

People started trading their unpaid weeks with each other. Those who needed the income more got covered by those who could afford to give. No one organized it. It just happened.

When the crisis passed, Company B came out more profitable, more loyal, and more cohesive than before.

We’ve been told that internal competition drives performance. That pressure produces results. And maybe it does, for a while.

But a leader who makes people feel safe will always outlast a leader who makes people feel replaceable.

The numbers might look better short term.

The company will not.