CEO Lays Off Two, Posts Crying Selfie, Learns Hard Lesson

Braden Wallake, CEO of HyperSocial, discovered this week that there is a difference between being authentic and being self-absorbed, though the distinction apparently required 6,700 comments and nearly 33,000 reactions to clarify.

Wallake laid off two employees. Then he posted a photograph of himself crying on LinkedIn. The caption read: "This will be the most vulnerable thing I'll ever share." He wanted people to know that not every CEO is "cold-hearted" when conducting layoffs. He had, he noted, reduced his own pay to zero from the $250 weekly salary he'd been taking.

The internet's response was immediate and brutal. Not because he laid people off—that happens. Not because he felt bad about it—that's human. But because he made his own pain the headline while his former employees were presumably updating their resumes.

LinkedIn users called it cringe. Out of touch. Infuriatingly narcissistic. The criticism boiled down to something simple: if you're going to fire people, you don't get to also be the victim of the story. You certainly don't get to monetize your feelings about it in a platform designed for professional self-promotion.

Wallake apologized the next day. "No, my intent was not to make it about me or victimize myself," he wrote, acknowledging he'd been tone-deaf. He promised to help former employees find work and admitted it wasn't his place to name them publicly. Fair enough. The apology was brief, direct, and notably absent of another selfie.

One of his laid-off employees, Noah Smith, actually defended Wallake, saying he understood the emotional weight of conducting layoffs. That's grace. That's also the exception.

Organizational behavior professor André Spicer noted that this moment reflects a current management trend where leaders are encouraged to "bring their real selves to work." True. But there's a canyon between authenticity and performance. Authenticity means sitting with discomfort privately and being useful publicly. It means taking the hit without narrating your own bruises.

Wallake's mistake wasn't caring. It was confusing caring with confession. Leadership isn't a feelings journal. Sometimes it's just doing the hard thing cleanly and letting other people talk about how it made them feel.