It is said that within every crisis lies opportunity. Making the difficult choice to conduct a large layoff is a likely one for many executives. But delivering this news need not become a reputation crisis for the company.

Much has already been written about how Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner and CEO, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook parent Meta, each conducted recent layoffs. The way each approached sharing the news offers lessons on how to deliver—and not deliver—bad news to employees....