On the morning of December 1 2025, Channing Martin got the kind of text from her boss that thousands of workers across corporate America would get in the months that followed. By that afternoon, her job was gone and that the team she built would be cut to a single person.
Martin was global chief diversity and social impact officer at the Interpublic Group, one of the largest advertising holding companies in the world. Omnicom‘s acquisition of the company had closed the day before Thanksgiving, and the layoffs followed within the week. Her first instinct was her team. She wanted to reach every person on it before they learned the news from a mass email or a town hall.
What she felt once the logistics were handled surprised her: irrelevance. She had spent two decades on a single premise: the harder she worked and the higher she climbed, the more power she would accumulate, and the job was to use that power to open systems for other people. The layoff exposed the premise as false. The power had been positional all along, lent by the title and revoked with it.
Martin’s story is the leading edge of a much larger reckoning. Omnicom announced more than 4,000 layoffs as it absorbed Interpublic, the cuts landing the same week Martin got her call, according to Fast Company. Her function was among the most exposed of all. Diversity headcount across the Russell 3000 has fallen roughly 15% from its 2022 peak, according to the labor-data firm Revelio Labs. The commitments companies made in 2020 were coming undone.
Diversity leaders were far from alone this year. U.S. employers announced close to 398,000 job cuts in the first five months of 2026, with AI the leading reason cited for three months running, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. As workers across the country sit with that reality, Martin’s path is worth studying. It took her out of the corporate world and toward building things she owns: an advisory practice, a coaching business for early-career talent, and the search for a company of her own to buy. And it made her realize that the title she had been chasing was never going to give her the power she actually wanted.
Here is what she has figured out so far:
Martin built her career on a clean equation: work harder, perform better, climb higher, and watch your power grow. The job, as she understood it, was to learn the systems, dismantle the ones that excluded people, and build better ones in their place, but the layoff broke the equation.
“I had to come to the realization and the acceptance that I wasn’t as powerful as I thought I was. And that these corporate systems and structures aren’t designed to do what I want to do. And that’s okay. I could either spend the rest of my career fighting against them and not building wealth for others, or I could build them myself and yield power in the ways that I really, really want to.”
The distinction Martin is drawing separates two kinds of power that look identical from the outside. Positional power comes with the title and the org chart. It can be granted, and it can be taken back in a single restructuring. Structural power is the ability to set the terms under which the work happens, and it does not evaporate when a deal closes. For twenty years, Martin treated the first as if it were the second. The layoff taught her the difference, and she decided she would rather build the smaller thing she controls than borrow the larger thing she does not.
Within weeks of the layoff, Martin had sketched four things she wanted to build at once: an advisory practice focused on the future of work and corporate purpose, a coaching business for early-career talent, a plan to buy an existing small company and run it, and a farm built around affordable housing and community. What links them is a single design principle.
“The idea that I could be a business owner and an entrepreneur without building a product was really exciting to me. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I don’t want to build a product that I have to scale and sell, but I wanna be an employer. I wanna watch my employees send their kids to college. I wanna build an organization that treats people well. And I wanna transform communities through small and medium sized businesses.”
The portfolio career gets talked about as a hustle, a way to cobble together income when no single job pays enough. Martin is using it as something closer to insurance. Four bets across four ventures means no single one of them can do to her what Interpublic did. She names the mechanism plainly: the power is in the choice. The leverage she lost when her title disappeared comes back the moment she has more than one place to stand.
Martin describes the bargain between workers and their companies as something close to a marriage, with all the commitment that implies and none of the legal protection. People put themselves through school, take on debt, return to work weeks after giving birth, and absorb years of slights, all on the understanding that the institution will hold up its end. When the company rewrites the deal, the worker finds out there was nothing on paper.
“This social contract, this social marriage with work, in particular in America. And there was no prenup because apparently the terms have changed. And I’m not seeing half on the other side. I’m not keeping the house. I don’t have a vacation home in the Hamptons. I didn’t get any of that stuff that you had before. And I think that is really scary for people.”
AI is the change that has voided the terms, and Martin’s point is that the fear it produces is rational. The companies asking workers to adapt at speed are the same companies that have shown, through merger after merger, that loyalty runs one direction. Her argument is that the people who see this most clearly have already stopped waiting for the institution to protect them and started protecting themselves.
Martin came up alongside two generations of women in this work: the trailblazers who did it before it had a title, many of whom have since left on their own terms, and a cohort now scrambling for a next step. She watches the chief diversity officer job still get posted, with the pay cut and the mandate hollowed out. The roles that remain often ask people to keep fighting for something the organization stopped funding.
“When what you do for a living and what you believe in and love is constantly being attacked and then not supported by your organization, it is really difficult to exist in that state for a long period of time. Our bodies weren’t designed to do that. So I’m hoping that a lot of folks are reinventing what they’re doing and how they’re doing it while still staying true to themselves.”
The 2020 commitments amounted to a hiring wave, and a hiring wave reversed as fast as it began. The work itself remains. It has moved outside the building, into advisory practices and coaching businesses where the people who know how to do it choose their clients and set their rates. The function the companies cut still has to be done, now by people who no longer answer to them.
When I asked Martin what term of her old full-time role she would never accept again, her answer was the freedom to show up fully as herself, including as a woman of faith. The term she is renegotiating is visibility: how much of herself she has to leave at the door to read as a leader. For two decades, being a Christian was something she managed and kept in its place at work. In the work she is building now, it comes with her.
“As a woman who is a believer and a Christian, I could never accept a role where I couldn’t be that in that role and in that place. Not saying that I walk around preaching at work, but a place that wouldn’t allow me to show up in that way, I just wouldn’t accept it.”
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