Leadership
We’re All Innies Now: Apple TV’s "Severance" Feels Too Real
Personal Perspective: "Severance" is about reclaiming humanity. Can we?
Updated March 31, 2025 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- Cold, transactional leadership is making a comeback—despite decades of evidence it doesn’t work.
- Psychological safety, trust, and autonomy are not job perks—they’re essential to performance.
- Neither leaders nor workers ultimately benefit from systems that punish care and reward compliance.
What if your employer could strip away your identity the moment you walked through the door? That’s the premise of Severance, the Apple TV+ series in which employees at fictional Lumon Industries undergo a procedure to split their consciousnesses: Their “Innie” lives only at work; their “Outie” remembers nothing that happens inside the office.
The first season felt like satire when it came out in 2022. But Season 2, which concluded last week, arrived alongside the second Trump administration, with widespread federal worker layoffs and the return of a more transactional leadership style. In this new moment, Severance hits much closer to home.
We don’t have to accept this. Treating workers with trust, care, and autonomy isn’t just ethical; it’s proven to create happier, more productive workplaces. Research shows that psychological safety, respect, and human connection aren’t soft; they’re what make organizations perform and endure.
It’s time to stop normalizing disconnection and start defending what actually works.
We’re All Innies Now
In Severance, control is sold as “efficiency.” Care is replaced by shallow perks like Waffle Parties and finger traps. Innies are monitored, isolated, and kept in line with cold corporate punishments.
As a federal employee, I’ve watched some of the logic of Severance seep in to the workplace. After-hours Fork-in-the-Road emails seem more like veiled threats dressed up as opportunities. “What did you do last week?” check-ins are required to be sent to an anonymous inbox with no feedback coming back and rumors of monitoring echo Lumon’s constant oversight. Teams vanish overnight without explanation, while others wait in limbo, wondering if the next email will end a decades-long career. But this is not just the situation in the federal government. Across industries, workers are seeing psychological safety fade, self-care dismissed as indulgent, autonomy stripped by rushed return-to-office mandates, and empathy treated like a weakness.
It feels like we’re all Innies now—expected to follow orders, not ask questions, suppress out humanity not celebrate it. That’s the hallmark of transactional leadership, and it’s making a comeback. Leaders who once prioritized relationships are now walled off. Loyalty seems more important than expertise. Caring for employees is an afterthought at best.
But we’ve known for decades transactional leadership doesn’t work. Endless corridors of research show that trust, inclusion, and purpose—not fear and control—drive real results. Even federal performance frameworks center feedback, learning, and well-being. But those principles are being pushed aside for speed and control, under the guise of efficiency.
When Humanity Becomes a Liability
A government leader recently told me, “Our agency isn’t people-first anymore—we’re work-first.” That might sound like a strong leadership stance, but it’s Severance logic in a nutshell: Pretend that it’s possible–or desirable—to separate the people from the work.
A colleague told me that her effort to support child care and carpooling was shelved because of “optics”—the optics of caring for employees. A State Department friend told me that her grief support group was canceled—mourning, it seems, wasn’t considered efficient. Goodbye parties are being scrapped. Across federal agencies, people say they feel afraid to even express compassion for fired co-workers, worried that it will be seen as disloyal.
But as Severance reminds us, humanity isn’t the problem; it’s the solution. On the show, Dylan risks punishment to give the departing Irv a proper goodbye. Irv himself leaves behind a map to help his team as a final act of care. Mark starts to lead by connecting with others, not reading from a corporate manual. Helly chooses to protect her colleagues, not betray them. And in the dramatic final scene, they don’t work together because they’re told to; they do so because they trust each other. They’ve become a team—not through control, but through care.
The “Villains” Are Cracking
One of the most compelling parts of Season 2 is watching the innie team's supervisors and enforcers, Mr. Milchick and Ms. Cobel, start to unravel. Ms. Cobel, now outside the company, begins to question and fight the institution she’s devoted her life to. In the final scene, Mr. Milchick stares at his reflection, reckoning with the cost of his blind loyalty to Lumon.
In real workplaces, leaders enforcing harsh policies are rarely villains; they’re caught in systems that reward detachment and punish compassion. Middle managers feel this most: Show too much care and be seen as disloyal. So they send the cold email, deliver the bad news without empathy, and are left wondering where the tough choices of leadership end—and where abandoning their values begins.
We Don’t Have to Accept a Half-Life
In the season's finale, Helly declares: “They give us half a life and think we won’t fight for it.”
As transactional leadership makes a return, we might consider fighting for our humanity, too. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it works. Trust, safety, autonomy, appreciation—these aren’t perks. They’re at the center of effective organizations.
Even animals know something’s off. The Washington Post reported that some dogs react badly to Severance—whining, pacing, leaving the room. People are waking up, too. After a well-being session I led, a colleague told me: “I felt scared to join from my office—but I’m done living in fear. We know these practices help us do better work and show up stronger.”
Severance Season 2 doesn’t end in silence but in awakening. The Innies stop pretending the system works and start working for something better. Because a workplace built on humanity isn’t a fantasy—it’s proven. And it’s worth standing up for.
