In preparing an article for a business publication about what I think business schools need to do in order to teach graduates to be effective in the post-layoff environment; I came up with three ideas. When the full article is published, I’ll provide a link, but here is a summary of my top three actions:

• Move beyond the traditional – usually fragmented and disliked – organizational behavior course, into actually teaching the two core competencies increasingly valued in today’s business environment: self-awareness and interpersonal skills. Faculty must have the ability to help students examine their motivational patterns, reduce their blind spots, and develop and practice coaching, and transition facilitation skills. This requires getting past academic turf issues and partnering with disciplines such as psychology and sociology as well as a much more experiential pedagogy including internships and practicums. 
• Rectify the lopsided imbalance of head skills with an equal dose of heart skills.  As safe and sterile as it may seem, managers can’t analyze people out of their pain.  They need to connect with them at the heart and not the head. When employees are in the midst of a crisis of identity and purpose, they are not interested in strategic analysis, demand curves, or decision trees.  They need “high touch, low tech.”
• Find faculty who have the ability and desire to understand and deal with the real issues faced by organizations. Business organizations are struggling to come to grips with a new, short term, provisional, psychological employment contract. Unfortunately, tenured, research oriented, quantitatively focused, business school faculty members are often unable to generate the necessary empathy and requisite transition facilitation skills to be of much help to students who will face this “real world.” 

I wrote a guest Business Week column on executive stress that came out today. It puts Healing the Wounds in Context for leaders in today’s organizations.  It is a short article and here is an even shorter summary.   

The Permanence of Temporariness.    Executives who came up through the old psychological contract often find it very stressful to come to grips with the necessity of managing temporary systems because it requires a fundamental shift in values and attitudes concerning loyalty, motivation, and commitment.

Sucking it Up Will Bring You Down. 

            Despite how they are really feeling, most business executives are conditioned into displaying cool, rational, analytical behavior.  The culture in many organizations forces executives to repress these emotions and, as a result, they experience enormous, often intolerable levels of stress.

Learn and Practice Helping Skills.

            Do onto others what was not done onto you. Most business schools postulate the traditional managerial functions of planning, organizing, evaluating, and controlling. These are the skills that got most executives where they are, but they are not the skills that will help layoff survivors overcome their survivor symptoms and return to productivity.  Non-evaluative listening, the ability to reflect feelings and emotions, and coaching skills are the executive currency of the realm in the new reality.  

Be Cautiously Loyal but Not Stupid. 

            Employees do not want their executives to be mercenaries and executives need to demonstrate realistic optimism. This, however, is not inconsistent with the necessity of constant external networking and ruthlessly honing marketable skills.  It is a delicate but essential balancing act.  The most successful and stress-free new reality executives are those who know they have the skills and options necessary to leave the organization but choose to be there.  The most stressed and least productive executives are those who live in fear of job loss and engage in a self defeating, passive-aggressive strategy of just trying to “hold on.”

The ideas in this posting were the basis for Training Magazine’s Inside Training   Business Intelligence July 15th column  In today’s pandemic of layoffs, training is sometimes seen as a nonessential activity, a target for cost reduction.  Here is how to change that misperception and position training as central to organizational recovery and enhanced productivity.

• The overwhelming consensus of research is that layoff survivors don’t work harder because they feel lucky to have a job; they are angry, risk averse, with much lowered productivity. They don’t automatically snap back and that’s where training can add significant value.
• Training line managers in basic helping skills – empathetic listening, non-judgmental reflection of feelings, and coaching is enormously beneficial in facilitating a return to productivity. It has a dual benefit: it equips managers with the tools necessary to authentically communicate and re-recruit their employees, and it helps managers deal with their own layoff survivor symptoms. 
• This is almost always a high leverage intervention. A one to two day workshop format with role plays, feedback, and facilitated practice has amazing “bang for the buck” both in providing managers with the requisite skills and in demonstrating the relevance of the training function.
• Trainers should focus on basic helping skills. Some organizations have experienced great success with semi-scripted managerial communication outlines for one-on-one employee sessions.  This is not demeaning to managers and they almost always find it helpful.  Helping skills are the currency of the realm in layoff recovery and most managers are undercapitalized.  They got where they are by excelling and planning, organizing, and controlling. Today they desperately need skills in listening, coaching, and empathy. This need represents a tremendous opportunity for the training profession to add significant value.  

I like to ask people to use layoffs or the threat of layoffs as a wake-up call; to take the opportunity to assess their life and career path and decide if they are really doing what they want to do.  If not, layoffs give them the opportunity to recalibrate and make some adjustments.

I’ve begun to think that sometimes people may hear the wrong wake up call and end up in worse shape than had the alarm not gone off in the first place.  An acquaintance from the Center for Creative Leadership decided that he really wanted to move out of the organizational cocoon and start his own consulting practice.  What he found, after ten futile months, was that he wasn’t ready or possibility not wired at all to become an independent consultant.  He missed the support services, marketing help, and collegial infrastructure of an organizational environment.  He’s now seeking an employer where he can find these services.  I think he may have heard the wrong wake-up call.

Another hypothesis is that he may not have spent enough time in the neutral zone. In Bill Bridges seminal work on Transitions he pointed out that, before we start something new, we need to spend time in what he calls the neutral zone – a place of ambiguity and uncertainty.  I think this is really good advice.

I was interviewed yesterday by a reporter from the Houston Chronicle.  She asked me an interesting question.  It was something like, “Do the younger ‘gen Y’ layoff survivors react the same as older surviving employees? 

 One would think that with their expectations of many jobs and not signing up for life, they would be less affected by layoff survivor sickness than more “chronologically gifted” employees.  What I’ve found is that their survivor symptoms are just as significant, but for different reasons.

 The violation they suffer is not because of the disappearance of long term job security. It is that, for the first time for many, their sense of entitlement has been violated. This is the generation that grew up under helicopter parents and have rarely, if ever, experienced failure.  The average GPA in most colleges is well over 3.0 and students get very upset if they even get a whiff of a C. When they are laid off or experience the threat of a layoff, it creates significant cogitative dissidence which quickly moves to layoff survivor symptoms.

 Young, “gen Y” employees, too need managers who are competent to help them work through their survivor symptoms. They also need coaching in how to handle a harsh external environment from which they were previously inappropriately insulated.

These ten questions are designed to facilitate a dialogue and open communications.  I have used them, or similar questions, when working with management groups.

1.  What is the future of the time honored strategy on the part of organizations of “capturing the total being” – tying the employee’s sense of direction, purpose, and self-esteem to the organization?

 2.     What are the implications of placing all of your emotional and social eggs in the organizational basket – defining who you are by where you work?

 3.     What are the implications of the new employment contract in regard to motivation, loyalty, and commitment?

 4.     How do you manage and lead employees within the context of the new employment contract?

 5.     What are the implications of the new reality on the organizational communication process – upward, downward, and laterally?

 6.     What do you tell your children in regard to the world of work and career planning?

 7.     How do you deal with the “chronologically gifted employee” who began her career under one set of assumptions (the old employment contract) and is struggling to end it under another set of assumptions (the new employment contract)?

 8.     What are the implications of the new reality on the service and mission of non-profit organizations?

 9.     How can grieving and emotional catharsis be achieved in the world of work and is this a legitimate role of the organization?

 10. How should you as an individual and your organization respond to the “new reality” – wait for it to go away – accept it as permanent – find a middle-ground?

I learned this deceptively simple phrase from the late Pat Williams, founder of the Pepperdine MSOD program and, over the years, have increasingly come to appreciate it’s relevance when coaching clients going through change and transition triggered by downsizing.  When a client is caught up in a crisis of purpose, competence, and self-esteem; facts, figures, models, 360 degree feedback reports, and flow charts don’t help – in fact they get in the way.  The currency of the realm is feelings and emotions, not facts and figures.  Logical analysis and rational planning may help the coach feel competent, but they will only make the coachee feel worse.  Anyone who has had an argument with a significant other and attempted to defuse their emotional issues by logical analysis to prove that they “shouldn’t feel that way” will understand that you don’t solve a “heart” problem (emotions and feelings) by a “head” (data and logic) process.  In a coaching relationship, the more a client’s “heart” issues are responded to by the coach’s “head” solutions, the wider the empathy gap. What is necessary before helping the client move forward are the basic skills of empathetic listening, reflecting feelings and emotions, and the ability to form an authentic, non-judgmental, helping relationship.  We can often be of more service to our clients by simply giving them empathy rather than our “scientific” tools.

Here is an interesting question.  Why are layoff survivors like prisoners?  There seem to be three similiarities.

1.  Layoff survivors are (based on some good research) depressed, angry, anxious, and fearful.  People in prisons also have these feelings.
2. The reason layoff survivors have what I call “layoff survivor sickness” is that they place all their social and emotional eggs in the organizational basket.  Who they are, their sense of relevance and purpose is defined by the organization.  I ask the question, “If who you are is where you work, what’s at threat if you job’s at threat?”  The answer is a lot more than a paycheck – your sense of relevance and purpose.  In prisons, inmates also develop what is called an “institutional personality.”  They can’t cope outside the system since the system has conditioned them into dependency.  Their sense of relevancy, purpose, and value is defined by the system.  This is why there is a lot of recidivism – ex cons find, often unconsciously, ways to get back into the system.  The cure for employees is to break, what I call, “organizational co-dependency,”  defining their self-worth by remaining employed in one organization.  The cure for prisoners to break an institutional identity is the same, to develop a sense of purpose and value outside the system.
3.  In both prisons and organizations, what psychologists call the “locus of control” is external – defined by the system and not the individual.  In prisons the external factors are gangs, sub-groups, privileges given by the institution or the power structure of gangs.  In organizations the external factors are status, office size, cliques, access to information, what meetings you attend, etc.  Both of these external factors serve to connect individuals to organizations for the wrong reasons.  Healthy employees and prisoners who have a chance of making it outside the institution define their sense of purpose, value, and relevance internally. That way when their jobs or their institutional residence is threatened, that’s all that is threatened, not their sense of identity.  When they loose a job that is all they loose or when they leave prison they bring their value system with them and can apply it to the outside world.

I was asked for three quick, clear, and concise bits of advice for a person who just got word that she or he would be laid off.  Here they are:

 Take a mental and physical time out.  Get away from your desk and your work space.  Do something physical take a walk, do some stretching, go to the gym for an hour.  You need to gain physical and emotional space.

 Bargain.  Take an inventory of your current projects and priorities.  Calmly and objectively meet with your boss and let her or him know how important these tasks are and how qualified you are to do them.  There is no downside but there could be an upside in terms of pushing out your actual termination date, potential consulting work, or working part time.

 Vent.  Keep your emotions in check until the day ends but as soon as it does, find someone to talk to.  You badly need emotional support and the best kind is not someone with gratuitous advice, but simply someone who can engage in empathetic listing. This can be a spouse, a significant other, a friend, or a helping professional.  Given the epidemic of layoffs you can intellectually understand what just happened, but you can’t get through the emotional impact without opening out to someone else.  You don’t need to wallow in it, but you do need to find someone to lean on.  This is something everyone should do.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act  is a government program that mandates that companies planning “massive” layoffs must give communities and employees 60 days notice. This is a great example of the old adage “no good deed” – or in this case act – “goes unpunished.”

 It attempts to do the right thing through the wrong means.  Giving employees and communities prior notice is a good thing.  Attempting to simplify a complex problem and administer the solution through government bureaucracy is a bad thing.  Because of exclusions and complicated guidelines, the act is extremely difficult to enforce. Giving more enforcement power to the Labor Department will only help the bureaucrats and the lawyers; not employees or organizations. 

Today’s recessionary climate is much more severe and unpredictable than when the act took effect in 1989.  Layoff decisions are often made in headquarters locations far removed from the actual sites of the reductions.  In the chaotic, ambiguity ridden, heat of battle for survival that characterizes most organizational cultures today, it is often not possible to plan 60 days out or predict the size or scope of layoffs. 

 Rather than give prior notice because of legislative mandate, it is far better to do it because it makes sound business sense.  Here is why:

•  If employees have prior notice, they have a sense of control and will actually be more productive because they will not suffer from fear, anxiety, and uncertainly.
•  Enlightened employers have found that being honest and clear with employees as a matter of policy is much better for productivity than relying on either extreme of layoff administration (walking employees out the door with no prior notice – or adhering to an artificial time frame such as the sixty days mandated by WARN).
• Research is clear that the best policy is for employers to tell employees what they know and, even more importantly, what they don’t know.  If they know or strongly suspect that there will be layoffs in the future they should be straight with employees.  This is based on good employee relations, not on a government mandate.
• It basically comes down to a three dimensions of trust: (1), If employees trust that employers will tell them the truth, even if that truth is they will be laid off in the future, they will be more productive and may even avert layoffs.  (2), If employers don’t trust their employees to handle the truth and need to walk them out the door with no prior notice, they have the wrong employees or are pursuing the wrong employee relations strategy. (3), Trusting the government to regulate truth telling and authenticity, is a bad bargain for both employee and organization.