1. Re-recruit the survivors.  The overwhelming consensus of downsizing research is that layoffs do not achieve their “going in” productivity goals.  Survivors of most organizations are angry, depressed, anxious and fearful.  They are not able or willing to take risks or focus on increasing customer service.  At the very time organizations need them to be the most creative and energetic; they hunker down in the trenches, absorbed in their own toxic survivor symptoms.  Although managers are, rightfully, caught up in cutting costs, they need to be reminded that people are not “things” to be added or deleted to the production equation with mathematical sterility.  Managers need to move beyond layoff administration and planning into formulating strategies for layoff recovery. This involves re-recruiting demoralized employees and working to help them overcome debilitating survivor emotions.  

2.  Facilitate venting.  This goes against the culture of some organizations that managers should not tolerate any whining and complaining. The reality is that without the healthy externalization of layoff induced anger, fear, and anxiety, employees will remain crippled by layoff survivor sickness.  In fact, research shows their symptoms will get worse. It is essential that managers lead the way in establishing organizationally sanctioned processes that facilitate the venting of repressed feelings and emotions.  Many successful organizations do this in groups with the help of a facilitator; others require managers to meet individually with employees.  This is sometimes a counter-cultural activity but organizations with the courage and tenacity to facilitate venting have been amazed with the results and found that healthy venting is a necessary means to the end of moving employees back to productivity.  

3. Communicate with truth and authenticity.  It is a myth that, in troubled times, managerial communication needs to be clear, planned, objective, and structured.  It is a fallacy that expressing uncertainly, ambiguity, or dealing in feelings and emotions is not useful. Surviving employees are attempting to deal with a toxic brew of productivity hindering emotions and need to feel authorized to talk about them. Employees would much rather have managers tell them that they don’t know something as opposed to having them not say anything or make something up.  It is also important that managers understand and communicate the truth about employment security. We are experiencing a fundamental shift in the psychological contract that connects employee to employer.  When the economy becomes more positive, the frequency of mass layoffs will diminish, but long-term, lifetime employment with one organization is a thing of the past. Managers need to emphasize that employees will have to rely on maintaining transferable marketable skills and continually cultivate their professional networks. 

4. Brush up on helping skills and lighten up on controlling skills. Don’t be afraid of feelings and emotions; they are the currency of the realm for helping survivors move back to productivity.  Telling survivors to “suck it up” and that they are lucky to have kept their job is the wrong strategy.   Layoff survivors are not motivated by luck. In fact, evidence is clear that the opposite happens – they are demotivated by survivor guilt and its cousins: anxiety and depression.  Managers who have been most successful in helping survivors overcome the trauma of layoffs have formed helping relationships with their employees. This requires managers to practice and, often, re-learn basic helping skills such as active listening, reflecting feelings and emotions, and giving and receiving non-evaluative feedback.  For many managers this initially feels like an against the grain activity in a time of economic crisis. It, however, has been proven to be an invaluable tool in helping employees overcome the symptoms of layoff survivor sickness and move back into productivity and creativity.       

5. Attract employees by nutritious work. The best strategy for organizational survival in the new reality will be to attract employees because of the work. The most talented employees will have options; they will choose their employers because they want to be there, not because they have to be there.  Employees will be loyal to their profession and motivated more by the work itself rather than the organization where they perform that work.  Successful organizations will help employees self-motivate by finding nutritious work and an inner sense of purpose rather than relying on contrived external motivational techniques.  Paradoxically, employees who are working in congruence with their unique gifts and purpose will be much more productive and increase the probability of their job security. Successful managers will be much more collaborative and have the ability to lead empowered employees not tied in by benefits, services, and social systems that reward fitting in and conformity and motivated by fear of job loss.

The difference between those organizations that will survive the global pandemic of layoffs and downsizing and those that won’t will be leaders with the ability to facilitate transitions:  their own, the organization’s and those of their fellow employees. The acquisition of these skills is not emphasized nearly enough in executive development activities and leaders need to take personal responsibility for their acquisition if they want to be relevant to the future needs of their organizations.  What follows are ten very specific and prescriptive activities that will facilitate the development of these essential skills.

• Get involved in the leadership of a volunteer organization.  Pick one that does not receive funding or support from your organization.  Helping manage a volunteer organization is a powerful feedback and developmental experience.  It removes you from your positional power base and allows you to assess your true impact.  It is very different when people don’t have to listen to you or tell you what you want to hear.  Many volunteer organizations are fractionated, political, and made up of conflicting special interest groups, yet they have to accomplish something.  What better way to learn how to manage single interests into the collective good.
• Take evening courses or sign up for special programs that teach helping skills..  The macro-leadership competency of the future will be the ability to help yourself, your organization, and your employees facilitate change and transition.  The so called soft-skills are really the hard-skills, and certainly the relevant skills!  Management will become a helping profession and managers will need the same kind of helping skills as other professionals in the field.  The bad news, at least for the validity of their curricula, is that these kinds of offerings are not often found in business schools.  The good news is that they can be found in other schools and departments such as psychology, sociology, counseling, organization development, and educational psychology.  There are also one-time seminars and special programs put on by universities and consulting organizations.
• Complete a professional 360-degree feedback instrument.  By professional, I mean that you should use an instrument that has a history, validity standards, and norms.  Have the results interpreted by someone trained in helping you understand what it means and doesn’t mean.  Some organizations have their own 360-degree instruments and others use instrument licensed and certified by external vendors.  There are also some excellent external organizations you can hire to administer such instruments. 
• Attend a professional leadership training program.  This type of training is different from a program on marketing, quality, or performance management.  It should focus on intra-personal insight, inter-personal skills, and the systems perspective necessary to develop a culture that leads to organizational learning.  There are some very good in-house programs and many excellent external offerings.
• Find a Truth Teller.  It is particularly important for top managers to cultivate and use truth tellers.  A truth teller is someone in the organization you can rely on to, as is said in baseball “call them they way they see them.”  Truth tellers provide unfiltered feedback.  They have three characteristics: they are tuned in to what is going on at all levels of the organization; they are secure and have no personal ax to grind; and you trust them.
• Attend Laboratory Training.  These sessions used to be called T-groups. Yes, this is sensitivity training, and yes, it is “feely” – but it probably won’t be “touchy.”  The bottom line is that this kind of laboratory training is a very powerful way to get the depth of feedback that will lead to self-awareness.  It is important to assure yourself that the facilitators are professional and the organization sponsoring the session has a track record with organizational managers.
• Become familiar with future search technology.  There is a whole new movement out there, using labels such as “future search,” and speaking of “getting the whole system in a room.”  These large system-change processes go for the jugular in stimulating the learning organization.  If you want to jump-start your understanding of learning in the collective, you need to get on the bandwagon;  the technology is growing faster than it can be codified.
• Learn how to have a dialogue.  A dialogue is different from a discussion, an argument, a debate, or a business meeting.  The dialogue process is very important in developing learning organizations and is central to collective learning.  There are seminars and workshops.  You can also find some consultants who can teach you and your organization dialogue skills.
• Get active in your professional association.  Don’t just attend the national meeting – become a worker, serve on committees, pass out the literature, do time in the information booth, set up the chairs!  The higher up you are, the more the value of the grunt work.  It forces you to see an organizational system from a different perspective and helps you rethink your own skills and assumptions as to what constitutes value-added.
• Set up an intensive personal feedback project.  One option involves retaining an external consultant to nearly overwhelm you with feedback from a wide range of data points.  This is a very powerful process.  You can’t escape valid data, and a skilled consultant will help you understand it and do something about it.

A number of years ago, a frustrated manager was looking for a way to put the pieces together after a downsizing eroded loyalty and commitment.  “With this new psychological contract, how do we keep things in place,” he asked?  “What’s the glue that holds the organization together?”   Together, we came up with a recipe for that glue.  It has become somewhat of a cult piece and, upon a request, I’m posting it here:     

Fill glue pot with the fresh pure,

clear water of undiluted human spirit.

    Take special care not to contaminate

with preconceived ideas or to pollute with

   excess control.

    Fill slowly; notice that the pot only

fills from the bottom up. It’s impossible to

fill it from the top down.

    Stir in equal parts of customer focus

and pride in good work

    Bring to boil and blend in a liberal

portion of diversity; one part self-esteem;

and one part tolerance.

    Fold in accountability.

    Simmer until smooth and thick,

stirring with shared leadership and clear goals.

    Season with a dash of humor and a

pinch of adventure.

    Let cool, then garnish with a topping

of core values.

    Serve by coating all boxes in the

organization chart, with particular

attention to the white spaces.  With proper

application, the boxes disappear and all

that can be seen is productivity, creativity,

and customer service.

A beleaguered manager expressed frustration at needing to work on all this “soft stuff” when his organization was imploding.  It is important that organizational leaders understand that, in today’s world, soft is hard.

 At the zenith of the old paradigm there was a reaction to anything that was deemed “soft.” This included feelings, relationships, empathy, and anything that was “touchy-feely.” If you think about it, this is a strange norm, because being alive and human involves relationships, feelings, and connecting with others. However, the value was facts and figures—“hard” stuff! Even though such rock-ribbed disciplines as physics now report that facts are relative, the bias continues. Organizations still talk about human resources and training as the “soft” side of management. But not only are people issues as real as financial and production figures, they require just as much skill and strength. In addition, they require authenticity and the risk of self-disclosure. This is much “harder” than hiding behind a memo, a stack of figures, or a quantitative decision matrix. 

 The current economic environment is helping with the realization that “soft” is “hard.”  The most effective managers are those who have the ability to engage in authentic helping relationships with their employees.  The next time someone belittles the “soft” stuff, remind them that in today’s environment soft is hard and if they want to be effective in healing the wounds of downsizing, they need to focus on the requisite skills – the “hard” stuff of engaging in authentic helping relationships with layoff survivors.

I’m often asked what overall strategies organizations can employ throught the system to help deal with layoff survivor sickness and revitilize downsized organizations.  Here is a list of  ten strategic responses along with related actions.    This is a good checklist when planning system-wide interventions.

         Strategy                                                Actions

The Greek God Proteus had the ability to change form in response to adversity, yet remain a God of the sea.  Proteus offers an interesting role model for leaders, struggling to put the pieces together after downsizing attempting to focus on healing the wounds after downsizing.

 Concepts of loyalty, motivation, and commitment have changed as people are more and more being seen as costs to be controlled and not long term assets to be developed.  Reciprocally, employees are increasing loyal to their professions and not the organization in which they ply that profession.

Leaders  need to balance these conflicting concepts, and although they can’t be all things to all people, it is possible to be more things to more people and still remain a steward to an organization.  This is the profound lesson of the Protean way and is good news for those who are locked into the old psychological employment contract for fear of losing their fundamental values or purpose.

 Robert Liftion in his book The Protean Self (1993, p. 82) wrote “A survivor, fundamentally, has two psychological possibilities: to shut down or to open out.”  Leaders, attempting to put the pieces together in a time of paradigm shift regarding the psychological employment contract need to open out, drop outmoded concepts of loyalty, motivation, and commitment, and embrace a new and often ambiguous reality.  This is the challenge of the Protean way.