Most managers got where they are by excelling in the classical managerial “ings” of planning, organizing, controlling, evaluating, and directing. The overwhelming consensus of research is that today’s organizations are populated by employees exhibiting the symptoms of layoff survivor sickness: a toxic combination of anger, fear, anxiety, and frustration.  They don’t work harder because they feel lucky to have a job; they hunker down in the trenches and respond with much lowered productivity. They don’t automatically snap back.  They need help, and that help does not take the form of increased control, direction, or evaluation.  In over a quarter century of working with organizations attempting to rebound from layoff survivor sickness, I have yet to hear an employee describe her or his best boss as being the best director, controller, or evaluator.  In times of organizational stress and turmoil, the best bosses are described as those who are good listeners, have the ability to form empathetic relationships, and possess coaching skills.  

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 them deal with their own layoff survivor symptoms.   There are four conditions that will insure this training reaches its potential:

• Trainers need to make a strong link between the application of helping skills and an increase in productivity. This insures managerial motivation.
• Role plays and cases should be specific to the organization, its products, and culture.  Managers have a low tolerance for artificiality in today’s environment.  
• Although the workshop is intended to give managers skills to apply to their employees, managers will concurrently be dealing with their own survivor issues. Trainers should expect and be skilled at processing emotions and venting. If this does not happen, it is a sign that something is not working.
• Video taping individual role plays is exceptionally powerful. Processing individual tapes in a group environment provides rich learning and builds positive norms. 

I had an article published in the “Soapbox” column of the higher educational section of the Financial Times recently.  It is a little long, but I think it is important that business schools teach the right stuff to help employees and organizations to survive the trauma of layoffs and heal the wounds.  Here are excerpts of that article:    

 Management as a profession of scientific, clear, and antiseptic methodology was a myth in the early days of Fredrick Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” and is totally irrelevant to the needs of today’s organizations.   Many new managers, particularly newly minted, inexperienced MBA’s and undergraduate business majors come to the business world with the expectation that it is a place of rationality, subject to objective analysis and thoughtful, quantitatively based decision making.  This is somewhat a result of their own naiveté, but more from being subjected to quantitatively biased curriculum and the teaching of management professors who have spent their entire lives in classrooms – from grade school through graduate school, then into the role of teacher – and have never actually worked in a business.  Those business professors who have industry experience, too often gained it during the “good old days” when things were more predictable and people were seen as long term assets to be nurtured and developed over a career as opposed to the current paradigm of people as costs to be reduced.  Here are three things business schools need to do in order to be relevant to today’s business organizations.

• 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.” 

              If business schools are to avoid the fate of dinosaurs and automobile manufactures, they need to equip their students with the skills and perspectives that will be of value to today’s business organizations. The untenable alternative is to keep their insular, tenured, quantitatively orientated, analytical heads in the sand, and not even have the visibility to see the world passing them by. 

I had a client who hated his job.  It wasn’t a short term thing; he hated his job for a number of years.  The primary reason he stayed was that he felt “trapped” by the health care benefit.  He had a history of heart problems and his son was disabled and needed extra medical care.  He was a very talented person and could have helped a number of organizations.  He also had an itch to go out on his own.  Alas, he stayed with his hated job until at age 55 he was laid off.  Now he has the worst of both worlds.  He does not have a job and the related health insurance, and he has missed the window for following his dream.

 The reason a person stays with a company or won’t take the risk to follow his heart into a more fulfilling career should not be health insurance. 

 Regardless of your politics, working within a system that allows talent to be wasted or sub-optimized because of a health insurance issue is not in the best interest of any of us.