In 1997 Mary Lynn Pulley wrote Losing your job – Reclaiming your Soul: Stories of Resilience Renewal, and Hope (Jossey-Bass, 1997).  It was a beautifully written and inspiring book that helped layoff victims re-frame job loss into a wake-up call that could help them rebound into work that was psychologically nutritious and provide deeper personal meaning.  It is as relevant today as it was when she wrote it.

 Mary Lynn passed away in January and her brother Jeff and two friends from The Center for Creative Leadership, Joan Gurvis and Marcia Horowitz are completing her work on an updated and revised second edition.  The second edition will be self-published and will be coming out this spring.  I’ll provide specific information as to how to buy it in a future blog. 

 In the meantime, if you can’t wait, you could buy the first edition and also update the information by purchasing the second edition when it comes out.  It is a very important book and provides reinforcement and specific examples that help give hope and strategies to overcome the toxic effects of organizational codependence that I describe in Healing the Wounds.

I once knew a senior manager who, at budget time, asked his staff to “shoot” enough employees to cover for a projected deficit in revenue.  Other symbolic terms for downsizing are “take-out,” or the ubiquitous “terminate” It is not without psychological significance that the language of layoffs is often the language of assassination. One client failed to meet me at the airport and the replacement apologized and told me my former client “went across the river.”  The outplacement firm that handled this organization’s downsized employees was located on the other side of the Ohio River.  

 One reason for the symbolic death language is a deep-seated fear of job loss caused by employees defining themselves not by what they do, but where they work.  If who you are is where you work, your basic identity is threatened when your job is threatened.  

 It is helpful for employees to understand that when employees loose their jobs, they don’t really loose their identity.  In fact, they often find job loss results in a wake-up call and can act as a stimulus for much more meaningful work and a more relevant life.

 Language is powerful and one useful intervention is to help employees and organization see the symbolism in their language around layoffs and downsizing.  One way to start is to simply have organizations stop using the word “terminate.”  It has the wrong symbolic context.

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.