A dear friend of mine whom I’ve known for over 10 years sent me a text recently. She’d been caught up in one of the very high-profile layoffs that have made headlines this year.
I went into HELP mode immediately and started asking questions. That’s when I found out that her husband, a brilliant tech professional, had suffered the exact same fate at another company just two months before. Neither was fired for cause; they were simply caught in the crossfire of a downsizing. No one sane would’ve said that either of these people were in risky industries. There is no way they could’ve known their entire livelihoods were at risk just a few months ago. But nevertheless, they’d just gone from two incomes to zero. Oh, and did I mention they had a graduating senior evaluating college prospects and an aging parent who needed skilled home healthcare?
Despite all my HR experience and “corporate anti-bodies,” if this had happened at my house, I would have lost it. That’s a really scary feeling.
So we brainstormed various things she could do (aside from the obvious “seek new role”) and this is what emerged.
Can You Get More Severance?
This is where my HR hat went on and went on tight. The amount she had been offered as severance was laughable—especially considering her senior level and the amount of—well, dirt—she had on the inner workings of the company. My friend knows where all the bodies are buried. So my first recommendation was to chat with a lawyer.
(Yes, I know all you HR folks are wondering if I’ve gone to the dark side, but, no, the light is just fine on my side, so stick with me for a second.)
Super important: lawyering up isn’t appropriate in all layoff situations. It can backfire. It can cost money you won’t get back. It can fail to get you a softer landing. And in some sectors it can make you… how do I put this? Radioactive? Whistleblowers scare people. You have to have a serious talk with yourself and determine if it’s worth it.
Not everyone who gets laid off is in the position my friend happened to be in, but if you’re someone who could, for example, expose corruption or abusiveness to the public if they wanted to, you are holding a serious bargaining chit. Unfortunately, large organizations virtually all have at least a few awkward (or utterly damning) closet-skeletons they’d rather keep locked up. When whistles are blown on corporate malfeasance it can cause huge reputational harm, and often, plummeting stock prices. So, if they’ve dropkicked you with an insulting severance offer and you are in a position to damage their public image? I’m sorry, but pointing that out to them is not inappropriate.
This might sound ethically sketchy in its own right, but I assure you it is business. You can think of it like a divorce negotiation, where the law demands that assets be equitably divided—that can mean alimony if one of you makes three times as much as the other. Let the company know they can purchase your silence and state your price. I’m serious. What my friend was offered was nowhere near enough for her to waive her right to share what she knew about that place.
To carry on my divorce analogy, I strongly recommend you enlist an employment lawyer to help you understand what you’re realistically entitled to and the best way to get it without an ugly fight. Regardless of your position, it’s worth finding out if your severance package is reasonable before you accept it. And if you know a bit more than the average employee, you might have a case to ask for a bigger safety net in exchange for your promise to move on quietly.
Let It Gooooooo
An individual and a corporation are not remotely the same in terms of power. Even if you’re 100% right and the company is being completely unreasonable, these situations tend to hurt the employee way more than the employer (again, if you’re high enough in the pecking order that you could inflict reputational damage, they’ll take you a lot more seriously, which also isn’t fair, but it’s reality). So part of supporting my friend meant that while one side of me was telling her to lawyer up and demand a better package, I was simultaneously counseling her to accept that bigger forces were in control and that she’d best do what she could to release her anger and worry and just let it go.
I grew up in Hawaii, so let me offer a surfing analogy. You can be an amazing surfer—agile, in touch with your instincts, flexible, observant and strong—but you will never, in one hundred million years, be faster than a ten-foot shark, or magically able to breathe underwater, or stronger than the ocean itself. You are at the mercy of the waves, and really good surfers are really good because they know that, and they’ve honed the ability to go with the currents and understand when fighting will just wear them out faster and get them into a potentially lethal two wave hold down.
Get Your Go-To-Market Plan
One way or another, after a layoff you’ll have to brush yourself off and get re-employed—unless you’ve got the savings and the desire to retire now. If a layoff is exposing you to financial distress (and they usually do), the last thing you want to hear is “pay for help,” but unfortunately it’s much, much more effective than going it alone. A professional career coach can serve many important purposes in layoff-triage.
This is an important and valuable inflection point. Your emotions are up, you’re feeling vulnerable and uncertain and very possibly betrayed or thrown under a bus. That’s not a bad time to ask yourself if the job that just kicked you to the curb was really your life’s passion. A good coach can guide you not only toward the best way to market yourself, but also help you expand your thinking on where your skills and talents might be more appreciated and where you might feel more fulfilled. Getting a fat offer from your former company’s biggest competitor can feel pretty good, I admit it. But so can realizing that there are whole other sectors where your skills are transferable and needed.
We serve as work-life-balance doulas sometimes, and this one is huge if your partner is also laid off, because your combined stress can create relationship damage. Simply having someone to lean on who is not your equally-freaked-out spouse can save your relationship in this particular crisis. And help you get short-term fixes, like a consulting gig, to relieve some of the financial pressure.
Your career coach might ask you if you have—or have ever considered—a side-gig. This won’t be appropriate for everyone but if you’re a laid-off blockchain expert who finds himself constantly asked to explain what the heck a blockchain is and you sometimes daydream about guest lecturing? Maybe you can and should! For that matter, maybe it’s time to launch that “Decrypting Crypto” YouTube channel. It could provide you with an income stream, raise your visibility in the marketplace, and give you a productive distraction from your layoff-stress. Your career coach might have a side-hustle history of their own and be full of advice on how to launch a solo endeavor, whether it’s meant to be short-term or not.
Lots of us find our way to career coaching from places like recruiting and corporate HR. Since we’ve worked for “the other side,” we are really good at decoding your situation and helping you understand your options, including whether you have recourse to petition for a lot more “don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out” money. We know the magic words to say (and not say) in a negotiation. We’re not attorneys but we’ll know whether you’d benefit from having one. We are fluent in corporate mumbo jumbo, and we have the chops to show you where you have agency or self-advocacy potential and where you really do need to just go with the flow.
It’s a rare person who doesn’t flinch in the face of an unexpected job loss, and knowing “it isn’t just you” isn’t that helpful, especially if you live with one of those other affected people and things like mortgages, tuition, property taxes, in-progress home renovations or medical dramas are in play. That sucks aquarium gravel, there’s no two ways about it.
But layoffs are temporary setbacks, albeit very invasive ones. You have options. So dust yourself off, take a deep breath, and look for the opportunity that’s pretty much always hiding behind a setback. You can minimize damage to your savings, your relationships and your own sense of self-worth and confidence. And that’s the best way to put this whole mess in the rear view window as fast as possible.
Oh, if you’re wondering what my friend ended up doing, it was a combination approach. She did have an attorney friend help her write her ex-employer a friendly reminder that it might be better for everyone if she got a little more of a severance-cushion so that financial stress wouldn’t give her a scorching case of Loose Lips Sink Ships Syndrome. Then she did “primal scream therapy” in her shower for a few minutes, accepted that she’d done all she could with this situation and that it was time to move on. Then, she went straight into “get a job” mode, updated her resume and started hitting up her personal network for leads. At the time of writing this she’s still interviewing, but she’s no longer in a panic, or a rage-hole, or throwing a pity-party. She’s even starting to realize that all that dirt she had on her former employers might have been a big old sign that she’d been in a toxic workplace and maybe deserved better. A little proactivity and a little mindset-management, and even a layoff shock starts to less like a disaster and more like a hassle. Which is as it should be.