A personal note on layoffs
I was in college, newly married, and looking for a career when my
mother wrote to tell me that my father had been laid off from his job.
It was one of those gut-wrenching moments when everything gets turned
upside down. The world had changed.
It wasn’t as though Dad was in a cyclical industry with a menial job.
He was a highly skilled sales/engineer with over 32 years with the
company. They called it early
retirement but I knew better. He
was too young for social security and the minuscule retirement stipend
wouldn’t cover the mortgage much less the food.
I suddenly realized that Dad wasn’t going to be rewarded for being a
“company man” after all. He was going to get the shaft.
I wrote to the company president asking what my father was to do but
received no reply from "Neutron Jack." Dad was one of
thousands being cut to make the corporate profit numbers.
He was just a statistic to most but a father to me.
Dad landed on his feet with a good teaching job at
the community college. But even now
decades later his stories are of the good old days of his first career.
You just can’t rip 32 years of life out of a man and tell him that he
is no longer valuable without some deep psychic wound.
The company is doing very well now; some say even an
icon of success. I don’t resent
them their success but I do resent their earlier failures that let management
get fat, dumb, and happy in the first place.
Dad knew where the problems were. He
could see them clear as day from his post in the field. The closer one got to headquarters, however, the thicker the
fog. If they had just done their
jobs, Dad could have kept his. That’s
my view and I’m sticking to it.
The first thing that happened to me was that I swore
I’d never let my loyalties get so entwined with a company that I lost my
independence. I went on to work for
a couple of billion-dollar companies but, as dedicated as I was, I always had my
escape plan. And when management
gave me any hint of a lack of absolute fidelity, I escaped.
I left when I was doing very well and could do even better at the next
stop. It didn’t matter that I’d
received promotion after promotion and the bonuses and kudos were still flowing
in. I didn’t trust them any more.
The next thing that I did was to promise that I would
try to do better than my father’s employer had done.
I committed to being the best possible engineer and manager that I could
be. Even as a lowly department
head, I railed against bad management and fought to do the right thing no matter
the perceived risk to my career. It
didn’t matter whose toes I stepped on. We
were going to do it the best possible way.
We owed it to our people. We
owed it to them to be safe and make money so they could keep their jobs and meet
their family needs.
Since then, I’ve experienced a lifetime of
continuous learning and one of making a positive difference. I’ve had to make layoffs in business units that were too
far-gone to save but I’ll tell you that I’ve personally created more jobs
than I’ve reduced. Companies that
share my principles are stronger for it. That’s
why my Profit Improvement Process is as much about
building as cutting. I hate
nightmares. Don’t you?
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