Last week, we teed up the idea of coaching to help employees who are leaving an organisation, through their own choice. Let’s now look at coaching to support people at a time of redundancy of role (I think that is a peculiarly UK phrase, which in other countries may be called being let go. This is not the same as being sacked or severed for misconduct).
Typical outplacement companies focus on the practicalities of helping you to get a new job – tactical things like how to write a curriculum vitae, how to use Linked In, writing an application etc. Those are all good, but there are two other things that need to happen first:
- working through the emotions of being let go (and this is a roller-coaster ride of emotions, let me tell you)
- figuring out who you want to be in the world in this new chapter in your life
You might argue that you just need to get practical and get stuck in to looking at job boards, applying for everything you see, and just going for it – you need a salary after all.
But my counter-argument is that you might end up in the wrong job, or not succeed at interview because you are unclear yourself about exactly what it is you want. Not to mention all those ugly emotions seeping out at interview because you haven’t processed them.
Change curve during redundancy
So let’s start with the emotions. You may have heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (1969), who introduced the change curve to describe the process of grieving, and we see similar reactions to changes in our work and lives. Pritchett, in the course Business As Unusual, describes how the change curve has an impact on our productivity and progress. We start at the status quo, and when a change is imposed upon us, there is a sense of betrayal. This is less marked when we choose the change ourselves, but nonetheless, there is a feeling of “why am I choosing to rock the boat?” We move on to denial, burying our head in the sand and acting as though nothing is different. You can imagine how that stops us from progressing. Then there’s identity crisis – who am I in this new circumstance; I can no longer be the person I was before, or do the same things I did before; I’m lost. As we go through these first three stages, our energy is spent on things other than being productive, and our motivation is low. Finally, we move into a search for solutions, and back up the energy and productivity curve we go again.
Search for roles during redundancy
So you can see that you cannot search for solutions – or in this case, search for a new role – until you have got the feeling of betrayal out of your system (at least to some extent, as this takes time to get completely out of your system), stopped denying the situation, and then done some work on your identity. Who are you now, what do you stand for, what are your greatest strengths and transferable skills, who do you want to be in this new chapter in your life, what is this teaching you etc. This is quite a substantial piece of work that needs some quiet time to percolate, and plenty of conversations with others to come to the surface.
In my situation, I’d say that searching for my new identity took about 6 months from knowing that my role was going, to knowing who I wanted to be and how I wanted to work. I thought I knew at 2 months, but I was still applying for roles that weren’t a perfect match with what I wanted to do, and wouldn’t have been growth opportunities for me. It turns out that what I really wanted was to be my own boss (something I had railed against for years, but realised as a consequence of the interview processes and other conversations).
Coaching to support us through redundancy and the change curve
I know we don’t all have the luxury of 6 months to decide on our next steps, but we can have a coach supporting us to work through the curve, so that we apply for roles that are perfect for us rather than going for a compromise. Oh and we should also remember that most roles aren’t even advertised, so once we know what we want to do, we can start to have conversations with the kinds of organisations we would like to work for, to see what opportunities might come out of those conversations. One lesson I learned early on though, was to have conversations when I wasn’t clear as well, as every conversation added some kind of clarity to the picture for me.
It’s a difficult time. Having someone walking beside us, who understands the difficult emotions that are getting in our way and the identity crisis we are going through, will really help us immensely.
I know, from experience, that working with an experienced coach (before we work with an outplacement consultant) is transformational.
