By Jack Cumming
It’s no fun to be fired. For some youngsters, it can be a growing-up moment when the reality of workplace expectations meets the self-indulgence of excessive parental love. For a person well established in a career, who is released from service at midlife, it’s usually something quite different.
After the Shock
If you’re really worth what your former employer has been paying you, you’ll soon land on your feet. First, you’ll find placement agents circling like flies hoping for a referral commission from your next employer. Ideally, a better employer than one who fired you will hear of your plight, and quickly be on the phone offering a more satisfying work situation.
Another probability is that people who know of your talent will be calling for freelance assignments to help with projects. That, too, can be a bridge to a permanent job, or it can open you to the independence that comes with freelance work. If you take a job, you depend on a single client, and that can lead to the sting of being let go.
If, say, you work freelance for five clients, losing a client only means that you have to find another client or clients to make up the income drop. That’s a lot more satisfying than having to find a job while you’re at your most vulnerable. It’s no wonder that the gig economy is rapidly growing.
My hope is that you take away the understanding that all will be well after you’re fired. Don’t look back. Don’t reflect on whether the separation was handled nicely or cruelly. That’s all in the past, and now the future beckons and, with a bit of luck and the hand of Providence, you’ll be happier in your future than you would have been clinging to a job that was slipping away.
It Takes Two
That brings us to our title topic. You didn’t unilaterally decide to be fired. It took at least two: your boss and you. Of course, you may have deserved to be terminated. Perhaps you weren’t suited to the job and it showed. In that case, your employer did you a favor by calling a spade a spade and letting you find something better suited. You probably should have made the move yourself, but it’s easy to get entangled with mortgage payments, school tuitions, and all the rigamarole of everyday life.
We sometimes cling to false payroll security in the fear that losing that binding chain will lead to catastrophe. Truth is that sometimes it does lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to have gumption and to hit the ground running on day 1, working your network and letting people know that you’re available.
False Advice
I know, I know, many people advise you to take a vacation and think about what you want next. That may work for some people, but adopting such a personal entitlement attitude is not going to make a future employer think you’ll give the job (or the assignment in the case of freelance) the desirable commitment. Interview question: What have you been doing since you lost your job? Answer: Oh, I took time off to recover and think. Interviewer: Next, please.
Then, there’s the increasing possibility that you were simply too far ahead for the comfort of your boss or your boss’s bosses. Recently, there have been numerous articles exposing this phenomenon, but one in particular caught my eye recently. It was titled “One of Our Employees Secretly Had AI Doing Most of His Job. We Found Out Because He Took a Vacation.”
Individual Initiative vs Corporate Loyalty
This highlights a growing business misstep, particularly in senior living, where it’s not uncommon for technology bosses to stay in the job for decades while remaining technically stagnant. They may consider an employee who automates his job as shirking work. The creative employee may also be a threat to the organization’s workforce culture. If personal initiative is only rewarded through subterfuge, as in the referenced article, then the human dynamics of organization are evidently wired to continue as a technological laggard.
Is a person terminated for taking the initiative and developing the know-how to automate his job to improve performance and reduce effort damaged goods for a new employer? Obviously, “no”; such an ex-employee should hold his head high and walk tall knowing that the arc of outcomes tends toward justice.
Its Personal
My personal experience is that most people who are fired lose their jobs due to corporate personal politics rather than to ineptitude. They generally do better in their next undertaking, whether a job or working freelance, than they would have staying put. In fact, many times that ex-employer falls toward collapse and failure afterwards. That’s been the case in both of the two situations I know best.
As for the Human Resources (HR) folks, they generally play the undertaker in the death of a career. They tend the corpse. They may dress it up for a job search. The best HR folks give hackneyed advice about networking and more. It’s all very logical, but it’s not the personal advice that you need when that corporate guillotine drops on your career. Instead, tell them thanks, but no thanks, unless they give you an office to work out of for a time. Take that.
What’s Next Is Up To You
Believe in yourself. As a friend of mine once advised me. “Talent finds its own level.” If you’ve been fired, never doubt yourself unless you did something nefarious. Believe in yourself and look for an opportunity that excites you and a challenge that you’d love to take on and conquer.
Also, read the linked article above. You may find yourself, or something like yourself, in it. Corporate life can become stale, stagnant, and sterile. You are not corporate. You are human. Corporate may be all work. You have family and friends and people who love and learn from you. You have value and can grow. Let the journey begin.
