Many years ago, on a particular Friday, our Silicon Valley startup was supposed to close a crucial round of funding to fuel the turnaround I had been brought in to help achieve. Then 9/11 happened. The funding evaporated. Everyone was laid off. Here are the lessons I learned. 

This Week’s Edition

Challenging events like a recession or layoffs can trigger leaders to question their next strategic move, their leadership and ultimately their professional identity. Can leaders maintain the confidence they’ve fought so hard to gain?

Clarify Your Thinking

The trending news on LinkedIn this week highlighted the companies doing layoffs. 51% of U.S. companies are expected to participate. I scrolled for pages reading the many brands laying off hundreds, sometimes thousands, of employees.

This triggered a little professional PTSD as I was forced to remember the two layoffs I experienced in my career. Anyone who’s been let go can attest to the challenges it presents to one’s professional psyche. 

Emotions can run the gamut from loss, abandonment, worry and outright fear. One additional negative impact of being let go, that often goes unspoken, is the loss of professional confidence. 

This ding to our confidence is understandable as leaders wrestle with obvious questions:

• Why me? I’m a hard-working contributor/leader.

• What did I do wrong? My last review was good.

• Why didn’t that other person get laid off? They don’t add as much value.

These questions can haunt leaders, in part, because they may never get any substantive answers. This will leave them searching for answers eventually fabricating assumptions that exaserbate their doubt. 

Externally, they will make the company utterly wrong about their flawed corporate decision, but internally they will suffer from decreased confidence at a time when they need complete confidence – interviewing and competing for the next job.

Old Thinking: I must not be as good as I thought. If I were good enough they would have kept me. 

New Thinking: Stuff happens. This event does not define me. I have strengths, skills and experience. This one just didn’t pan out. Let me learn what I can and move on. 

Thoughts Lead to Actions

Later this past week, the trending follow up LinkedIn articles were “How to Manage a Career Pivot,” and “The Top Seasonal Jobs Right Now.” While those topics may offer some helpful advice, they don’t address the underlying issue – the impact to one’s confidence brought about by being laid off.

Below is a short process you can go through to help triage your thinking so you don’t drop down the proverbial rabbit hole and lose months of precious job hunting time to short-term professional depression.

Here are three lessons that all Confident Leaders can adopt and apply: 

1. Mourn the loss.

• Give yourself “permission” to experience the emotions of the situation. 

• Use your Leadership Thinking Time to reflect on your situation and purge your thoughts/feelings by writing them down.

1. Know your identity.

• Don’t subcumb to thinking that your job, title or former company’s brand is who you are. That is not your identity.

• Make a list of all your strengths, skills and experiences to remind yourself of your true professional identity.

1. Establish a new vision.

• Your old vision may have vanished along with your job. 

• Define a new vision for your career. Establish a new professional destination.

This short and simple process will help you avoid the brain’s temptation to relitigate the past and help train your thinking toward what needs to be done going forward. Belief leads to thoughts. Thoughts lead to actions. Actions lead to results.

Boost Your Performance

As leaders, we cannot lose any amount of good leadership to doubtful thinking. So, if you’ve been laid off, commit to each of these three steps. And if you know someone who is currently experiencing the threat of a layoff or is recently unemployed, send this newsletter to them immediately to help boost their performance as they focus on finding their next professional pursuit.

What’s Your Opinion?

What’s the one thing you learned from being laid off or let go? Share it with me at robin.pou@robinpou.com. 

If you are going to be a leader, you might as well be a good one. Don’t let doubt count you out. Have a confident week!

Robin Pou, Chief Advisor and Strategist

We live to make bad leadership extinct so forward this newsletter to others who strive to be confident leaders. 

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What is “The Confident Leader”?

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I began a video series called “Panic or Plan?” It was designed to equip leaders to navigate the doubt they experienced and to rise in the confidence they needed to lead during turbulent times. It took off. I then started this newsletter to equip leaders in the same fashion each week for the doubt that crashes across the bow of their leaderSHIP.