Companies today seem to use safe language around letting employees go when dealing with job security. In a recent WSJ article, “The Layoff Announcements Keep Coming, but No One Knows Who, Where or When,” the word “layoff” was used. They even have acronyms, although these were not used in the piece: RIF / RIWF: Reduction in Force / Reduction in Workforce (permanent cuts often tied to budget or restructuring).
But the real word not being used is fire. You fire people. Layoff is just a nicer way to put it.
In both cases, however, firing or laying off is a serious event. Because when you fire someone, no matter what you call it, you change their life. And your company’s.
The truth is, what the writers of the WSJ article stumbled on is the truth about ALL employment: it’s all uncertain. Always uncertain. Tenure is an illusion. The future is uncertain. If it was certain, wouldn’t we all be multimillionaires?
Three Strikes I’m Out
I was fired three times. The first came two days before the school term started when I was a teacher in the early 1980s. When the summer began, the principal shook my hand and said what a good job I did and “we’ll see you in the fall.” The secretary of the English department called me two days before school started and said, “You can’t come back. He doesn’t want you back.” I appealed to the chairman of the English department. “Nothing I can do,” he told me. I had challenged the principal over an incident and took a senior’s side in an argument over what goes into the yearbook. The principal never forgave me for that. The cruelty of waiting until school was about to start to tell me was, as I found out later, a gift from heaven, though it hardly seemed like that at the time.
That first time you get fired is a shocker. What do you do? My wife had some illness and wasn’t working; I had no insurance. I ended up getting three part-time jobs within a week: a stringer for the local newspaper, a teacher of adult education at the local junior college, and ghostwriting PhD dissertations for an ex-encyclopedia editor in Oak Park, Illinois who was doing that for a living now. My rate for ghostwriting? $1.00 per page. I built up my speed with that engagement.
Strike Two
The second time I was fired was working as a copywriter when I challenged the Executive Vice President over my pay that was promised when I started after a year and didn’t get. Having been fired once, I learned not to challenge authority unless I had a plan, or at least one in motion for replacing my current position. Which I did.
I saw my job in the Sunday paper after I challenged the EVP on Friday (they move quickly when they want to). At that time, people found employment in Sunday newspaper ads. I told my team about it that Monday morning and each thought it was him who would be fired. One because he was the oldest, nearing 65, one because he always argued with the EVP. I said it was me because I challenged him for my pay. There were only three of us, and all three of us immediately found a reason why it could be us. That’s what uncertainty does.
We met with the HR director that afternoon and she said, “It’s you, Jim.” “Why?” I asked. I knew I was a top performer. “You’re not heavy enough.” “I can gain weight,” I said. She didn’t smile. “You can stay till you find employment.” “That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll leave now.” Little did she know I had an offer in my back pocket. I was never a Boy Scout, but I liked their motto a lot.
The third and final time I got fired was working for the 10th largest at-that-time direct response agency as a creative director. The son bought out the father, kicked his father out of the office, changed banks, changed accounting firms, fired my boss and called me in. “I didn’t hire you,” he said. “My father did. You’re done. You can stay until you find another job.” This time I didn’t have another offer; it was sudden, like the first time. But I had enough confidence in my abilities by that time to realize I would find another job quickly. The question now was, did I want to?
I talked it over with my wife that night and told her, “I can keep getting fired, or I can try to just start my own agency.” The love of my life said, “Whatever you’d like to do.” I quit the next day, called up an agency friend, bartered my rate for an office at his downtown agency, and never looked back.
Now 35 years later, with a business I started in 1990 still standing despite all the turmoil of the advertising business, the lessons in the WSJ article aren’t quite clear enough for people “on the block.” Here is something I think can help.
- Don’t get hired; you should hire the company. After the first time I got fired, I realized the positions should be reversed. When you interview, you are actually interviewing the company. You are doing the hiring! That point of view change will help you see through the noise for the true signals of what these people are telling you. What kind of people are they? How do they treat people? What do they believe? You can learn a lot when you stop trying to convince them to hire you and start deciding whether you want to hire them.
- Always be looking. Regardless of any job you have, you are in the relationship business. With your peers, your vendors, your customers. Being honest and being yourself means something, and if things go south, your attention to those relationships will matter in overcoming obstacles. And, you are temporary. Always. So always, always be on the lookout for opportunities. That doesn’t mean being disloyal to your employer. It means understanding that your employer cannot guarantee your future, so you shouldn’t turn responsibility for your future over to them.
- A business that looks only at investors or the bottom line forgets a cardinal rule of business: firing people is always a two-edged sword. The WSJ article put it this way: “Just about every way of cutting jobs, of course, has trade-offs.” That’s obvious. But in a RIF or layoff, you often cut without really understanding the contribution of a person. I always used the light bulb test. Each person is a light bulb. Pull their plug and ask what happens: does the room dim? Get brighter? Stay the same? When you pull a person’s plug and the room gets brighter, don’t put the plug back in. But if it gets dark, how dark? Really dark? Better put the plug back in quickly. Remember, when you fire someone you aren’t just changing their life. You are changing your company, and you better understand what you are changing before you pull the plug.
- Poor philosophy in a business is bad business. If the company you work for has this thinking—“One reason executives say they wait to divulge layoff details is that many just don’t know how big or small their companies should be in the future”—you better start looking for a job right now. That kind of thinking is stupid because no one really knows “how big or small” you have to be or will be. For example, when Elon Musk fired 80% of the people when he bought Twitter, he shrunk his business by that much. Hmm. Twitter, now “X” is still standing today. Firing and laying off are the very nature of business as much as hiring. But that nature should be part of a company’s thinking ALL THE TIME. I certainly didn’t know when I started my company in 1990 how large it would become, how many people I would employ, or what would happen to it over the next 35 years. But not knowing what the future looks like is very different from not knowing what you believe. The one thing you want from any company is loyalty, commitment, to you. Very rare these days. But when you find it, latch on to it. A company can’t give you certainty. It can give you loyalty. There’s a difference. For example, I used to ask my staff: “How long would you work for me if I didn’t pay you?” Answers ranged from “as long as I could” to “two seconds.” Which of those employees are still with me do you think?
- Live with uncertainty. The WSJ had this little pearl: “At Nike, the company acknowledged that the coming job reductions will create uncertainty.” Really? You wonder why Nike is failing now after being on top for so long? You don’t have to look far: pride and arrogance have a way of deflating the largest of balloons. Of course the coming job reductions will create uncertainty. But the people at Nike should have been uncertain before the announcement. They just didn’t think about uncertainty. Nothing, nothing is certain in this life of business. Except change. Things change. So adapt, change or disappear.
I grew my company up to 25 people at one point, and then it shrunk down to its current size. Some people were fired; others quit. Even during COVID, I kept my staff working with the PPP for as long as I could. I paid a price in profitability for several years. Did I know what was going to happen? Of course not. Nobody did. But I knew very early in the game that people are the most important asset of a business. Not technology. Not equipment. People.
Which brings me back to the WSJ article and all those people wondering whether their names are going to be on the list.
You were always on the layoff list. You still are.
Maybe you will never be laid off. Maybe you’ll spend your entire career at one company. But as long as someone else can make a decision that ends your employment, you are on the list whether there is an actual list or not. Once you understand that, you stop expecting certainty from something that can never give it to you.
There’s a great poem called CUTTING UP THE OX that has these lines in it. After the cook cuts up the ox with his blade, which he hasn’t sharpened in 19 years, he says:
“Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still And let the joy of the work
Sink in.”
Running a business is like cutting up an ox. Practice. More Practice. And then still more, until you “Find that space…There is all the room you need! It goes like a breeze!”
The ox doesn’t get easier. The cook gets better.
Maybe that’s the real lesson in all of this. Business doesn’t get more certain. Employment doesn’t get more certain. Life certainly doesn’t get more certain. You just get better at finding the spaces.
Well, maybe not as easy a breeze, but certainly without the fear of being laid off or fired.
