They worry continuously over the causes of rejection.
During the adaptation stage, a support group of some sort becomes especially useful. A group provides urgently needed feedback from peers and gives members an opportunity to vent their "hidden" fears about skills displacement, age, obsolescence, and general worthlessness.
Issues to Resolve during the Adaptive Phase of Unemployment
Whether unemployed older executives join a support group or not, they still have five major issues which they must resolve during the adaptive phase. These are: identity maintenance, loss of office, persistence of guilt, ambivalence in relationships and fear of rejection.
1. Identity Maintenance Most unemployed executives refer to themselves in termsof generic job titles-Fm a planner, an information systems manager, a sales manager, a marketing manager, a purchasing manager, a controller, a program analyst, an engineer, a financial officer. They avoid reference to their former companies and to their former specific job title. They describe their skills and accomplishments in a textbook (read that resume) style. As they talk about themselves, they seem to be rehearsing for their interviews. By generalizing their skills, they also mask a worry that their specific job-related skills will melt away-that they'll be obsolete.
Even though unemployed, they still identify strongly with work roles, career direction, and with the drive and rewards that are provided by an organization. Being deprived of a job deprives them of the context in which they can formally perform management tasks, and of the organizational goals to which their very genuine skills were attuned. So, they have a real need to retain this organizational identity even in the absence of an institution.
We've got to be marketable, in tune with the '90s. Management is looking for a quick payback or they go down the tubes. So we all try to show how cost-efficient we are, how profitable it will be for a company to hire us because of our skills and knowledge.
The income is the measure of somebody's assessment of our value to them. I don't think I can afford to-or stand to-work for less than 60 grand.
I've got to do something. I want to stay in my field. I want to do something good, to work for a company. I want to be rewarded. Maybe Fm just geared to the work ethic. I always like to be busy, even if I just paint my house or start a vegetable garden. Even if I say, "OK, you're going to do nothing." I still set a goal that that's what I'll do. I've got to know what direction I'm headed for and know what my plan is. That's the worst thing about being unemployed-I don't really know where I'm going.
I've always been very goal-oriented-most of us have. We get to a certain place and discover most of our goals have been set for us by whatever business we were in. Now we don't have those things driving us and we discover we don't have any personal goals. If we don't reset some goals, we're not going to get well. We don't even know what to be challenged by.
2. Loss of Office.The loss of an office critically undermines the struggle to maintain executive identity. The office confers and signals status and identity. It's the forum in which executives practice their craft. But something else happens with the loss of the office. Before, home and work were separated, with home being the privileged location where one relaxed, had leisure and privacy. Now, home is neither fish nor fowl-it is neither itself nor the office. It's no longer sanctuary. So unemployed executives find they have no place that's their own: no office and no home.
In addition, all the normal, routine accoutrements of the office are no longer available. They don't have access to an answered telephone, to a typist, to a photocopy machine, even to simple supplies. They must take a great deal of time and personal initiative to accomplish even the simplest task.
3. Persistence of Guilt.Unemployed older executives must struggle with potentially immobilizing feelings of guilt. Regardless of cause, the job loss almost always converts into personal terms of guilt. Former President Reagan's quip that "when the other guy is out of work, it's a recession; when you're out of work, it's a depression" too often becomes a reality. As the experience of unemployment continues, depression shifts from its economic meaning to its psychological meaning and the individual is threatened with that as well,
The sense of guilt arises from several sources. For instance, older executives have been "brainwashed," if you will, by the Protestant work ethic-you feel you don't have value if you're not being productive. It's insidious, with even routine things such as coffee breaks losing their value because you no longer have work to take a break from! The popular press and even friends and family impart a negative moral value to unemployment. Unemployment is equated with morally unjustified idleness, with laziness.
Unemployed older executives develop a focus of self-blame, which is disabling. They experience unemployment as a sign that they're failures. They discount any previous accomplishments. They may have an unreasonable sense of "destiny" which says that fate caused their unemployment because they were inadequate. They may develop a circular pattern of blame. "I am no good because no one will hire me. But that's the way things are. The economy is changing so fast that the company got in trouble. It had to let people go. But, why me? I may really be no good. After all, no one has hired me.They have a nagging sense of worthlessness which dogs their steps.
Each interview, then, becomes a personal test on a deep level. They worry whether the interviewer "saw" their lack of value. And this anxiety may cause them to present themselves in an artificial and constrained manner, undermining their interviews.
But older executives must fight their feelings of personal worthlessness and daily affirm the value of work and of working by actively seeking employment. The actual act of looking for work may help harness the feelings. So, the ritualization of an imitation of working-dressing, commuting, maintaining a visible aspect of a working routine-becomes extremely important. It represents control over the situation, a sort of magical force working for the individual to counteract the feelings of being lost and worthless.
