You're fired.
Now what? Do you just let yourself get swept off the chessboard and into the discard pile? Or is there something you can do to help yourself?
You may be surprised at how much you can do. Your actions in the minutes, days, and weeks after a firing can profoundly affect your future.
Calm yourself. It may take an effort, but it is the absolutely essential first response to a firing. Sit quietly. It may seem that the end of the world has come, but it has not. Hundreds of thousands of men and women before you have endured firings and survived. You aren't washed up-not if you keep your wits about you.
Don't be hostile to your boss. You may feel a lot of anger. That is perfectly natural and understandable. You may even hate the sight of your boss, may hate the entire company, and may feel an urge to strike out at people. Suppress that urge. Having a temper tantrum now may give you some passing satisfaction, but it cannot do you any tangible good in the long run.
For you should understand that your boss finds the episode highly unpleasant. When he or she gives you the standard speech about feeling regretful and wishing there was another way, those words are, in most cases, the genuine truth. In all my time in the business world, I have never met anybody who enjoyed firing a subordinate--even a subordinate who richly deserved to be fired. By being hostile, by throwing a tantrum, you make the firing easier on your boss. This is exactly what you do not want to do. A case story will illustrate why.
The story involved a middle-aged executive whose career had been stalled for a time. He was considered perfectly competent but not brilliant. During a corporate upheaval, a new manager--a woman--was moved in over his head. As an indirect result of the same upheaval, one of her first duties was to fire him. She hated the idea. She tried to find another opening for the man but could not. Finally, unable to avoid it any longer, she called him into her office for the unhappy interview.
She was prepared to be sympathetic. More than that: she was ready to lean over backward to ease the financial and psychological shock. If the man had given her the slightest encouragement, she would have fought to get him the best possible severance package, the most liberal terms for continued use of his office--whatever he asked for.
But he spoiled it for himself by being hostile. He shouted at her: "I don't need any favors from you! I don't need you or this rotten company! I'm glad I'm leaving!" Perhaps this saved his pride for a short time, but it did nothing for his bank account. The temper tantrum made the firing easier on his boss than she had been anticipating. Stung by his rudeness, she said, "All right, go." He was given the minimum two weeks of severance pay and one week to clean out his desk. He is still unemployed. The moral should be clear. Instead of being hostile, think of your future.
Use your boss's discomfort. This is the time to ask for a generous severance package and other sympathetic treatment. Your boss may have fairly wide latitude in determining what you are to get. Or it may be that there are company rules that can be bent under some circumstances. At any rate, you should ask for what you want. Ask for a lot. Your boss may seize on your requests as a way out of an unpleasant situation.
In all likelihood, when you react to the crisis by talking calmly and pleasantly about severance benefits instead of flying into a rage, you will see a look of profound relief on your boss's face. You have offered an escape. The chances are your boss will take it: "Of course I'll go to bat for you! Listen, I want to make this just as easy on you as I can.
Don't let your pride get in your way. When you have a mortgage to maintain and mouths to feed and your own future is at stake, pride should be the least of your worries.
This doesn't mean you have to grovel. What it does mean is that you should take everything your boss offers and ask for more. Don't be too proud to ask for whatever help you want. Don't scorn it as "charity." Take it,
For you have a lot to do. Getting your derailed career back on the tracks will be hard work no matter how you approach it. But the task can be greatly lightened by the various kinds of help you can get from your company.
Don't just ask for severance money. That money is important, of course. The greater the amount, the longer you will be able to survive without dipping into savings, selling securities, or borrowing. Many people, in the panic of being fired, think of nothing else.
But there are several other benefits of enormous value that you should ask for:
Continued use of your office or some other empty office, plus the use of the office phone. This isn't just a matter of convenience; it is a matter of psychological necessity. You will feel much better if you have an office to go to; it will make your hunt for a new job far easier. Moreover, it will enable you to hide the fact that you are jobless. Recruiters and prospective new employers are always more strongly attracted to employed people than to those tainted with a suggestion of failure, no matter how unfair that may be.
A mutually agreed-upon cover story. Prospective new employers may call your boss to ask questions about you. Prepare for this from the very beginning. Work out a story with your boss: you aren't fired but are leaving the company for some plausible reason.
Consulting assignments, or some other kind of work that you can do for the company on an independent or freelance basis. Less-than-boom times tend to increase the availability of such work, for as companies cut back on full-time staffs, many projects get postponed. You may know of such projects lying dormant around your company--and, if so, you will help your cause if you make specific suggestions about some work you can do. One young woman, fired from a Chicago ad agency, picked up so many freelance assignments in this way that she soon found her income higher than her former salary.
Direct help from your boss in finding you another job. Your company may have a formal "outplacement" operation to provide some such help, but you should enlist your boss's personal efforts in any case. Perhaps, for example, he or she can phone a few friends at other companies and get you in the door.
Those other companies might well be customers or suppliers of the company you are leaving. This isn't by any means an unusual situation. In one case I'm familiar with, a public accounting firm fired a young man whose flamboyant manner and life style clashed with the firm's sober image. His boss found him another job with a small client company--a group of entertainment people whose personalities harmonized perfectly with the young man's. As controller of this little client company, the young man was now in a position to turn around and do favors for his former boss.
Do your best to project confidence. This is one of the most difficult aspects of getting fired. It is obvious that you must have an aura of brisk competence and confidence in order to attract any new employer. Yet it is this very aura that often gets destroyed in people who lose their jobs. I find I can sometimes tell just by looking at a man or woman--sometimes just by hearing a voice on the phone--that this person is unemployed. Some indefinable depressed quality seems to creep into the personality. You see it in the walk and posture, hear it in the tone and use of words.
I won't try to tell you it is easy to maintain your confident appearance. After all, you have received a severe jolt. What you are going through is not a picnic. But I do tell you it is not as hard to keep up that good aura as most people think. It can be done. I have seen many do it successfully.
I've already emphasized the importance of having an office to go to. This is part of a broader psychological strategy: for your own morale and for its effect on others, try as far as possible to behave as though nothing has changed.
Get up at your usual hour each morning and go to that office. Don't allow yourself to mope around home. Dress and groom yourself as crisply as you ever did while employed. Carry your briefcase even if nothing is in it. Have lunch with friends.
These suggestions are all endorsed by people who have lived through the experience of losing a job. Among these people are members of the Forty-Plus Clubs, a loose association of clubs set up specifically to help men and women over forty who are looking for executive-level positions. If you are under forty, your problems may be slightly easier than theirs--but their advice is worth listening to. It applies to anybody who needs a job.
One of the key Forty-Plus Club axioms is that moping around home is a recipe for going nowhere. If you want to spend an occasional day at home composing a resume or addressing envelopes, that is fine--but don't make a habit of it. You will slip into what one Forty-Plus man calls "the at-home mentality. You're in sloppy clothes, you look like a hobo--and pretty soon that begins to show in your voice and attitude. You won't be aware of it, but other people will."
This is why Forty-Plus Clubs in many big cities have offices and telephones for use by members who can no longer use their former company facilities. There are strict codes of dress for anyone on club premises. These codes exist for one purpose only: to help members keep up their morale and project that essential aura of confidence.
If your jobless period outlasts your company--office privilege, do your best to find another office to go to, at least occasionally. Perhaps, for example, you belong to a club or professional society that maintains offices.
Beyond that, check your grooming every day with a critical eye. Check your posture frequently. Be sure you are standing erect, shoulders back, head high. And though it is difficult to hear your own voice the way it sounds to others, there are two voice qualities you can be aware of: volume and monotony. Don*t let your voice die to a mumble or a whisper, and don't let it fall into a monotone.
People resort to all kinds of psychological tricks to maintain a confident posture, voice, and other subtle characteristics. One middle-aged man, during a jobless period, stood himself in front of a mirror several times a day and said, "I'm interesting! I'm valuable! I'm worth a good big salary! A woman went out and bought herself a bright red coat the day after she lost her job. She wore it to all her job interviews because, she said, "It made me feel peppy. I could never have gotten my mood up if I'd worn my dowdy old brown coat. That red coat was a big investment for somebody without a salary, but it paid off in the end."
She is happily employed now, as is the man who talked to himself in front of a mirror. You may not need to rely on such props, but these stories do illustrate the importance of mood when you are job-hunting.
Let things happen at their own pace. Don't be impatient. Don't pester prospective new employers or recruiters with frequent phone calls: "Has there been any decision yet?
Naturally you want things to happen for you quickly. It is not easy to hold on to your patience at a time like this--especially if the loss of a paycheck has put you in an acute financial bind that gets worse with every passing week. But there are three good reasons for avoiding impatience:
First, people are going to do things at their own speed whether you badger them or not. If a company needs three weeks to reach a decision, your thrice-weekly calls to the personnel director won't hurry the process one bit.
Second, impatience will undermine your own calm confidence--the aura that, as we have seen, is so important to you in this critical period of your life. If you give in to chronic impatience, you are likely to become visibly jittery and shaky. That cannot help your cause.
And third, your impatience will make a distinctly wrong impression on other people. Those too-frequent calls not only irritate people but, in time, take on the sound of desperation. It is a fact of life in the business world that desperation tends to turn employers away. The paradox is cruel but inescapable; the most coveted jobs, as a rule, go to those who don't really seem to need them.
So do your best to relax. While waiting for one decision to come through, explore other possibilities. Try to keep several possibilities alive at any given time. Keep yourself busy with family and friends. If you want to spend some time alone, don't get stuck in front of a TV set but go for a walk around your favorite city or a ramble in the countryside.
In time you'll get another job. And look at it this way: your career may have been set back or delayed a little, but now you have the grand opportunity to make a fresh start.
