From the other end

What they remember, a year later

James spent more than twenty years headhunting in airline, hospitality and travel, where redundancy arrives in waves. He is the man who rang those people afterwards.

Hundreds of those calls started the same way: so, what happened at your last place. This is what they said.

What they forgave

Almost always, the decision itself. Men who lost jobs they loved would say the business had no choice, or that they would have done the same in his position. Very few carried anger about the fact of it.

  • Being told early, before it was confirmed, when the man was honest that it was not yet certain.
  • The truth about why, including when the truth was that the money had gone.
  • Being told plainly that there was nothing they could have done differently, where that was true.
  • A man who was visibly affected by doing it. Nobody, in twenty years, held that against him.
  • A man who said he did not know the answer to something, rather than inventing one.

The pattern is simple enough to state: they forgave the news. They did not forgive the handling.

What they never forgave

  • Finding out from a rumour, or from a calendar invitation with an unfamiliar name on it, or from somebody in another department who had heard.
  • Being told by a stranger — a consultant, an HR manager they had never met, a junior — while the man who made the decision stayed in his office.
  • Being told by a screen. A letter, an email, or a call where the camera stayed off.
  • A reason they knew was false. Restructure, when the role was advertised again four months later. Performance, when nobody had ever raised it.
  • Being managed rather than told: the rehearsed phrases, the language that came off a template, the sense of being processed by somebody who used to be a colleague.
  • Being walked out immediately with no chance to say goodbye to anybody, for no reason they could see.

Ten years later, men would still repeat the exact sentence that was used on them. They rarely remembered the severance figure.

Why that is the useful distinction

You cannot change the decision. In most cases you did not make it alone, and it is not going to be reversed by how you feel about it.

What is entirely in your hands is the part they will remember: who tells them, how early, whether it is the truth, and whether you are in the room.

That is a smaller thing than the decision and it is the thing that lasts.

This is observation, not instruction

None of the above is a method, a procedure or a legal position, and it is not a script. It is what men said, afterwards, to somebody who had no stake in defending the company that did it to them.

What you do with it is yours. Anything procedural — consultation, notice, selection, settlement, in any country — belongs with an employment lawyer and not with this site.

The next page is about the position you are in while you carry it: neither villain nor victim.