Layoffs: When you're the bad guy
I still remember my long-distance layoff: the email telling me to phone my boss immediately, the premonition, the tears. But the tears weren't just on my end. I was flabbergasted to hear my boss choke back the first sob. I hung up in shockâwith the full range of expected emotions. Yet almost a year later, with the sting still surprisingly fresh, I actually found myself feeling sorry for her when I heard she was facing another impending round of pink slips.
Whether it's a long-distance phone call or a long trip down the office corridor, a layoff notice is too often the purpose these days. While traumatic for the laid-off employee, it can be almost as stressful for the manager delivering the bad news. After a tumultuous day of telling people they no longer have jobs, many a deflated manager may leave the office with a lighter payroll, but at the price of a heavier heart.
Managers who execute cuts are usually portrayed as the bad guys in the layoff landscape. But if you've ever had to deliver the news yourself, you know how gut wrenching it can be.
So when layoffs are the only solution to a budget crisis, and there are no performance issues to facilitate the decision, how does a caring manager choose who stays and who goes?
(Worried you might be laid off? Have a financial plan.)
Making the call
"It never gets easier," says Margot McFarlane Hall, who worked in the hotel business for 27 years and is now a consultant in Montreal. As a supervisor, she struggled through four layoffs involving about 20 people in total. "It was always extremely upsetting and I would get very, very stressed," she says. "Plus, I'm an emotional person, so I don't do these things well."
"The only tougher thing I'd been through was my divorce," recalls Judith Matthews*, who laid off six employees during her 21 years in the Toronto head office of a national charity.
Despite there being no shortage of jobs lost in the current economic crisis, few managers who have had to deliver recent layoff notices are willing to discuss their experiences.
Monika Morrow, a VP at Right Management, coaches managers in layoff protocol. "It doesn't matter how many you've done, each and every one of them can be difficult," she says from her Toronto office. "You really have to separate your head from your heart. Your first allegiance is to the business, and when you're talking to the employee you have to stress that this is a business decision."
But while a manager's head should always take the lead in a layoff situation, Morrow says the heart should not be left out of the message. As a supervisor, you need to understand how profoundly the decision is affecting someone's life, she says.
