Ten lessons you learn only when you get a pink slip.

There are moments in life when a nagging prick in your gut tells you what’s coming even before words are spoken. That’s when you realize that living in denial till then was stupid. But well, that’s human nature.

It was the 11th of April , a week before my daughter's birthday . On some days it slips into remission . On other days it comes back & stings like a raw pain. Getting fired is a wound that never quite heals.

There had been corridor murmurs over the past few months about rationalizing and optimizing the verticals in the business that was struggling to scale the ambitious targets it had accepted in a shrinking marketplace with a dying product line . Like always, it started with some of the big names in the leadership team who quickly took on new, safer roles, and promptly sent out colorful blogposts in the intranet, encouraging the staff to carry on with the great work because it was going to be business as usual. But as we all know, business is seldom as usual, especially when being told to you by someone who himself was jumping ship . But we humans are eternally optimistic, and always believe that bad things happen to other people and not to us. So we carry on, ignoring the yellow flags. The next phase consisted of manpower audits and called for a 25% shaving off of resources, because apparently the top guy had taken on a ‘stretch target’ of 25% base cost reduction because he was not man enough to instead challenge his team to go for 40 % business expansion. Ironically the top guy’s bonus was also linked to this base cost reduction, meaning – he was incentivized to fire people. Again, you go with the flow and assume that this will be the bottom 25%, the laggards at the vending machine. So you keep your cheerful hat on, putting up your best ‘leadership under tough times’ act, at home and at work. Your long standing track record documented in your resume and your trophies in the mantelpiece tell you that you are among the top 10% talent in the organization, and you are obviously safe. Actually, you also start having a wild thought that all this disruption might be paving way for a bigger opportunity for you in the near future.

It starts with meetings vanishing from your Outlook calendar. It takes you a couple of weeks to realize that the meetings were not cancelled, but it was you who was plucked out of them. Next, you start spotting signs of rebellion in some of your team members who start missing your review calls and stop sending you weekly reports, making you suspicious for the first time that all might not be well. Suddenly your boss avoids your calls on some silly pretext or other. Suddenly the clueless HR Manager ( who otherwise never had any idea of the business, except for ordering pizza during the monthly meetings ) starts acting pricey and sighing about the ‘thinning pipeline’. Suddenly people in your team are made into joint resources and you have another manager to share your resources with, which makes you protest because you are already understaffed, but by now you have a premonition that you are fighting a lost battle. Then follow a few rounds of business reviews, which, if you have been through the grind, would know, have nothing to do with business. They are forums to frustrate you and encourage you to throw up your hands and start calling head hunters to help you with a job outside. But you love the organization. And you have an unhealthy amount of healthy self image. So you keep battling through these meetings, systematically making your case about the ground you are covering, the revenue you are contributing and the road map into the future. Foolishly, you still think that its about performance and that your credentials & time tested work ethic will win in the end. After all, you always know that in the end, the good guy wins. And you are the good guy here. But for once, it doesn’t work that way. Three weeks on, you receive the ‘Catch-up’ VC invite with the Biz head and the HR lady. While the Biz head is visibly distressed ( or he is a great actor), the HR lady keeps yawning through the discussion, periodically checking texts on her phone and occasionally letting out a small smile. Two minutes into the discussion, you know what’s coming. Thankfully that’s where your years of hard earned self esteem surfaces, snubs the thudding in your solar plexus, and makes you stand up and conclude the meeting. You thank them and walk out. Outside, an apologetic HR BP is waiting with a few sheets of paper which contains your severance conditions & your notice period, and also some legal mumbo jumbo which in effect is to protect the organization in case you plan to sue. You don’t even read through the papers. You sign, smile at her and walk to the elevator. As the elevator descends, your entire career comes back to you in fleeting flashback – the beginning, the first sale, the first promotion, the first young leader award, the first international assignment, the first external recognition in the industry , the teams you built, the clients you brought in , the back breaking long work days, the contracts you signed , the sacrifices you made at your home front just so as to be the copybook committed professional…The pains, the trials, the tribulations.

Once outside the building, you decide to leave your car behind and go for a long aimless walk to collect yourself before facing your family. By now the disbelief has given way to a debilitating sense of self-pity and a ‘Why me ?!’ scream inside your head. Somewhere over the next two hours, your sense of combat is back and your self-pity is replaced by a seething white rage. Bit by bit, your mind works back on the events and explains how you have been played for sucker, and you want to fight back. The anger doesn’t go away for some days. Every morning as you look at the faces of your family members, it comes back. Every night as you battle your insomnia, you toss and turn in anger. Then, somewhere during the next week, your anger starts subsiding as your rational mind has started making lists of options. Thereafter, it gets easier because you throw yourself into your job hunt with a new found vengeance. Soon you find a job. Some job. Any job. And you are back into the workforce.

But truth be told, you are never back as the same person who walked out of that elevator with a pink slip that day. Getting fired hardens you and changes you in ways you never imagined before. Having said that, I would say that there are certain lessons you learn only when you have had this experience. Some muscles develop only under hardships. Likewise, some unwritten lines get added into your resume only after you get fired, lessons that make you a sharper professional, an empathetic leader and most of all, a better human being. Here are the top ten lessons you learn when you get fired –

1. The apprehension of getting fired is always worse than the real thing. Curiously, for me, the last few weeks of anticipation was the actual torture. Once it happened, I went back home that evening, changed into my gym attire, and clocked my best 10k timing for the year on the treadmill. Later, that evening, I poured myself a large whisky and watched my favorite Woody Allen movie. It was actually not that bad once that it was done with.
2. It’s the politics, stupid. Late though it might come, the eureka moment is when you realize that it was not about your capabilities. Rather, it was because you were an odd man out inside a pre-existing political coterie. Funnily, during the same period, a counterpart of mine with terrible performance numbers ( but who was part of the old boys' club in the business for many years ) not only kept his job, but also managed to get transferred to a new safer role in a high cost country of his preference. Base cost reduction and all that blah !
3. Life is unfair. Deal with it. Most of us sleep walk through our careers with idealistic hopes in our hearts till we get kicked in the stomach for the first time. Getting fired unfairly is the best wake up call you can have that will activate your antennae for the rest of your professional life, making sure you never fall asleep on your job ever. And that you watch out for assholes at all times.
4. They cannot take away your yesterdays. Or your tomorrows. Your yesterdays are for keeps. They are what add up to the you who you are today. Getting fired from one job doesn’t delete your past. Nor does it have to write your future. Getting fired is an event. In my case it was by design. In most cases in today’s disruptive world, it happens by default. It is no measure of your competence. If you have been a rock star yesterday, you can be a rock star tomorrow as well.
5. Pay attention to your first interview. In most cases, your first interview sets the tone for the stint ahead. In my case, my discussion with the Biz head had not gone very well. This man had once tried to hire me for a different role which I had turned down. Then, during the interview, I had spoken my mind and laid out my plans, some of which were in conflict with what he had in mind, for his future organization that had his bunch of cronies in the scheme of things . Later I realized how much he must have hated me. Politically he could not reject me as I came in with a stellar track record. So he let me in. And set me up for failure. Unfair, true. But that’s life.
6. Sometimes it might not be about you at all . I mentioned cronies. In most large organizations, leaders grow by forming fiefdoms. The legendary leadership personalities you read about in issues of HBR, are a rare breed now. Most fast growing leaders in large complex organizations prefer to gather yes-men around them. It’s a win-win, ‘you-watch-my-back-I-watch yours’ arrangement. You need a rude awakening by means of getting fired to come off your romanticized illusions about leadership, fairness, vision and all the bull. Unfortunately most workplaces comprise of a series of silos with an unspoken agreement of non-interference with each other. Sometimes when you go all guns blazing with your ideological agenda for the good of the larger organization, you might be harming someone else’s personal agenda. And that someone might be higher in the pecking order than you, with access to a more important audience than you.
7. Sometimes you need to also look into the mirror. Often, we make the mistake of trying to bend the organization to our style. It never works. Whenever you get into a new set-up, you need to keenly observe the existing people in there, because in the long run you will need to become one of them, and not the other way round. In all my earlier roles, I had my rebellious streak in me, partly a resultant of my good track record and which had made me arrogant. I was too opinionated on all matters, sometimes bordering brash when it came to rubbish ideas that were different from my own. Unless you are self-employed, you need a certain degree of adaptability and a healthy amount of humility. Getting fired has made me humble. Today, I listen more than I speak. And I do not dismiss anyone else’s idea, no matter how junior he / she be in the value chain.
8. Sometimes it could be that you are too good. I know this sounds pompous and inappropriate. But I know that in this particular job, I was giving my manager the jitters. I understood the market better than him. My clients loved me. I was younger and had more energy than him. And I had made the cardinal error of writing in my goal sheet in my appraisal that I would like to succeed him in the next 1-2 years. While I myself always encourage my juniors to aspire to take my job so that I can move up, my straightforward stake probably unsettled my boss who perceived me as a threat. No wonder he would meticulously keep me away from all the management meetings with the global leadership, lest I steal his thunder.
9. Getting fired is like a boot camp you are thrown into, so that you may find yourself back. Often, caught up in the 9-6 treadmill, the mask we don for conformity, stealthily becomes our face. And unknowingly we leave behind that wide-eyed & proud youngster we used to be at the starting line. Reclaiming your dignity after a pink slip is perhaps the biggest challenge and yet the greatest reward of it all. Sometimes in life, we need to go back to the beginning, to start again. Getting fired is finding back your page one, in the middle of your story.
10. You are not your job – You are a son, a daughter, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a support system, an artist, a poet, a musician, an athlete and so many other things outside that elevator. I have had some people ask me in recent months why I do not put my organization’s name in my LinkedIn profile. This was a conscious decision I took this January. It has nothing to do with my organization. I work for one of the best organizations in the world. I adore its leadership and I love my work. And I know that till the time I am doing well, I shall have takers for me in the world out there. But I do not want to pin my identity into a specific box that labels me as an employee of Company X. I love this anonymity. It gives me the breathing space to be myself outside of my work.

In summary, if you have been fired – Don’t take it too personally. It could be the best thing that has happened to you. And if you need to fire somebody, make sure it is for the right reasons and not because of a political agenda. Most importantly, give the person his / her share of dignity and grace that he / she deserves.

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( Afterword – I would like to add that my life motto, “In the end the good guy wins. Be the good guy”, stays preserved. Incidentally the ‘top guy’, the ‘biz head’ and the HR lady were all fired during the course of the next one year from that incident. The HR lady actually had the cheek of writing to me once, asking if I knew of any openings in my network. Talk of divine justice !)

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My Thursday night blog post, 27/06/19)

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