Chapter 9: Losing Your Job or Being Passed Over for Promotion

Overview

This isn’t about losing just any job or being passed over for a position that wasn’t of much interest to you. Instead, it’s about being laid off or fired from a company to which you dedicated twenty years of your life. Or it’s about not receiving a promotion you had targeted for some time—an opportunity that rarely comes around. In other words, this passage involves a huge career disappointment—one that shakes you to your core. Although it was once unusual, this passage is increasingly common as companies restructure, reorganize, or seek to reduce employment costs.

Psychologically and emotionally, this passage taxes your resolve and resilience. It’s extraordinarily difficult for many successful leaders to get their minds around the fact that they lost out to another candidate or that they were let go; it is ego-deflating and challenges their sense of self. Similarly, this passage can create tremendous anger, bitterness, and betrayal, and these feelings can stop leadership growth in its tracks. We are often called in to coach senior leaders in the middle of this passage, because the organization wants to “save them.” We know from intense conversation this passage is difficult and sometimes emotionally wrenching.

Like the other passages, though, this particular adversity does help you become a more effective leader in a unique way. If you make the right choices and avoid extreme negative emotions, you can emerge from the passage as a more viable candidate for a leadership position than you were in the past. Just ask James McNerney (chairman and CEO of 3M), Bill George (former chairman and CEO of Medtronic), Jeffrey Katzenberg (partner in DreamWorks SKG), Jamie Dimon (chairman and CEO of BankOne), Steve Jobs (chairman and CEO of Apple), and many other successful leaders who endured the pain of this passage, only to go on to another senior leadership role stronger and more insightful as a result. The key, though, is to view the adverse circumstances with perspective and insight.