Introduction
What makes a person indispensable to a firm and immune to massive layoffs? Why do some people end up receiving a pink slip after many years of service to their employer? What separates a good employee from a bad employee? The answer to all these questions lies in the way employees use and improve their skills to add value to their employer’s business.
I remember what sparked me to write this book.
It was a Friday evening in October. The time on the satellite radio in my car read 5:23 P.M., and I was stuck at the longest traffic light in Detroit. Except for the roar of car engines around me, I sat in complete silence, thinking of almost nothing but the disturbing phone call I had received just hours before. “What in the world is so urgent that we need to meet at a restaurant?” I wondered as the cars in front of me began to move. Grabbing my cell phone, I punched in my boss’s familiar number and waited.
“I’m just around the corner and will be there in a few,” I said timidly after he answered.
“Okay, take your time. We’ll be waiting.”
“We’ll be waiting.” Who in the hell was “we”? I could scarcely breathe. The mental race had exhausted me. I had been trying to figure out what I could have done better to secure my job as a human resources manager for a major soft drink distributor. During my five years with that company, I thought I had enacted the role of a model employee. Was this the end of the road? Come Monday morning, would I be standing in the unemployment line? After parking, I raced inside the restaurant, trying to replace every pessimistic thought with an optimistic one.
I found Scott Bailey and Gregory Williams sitting toward the back of the restaurant. Scott was my immediate supervisor; Gregory was his. As I approached the table, I could feel their stares. I straightened my necktie and took a seat.
“Great to see you again, Derek.” Mr. Williams greeted me with a polite handshake that caught me by surprise. He seemed much more pleasant than the day he had asked me tough questions during my final interview for the human resources manager position.
“Likewise,” I responded to Mr. Williams then addressed Scott. “Hey, Scott, how are you?”
He placed his wide hand on my shoulder. “I’m pretty good. I still have my job, right?”
The waitress was busy at the table next to us so Mr. Williams got up and went to the bar to get us a few drinks, while Scott continued. “I’m not going to drag this out for you, Derek. We need to make significant reductions starting Monday. Unfortunately, you’ll be affected by it all.”
My eyes closed slowly as I began to panic. When I opened them, I felt like crawling underneath the table.
“Don’t worry. Not in that way,” he said, sensing my trepidation. “We called you out to discuss a plan. Based on sales volume, the company is losing money faster than expected. It’s nothing you don’t know already, I’m sure.”
“Yes, our fourth-quarter numbers are worse than ever before.”
“Derek, we posted a fourth-quarter loss of 1.8 million dollars. You can take away the purchasing of pens and paper, minimize travel, and cut all sorts of minor expenses, but the overall savings lie in one place and one place only. We have to look closely at our labor costs.”
Just then, Mr. Williams returned with three beers and placed them on the table. “You guys started looking at the numbers yet?” he asked as Scott nodded. Taking his seat, Mr. Williams began shuffling papers out of a folder. “Look at the numbers by type of play rather than yards to go. We need to come up with the best players to get us the touchdown.”
For the next hour, we sat at the table strategizing and determining who we felt were our company’s emerging leaders (high achievers), as well as the satisfactory and unsatisfactory performers. At the end of the brainstorming, we had roughly sixteen names, all of which were on the chopping block. They had been categorized as “unsatisfactory contributors,” and Monday would be their last day of employment with the company.
“Now comes the hard part, Derek,” Scott said as we waited for the waitress to bring our check. “I need you to cut an additional seven employees. Take the weekend to think about whom to cut and fire both sets of employees on Monday. I’m flying to Mexico Sunday night, so this one’s entirely your call. Just give me a ring late Monday night after you’ve made the reductions and let me know how they went.”
My bosses stood up from the table and headed out. I stayed behind, left with a bitter taste in my mouth that even the remains of foamy beer couldn’t remove.
I spent the rest of that evening and the following two days plotting, planning, and deciding who else I should fire. It wasn’t an easy task, by any means.
In my years as a human resources manager, I’ve prepared a lot of boxes for employees to place their personal belongings in. I’ve helped collect their cherished belongings, from photographs on the wall to certificates of achievement, taken their badges, and walked them out. It’s never easy to do! Some of the employees that I’ve had the unfortunate task of terminating were close colleagues, and I hated to see them go; others were more distant connections, and I hated to see them go, too. Regardless of who’s involved, the task of uprooting people’s lives is never fun. The unpleasant reality that comes with firing or laying off an employee is extremely difficult and stressful.
Now that my bosses had instructed me to go through the single most grueling aspect of my job, workforce reductions, a myriad of thoughts inundated my mind as to who to keep and who to let go. So, to make my difficult situation a little easier, I decided to draft some questions to evaluate whether each of the seventy-two employees that I support should be fired or remain employed. I decided to focus first on whom to keep, so I formulated the questions to reflect the traits I look for in an employee:
• Who has the best chance of being successful—of continually improving and developing?
• Who has the capabilities, drive, and desire to improve his or her skills?
• Who are the leaders of tomorrow, the people who will thrive within our company and throughout their career?
That weekend, I continued to separate employees into groups of emerging leaders, satisfactory performers, and unsatisfactory contributors based on the answers to those three questions. I drew up three columns, each headed with one of the aforementioned categories.
While I was performing this difficult task, an inspiration struck me.
What if I used this unpleasant situation to provide essential information from firsthand experience to employees in other firms so that they could, within reason, avoid being put on the chopping block? How could I prepare employees who couldn’t avoid the chopping block for success with a future employer? What solid information could I provide to help them avoid distress during these turbulent times and begin to envision career advancement with their current or future employer?
Those questions led me to write this book to help people like you, the reader. Sometimes, job loss is completely out of your control. It can result from outsourcing, automation, department restructuring, elimination of a particular job, or budget cuts. What’s within your control is the perception that an employer has of you. Even when downsizing is necessary, companies are extremely reluctant to fire good workers. My goal is to provide you with valuable information that you can use now to make yourself irreplaceable. I’ve personally insisted that we keep good employees simply because of their ability to grow, develop, and emerge as probable leaders. In applying the leadership lessons in this book, you will not only learn to lead but will continue to lead amid rising economic uncertainty.
In creating this book, I decided to solicit help from other human resources professionals to help me give you some of the why’s, what’s, and how’s of becoming an untouchable employee when managers are forced to reduce labor costs. Not surprisingly, they, too, dislike letting go of a good employee.
My goal in writing this guide is to help you increase your overall value to a company, making you more marketable and employable. Pink Slip Panic is intentionally written to be skimmable. I’m not going to try to be clever in this guide, nor will I try to reinvent the wheel. What I will do is provide advice based on experience illustrated with specific examples and stories of the employees I decided to keep or let go on that Monday morning’s doomsday.
To some business leaders, maximizing revenues is more important than attracting and keeping employees. In my opinion, however, a company can maximize revenues only if it has excellent employees. When your company needs to make tough decisions regarding workforce reductions, I hope that your managers retain you because you’ve applied the very important information that I’m about to communicate and prepared yourself not to get caught in a pink slip panic.
