Of course, redundancy strikes at the core of our basic human needs for acceptance, security and identity. As you’ll have seen, the initial emotions – shock, fear, anger – can be compared to bereavement. Yet it also calls forth another equally human part of us described by poet David Whyte as ‘that small bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in…the heart’.
This freedom provides opportunity. In your HR capacity, you can gently encourage those who have ever harboured dreams of a different life, to make that shift now. You can also acknowledge the shortage of similar, replacement roles and guide senior people to think creatively about new applications of their skills.
The Bishop of London Reverend Richard Chartres suggested that redundancy can come as an "opportunity to get off the treadmill and… reboot our sense of what a truly flourishing human life consists of". The trouble is, many people, suddenly faced with that chance to rethink, even restart their lives, don’t know where to begin.
Traditional career coaching can’t help if a person has only vague inklings of new living circumstances, following passions or rebalancing. What if they know they want to ‘make a difference’ but they don’t know what difference they want to make?
Short purpose-quest journeys from organisations such as The Big Stretch or Common Purpose are a good suggestion here. Exploring their wider world views, individuals can pinpoint the needs of society that would be most compelling and rewarding for them to help meet.
Once people are clear of the contribution they’d like to make in the world then it’s a smaller step to uncover the organisations that operate in that field – businesses, UN directorates, charities – and the roles within. Such organisations start with the desire for new meaning at work but rapidly guide someone to sharper visions of personal destiny. They rekindle a sense of purpose and usefulness relatively fast.
Of course, mortgage demands create urgency and tunnel vision. Though you might be dealing with a senior person who has unique experience and transferable skills, in their fear and anger, they probably aren’t feeling flexible. With a creative mindset, that same person could see lateral possibilities for themselves - their talents becoming relevant to radically different fields. Another important pointer you can offer, then, is towards creative thinking at this time.
Chris Brown’s book, How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas, focuses on building this can-do mindset. Similarly, some of the purpose-quest journeys already identified work on a person’s creative state – using mountain walking to restore insight and intuition, and creative problem-solving in the natural world as a source of ideas. The focus might be revolutionising unhelpful internal patterns of thought, or finding new ways to research and break into an unfamiliar field. Whatever is obstructing your executive from open, action-oriented creativity, gets addressed.
Finally, you might nudge a senior executive beyond thinking like an employee. This year, I’ve seen dozens of senior people kick start a portfolio career by freelancing in their former field. They start thinking like an entrepreneur, asking ‘How can I use my strengths? How can I create a new service that fits me and the current climate like a glove?’
As with the economic and environmental sources of this crisis, there’s no single silver bullet. Instead, you can listen closely to individual orientation, take changing realities on board, and support people to find their best way forward by suggesting providers that are broad-thinking and creative, rather than deductive. Times like these favour people who’ve developed a unique, self driven, passionate, creative approach. As a HR manager, you can point them on that path.
Rosie Walford runs The Big Stretch
