Bloodbath Monday

There is nothing like the chaos of the professional environment, right?

I've recently talked about how my team was shifting around, and we are embarking on a new journey as a different entity. That's finished now, and boy was it a hell of a lot of work and hustle! Many of us were pulling long hours into the evenings, after working full days, to get all of our stuff documented and migrated. It was a great amount of work that's for sure, but there are certainly a lot of benefits coming on the other side of all that.

There are also, unfortunately some drawbacks..

The other day it started out as normal. Getting things together, preparing the activities for the day and folks coming online. I messaged some of my colleagues for things that I wanted to get accomplished and we had some work laid out. A few internal and external meetings go by when I get a message that one of the people we work with was let go. That was really difficult to hear! Then the additional messages rolled in.. more and more were dropping like flies. It was honestly insane! It was an absolute bloodbath for our workforce.

After all was said and done, there were quite a number of my colleagues, people I've worked with for many years and developed pretty good relationships. All of them were gone in the blink of an eye. It was such an intense day of emotion and turmoil. The good thing at the end of it all was that I still had a job, as did a core group of us. There were some commonalities that arose when we learned more about it.

In the day that we live in, it's good to specialize in some things, but it's also a bit more important to be broad. Yes there is absolutely value in being the best at one particular task however those are very limited in their disbursement in the world for obvious reasons. Companies, unless they grow the individual within, are looking for people who can cover a number of bases instead of just one base. The commonality between the people who stayed versus the ones who were told their employment was ending was that we were the ones that were highly flexible, nimble and can do a lot of things at once. The others, sadly were not.

It is one of the most difficult things to have to tell somebody that they no longer have a job, especially after working with them for a number of years. When you have to let LOTS of people know that they no longer have a job, that's a whole different ball of wax.. that is one of the reasons that I don't think I am necessarily cut out for upper management roles, I don't know if I could stomach having those conversations. Granted, my top two leaders absolutely hated and felt really bad what they had to do, but it was saving the whole business from the sacrificing of a smaller number of individuals. We all understood, after it was discussed in detail from top to bottom, why what happened, had happened.

Not that I am the most valuable person, or the best at things but one of the things I've had my entire career is an ability to make myself useful. I am always expanding beyond what my normal job responsibilities are. When I worked in a file room at the very beginning, I learned the role and got that under my belt but then started to shift and clean things up. My colleagues didn't have an interest in doing it because they were busy doing other things, some of it related but much of it not at all. I was never truly interested in that and wanted to instead figure out other things to do that were beneficial. I started a purging program and by the end, had purged tens of thousands of really old files and saved the place a fair chunk of money. It only expanded from there and into the place I'm at today.

That is to say that it's important, in my opinion and experience, to be flexible and versatile in a number of things so that you can make it painful for someone to have to let you go. If they have their choice between a multidisciplinary individual and someone who has just one focus, the likely change in most industries is they are going to let go the single focus individual.

I learned afterwards that one of the reasons I was not let go is because of that very broad nature of things I am good at and interested in. I never shy away from a problem and actually just attack them head on and directly, which is such an important skill to have and be confident in.

I sorely miss the people that I worked with, as some of them were fantastic friends, but friends don't pay the bills and I have already offered to be a reference for the good ones so that they can hopefully land a good job somewhere else!

What about you, have you worked at a place that did a restructuring? How did it go? Were you let go, or were others? Let me know in the comments!