Survivor’s Guilt

Welcome to Your Worthy Career, a podcast with me, Melissa Lawrence. I’m a career and life coach with all the corporate credit and talent development and organizational psychology. I help women like you get extraordinary results by being more you, not less. I won’t just help you have a career experience worthy of you, but I will help you build your self worth to shift what you think is possible and take the action that will create the career you’ve always wanted. Whether it’s more meaningful work you’re passionate about, making more money, getting to your next level, or being more effective as a leader, we are shattering the glass ceiling here. The one that exists for women at work and the one we put on ourselves with our doubt and inner critic. Each week you will get practical teachings grounded in neuroscience and effective career development strategies. You’ll experience deep mindset shifts and the perfect amount of rule so you can run your career with ease rather than your career running you. You were born for more, and I’m going to help you get there with maybe a few dance parties along the way. Your up level begins now.

Hello, welcome. I am so glad that you are here with me today. Now, today we’re going to talk about something that’s a little heavy and it impacts most people in the pharma biotech industry at least once. Layoffs, buyouts, reorganization. Companies going through change can result in changes in employee headcount. The need of organizations can change, and what they projected they would need may change. And as a result, your work best see your boss, someone you’ve worked with forever can be suddenly gone. Now, I could do an episode on layoffs, and maybe I will. But this episode is more nuanced. It’s more specific. We’re going to talk about survivor’s guilt, that real thing that can happen when you aren’t laid off, when you see people you care about leave and you are chosen to stay. It’s like the work version of the Hunger Games. Your boss or employer just may not understand that your only feeling about being chosen to stay isn’t gratitude. Now, I’m going to share my personal experience with layoffs and survivor’s guilt and what some of the recent studies tell us about the employee experience of survivor’s guilt. And then I’m going to share with you how you can process, heal, and respond to it if this is something that you’re going through, or maybe you have a colleague or friend who is and you can use this information to help them.

The first time that I went through this was when I worked at Covance Laboratories in Wisconsin. If you aren’t familiar with Covance, they were a CRO and they have since been purchased by LabCore. Now, I worked in a global department called the Learning and performance center. I was a performance consultant and instructional designer at the time. This was my first job in industry after I migrated over from child welfare and government consulting. Now, when I was there, there was a massive layoff. And what sticks out to me the most is that an entire site out in Virginia, close to where I live now in the DC area, was completely closed. The layoffs were much larger than that, but I had close relationships with the people in that office, so that’s what sticks out to me in my mind. And it was devastating for me because I was really close with that site. I had traveled out there several times for work. I had friends that worked there. They were like the OGs. Many of them have worked for the company for many years at that same location decades or more, certainly longer than I had worked there.

Now, I worked at CoVance for about three years before I moved out to the DC area to work for Human Genome Sciences. So it was maybe a year to 18 months when this had happened. Here, one day, I was flying out and visiting them, and we were working on projects together, and shortly after, they were all being laid off, and I felt terrible for them. I felt guilty that I was newer and I was staying. I felt bad that I was traveling out there and money was spent on me to do that. And little did I know that they were going to be laid off in the future. I had so much compassion and empathy for them for having to find new jobs, for them losing their sense of their work family, their work friends, and everything they had known for their career. They were losing their stability. And then I felt bad for feeling bad because I had my job and I didn’t want to make this about me. It’s almost like I didn’t feel entitled to my feelings. I didn’t feel entitled to feel bad because look what they were going through compared to me.

It was just awful all around. It was so uncomfortable to lose people I had worked with so closely in one big fellow swoop like that that I thought about leaving myself. Then you get into the culture aspect, right? People typically aren’t hopping around happy, having happy hours, and laughing around the water cooler after something like that happens. There was a heavy energy in the air. People were grieving. Whenever we go through any change like this, there is a grieving process. Any big change has an element of grief. You don’t have to have a death to experience it. You are grieving what you knew to be true, what you had taken for granted and as always being there. You have to let that go. And then when you add personal relationships, friendships, connections to the mix, it is very heightened. I’d love to tell you that this was the only time that I dealt with this, but it wasn’t. About a year later, one of the colleagues that I was close with that had been part of that layoff reached out to me. He had moved to and Genome Sciences, and he loved working there. And they were looking for a research and development training manager to come out and build a learning culture within R&D and ultimately help centralize the development activities across sales, HR, manufacturing, and R&D.

So I decided to go for it. I had such a fond experience visiting the area, and my family had wanted to move to an area that was more diverse than Wisconsin, so this seemed like it could be a good fit. I ultimately got the job and we moved to Maryland. Now, there were a few people that had moved to HGS, Human Genomics from Cobans, so it was like we had the band back together. But then four months after I moved out here, GSK, Glaxo SmithKline, bought out HGS. I was going to be laid off this time. But these layoffs were incremental. So I ended up being at HGS for about a year, and I was in one of the later waves. And you bet I had some feelings about that. I had only been part of the culture without layoffs for four months, and it was the culture I enjoyed the most of all of the companies I had worked for. I had the opportunity to go to an investigators meeting in Miami, and we were going to change the way the meetings were done to be more effective for those running studies. Big things were happening.

Everyone was so collaborative and warm in my experience there. But here I was in the same spot. We just got the band together. And because of my level, maybe because they had just relocated me halfway across the country, I had the fortunate situation of being laid off at a later time. So ultimately, I was someone who was laid off, but I also was going through other people being laid off before me. And I ended up moving over to Emerging and Bio Solutions as my next step after HGS. And I met my wife there, so it all worked out. But these things can take a toll. There’s a mental health aspect to all of this, to going through organizational changes, sometimes feeling like you’re a pawn being moved where you’re needed, not always knowing how they made the cut or the reasoning behind it, so it can seem very cold. So if you’ve experienced this, or maybe you’re experiencing this now, I see you. If you’re a people manager and need to navigate this at some point, it’s important to know this perspective so you can lead more effectively and help your employees through this. There was a study done by Leadership IQ, and I want to share some of those statistics with you. All right, so here’s what that study found.

74 % of employees who kept their job amid a corporate layoff say their own productivity has declined since the layoff. 69 % say the quality of their company’s service has declined since the layoff. 87 % of surviving workers say they are less likely to recommend their organization as a great one to work for. 64 % of surviving workers say the productivity of their colleagues has also declined. 81 % of surviving workers say the service that customers receive has declined. 77 % of surviving workers say they see more errors and mistakes being made. And 61 % of surviving workers say they believe their company’s future prospects are worse. Now, that’s startling because you need to think about the impact that that would have on you, on your colleagues, on your leadership, the ripple effect to the communities that you serve, to the engagement of the future that you might see with the company. And all of those things are tied to our own health and well being, but also into the delivery of medicine for patients and all of the important work that we do in this industry. Everything is so drastically impacted when there are layoffs.

And I don’t know that there is enough being done to really address this when it happens. Now, we haven’t even talked about the reality that in some cases, you may end up having more work on top of that survivor’s guilt to manage. Because when people leave, there’s a lot that has to be cleaned up. And sometimes what the leadership decides as the headcount needed is under projected, and there’s more work than people to do it. So it’s just not fun for anyone. And survivor’s guilt is really real. And so I want to talk about how to process and heal from it. First, acknowledge how you feel. However you feel is okay. If you feel grateful, that’s amazing. If you feel guilty, great. If you feel sad, frustrated, if you feel anxious, whatever feeling or combination of emotions you have, they are all okay. Acknowledge them. Don’t try to convince yourself not to feel how you feel. That resistance will only make it worse. It’s like the saying, what you resist persists. Don’t need to feel guilty for feeling guilty. Just take some time and let yourself feel all the feelings. Honestly, feeling feelings can be a challenge for some people.

Some like to numb their feelings, whether they’re doing it consciously or subconsciously by distracting themselves with dinners or wine or shopping or Netflix, whatever it is. Instead, take a little bit of time, put on some music, and just let it all out. It will help you recover so much more quickly. Now, number two, look or ask for the why. If it is unclear to you why layoffs occurred, how the decision was made, ask. Don’t make assumptions, look for the why. There was a reason, and I’m guessing that it isn’t personal. So if you can understand the strategic reason behind the reduction in headcount, it can help you see another perspective and lessen the overall pain. Seeing someone hurt or unhappy and having it seem like there was absolutely no reason is going to make everything worse. So get the reason, get the why. Number three, don’t let the fact that you weren’t laid off keep you stuck. This is a big one. I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel obligated to stay because they weren’t laid off. They were unhappy in their job already. They were even looking for jobs for interviewing. And then the layoffs came, their friends were laid off, and they were the chosen one.

They were chosen to stay. And so now they feel guilty for leaving. Now, regardless of the timing of you being unhappy in your career, you always have the option to figure out what you want and make a move. I can help you with this if this is something that you’re considering doing this as part of the work that I do when I coach clients one on one. Now, you aren’t obligated to stay where you don’t want to be. If we give the benefit to the company, the layoff wasn’t personal and was strategic, think of your career as the same thing. It’s the same type of strategic business decision. This is all just business. If you want to figure out your next best move, if you want to make a change in your career, you are entitled to make that change at any time. Number four, double down on boundaries. Don’t sacrifice your boundaries and take on more work because there are less people. This wasn’t your decision. Sometimes leaders make mistakes and miscalculate the headcount needed. Sometimes they’re trying to get the most that they can with as little as possible. So the decision to reduce headcount does not mean you are now responsible for two people’s jobs.

Keep your boundaries in place. Communicate with your boss when resources and bandwidth are limited. It is not your job to overcompensate and burn yourself out. You need to protect yourself first. Now, finally, as a people manager, if you’re a people manager listening to this, be open and transparent about the reason for the layoffs and what might be coming down the road. Acknowledge your employee’s perspective and don’t expect them to feel or think a certain way. Don’t put the burden on your team to make up for a reduction in headcount. Now, to end this episode, I have another resource for you. So a while back, I think it’s episode… It’s in the 60s, I think it’s 61, I did an emotions acceptance meditation. So I’m going to have this linked in the show notes for you because that meditation that I did is only a few minutes, but it’s going to guide you through feeling your feelings and processing them in a way that will help you. And you can use it as often as you need to, regardless of your role in a layoff or maybe you’re just listening to this and you want to ensure that you’re processing your feelings and not numbing or distracting yourself with some of those things I talked about earlier.

All right, have an amazing week. I will talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to this episode of Your Worthy Career. Visit yourworthycareer.com for full show notes and additional resources to help you on your career journey. Speaking of resources, if you enjoyed today’s show, you will love being an email VIP insider where I share trainings, tools, and behind the scenes content exclusive to my VIP list. Become a VIP and join us at yourworthycareer.com. See you next week.