I have had a lot of success in my career. I wrote a book on how to be successful. Yet, shockingly (not really), even I have had struggles and failures along the way. That includes the crumbling of what I thought would be a career for the rest of my working days.
That job ending was not the actual problem–how it ended was.
A Lesson I Learned First Hand
To save you from all the ins and outs, basically a political shift started a path to there being no place for me anymore. It stinks, but it happens in business. The thing about the company is that they never really like having direct conversations with people about things like that or performance issues.
The reason? Those conversations are hard.
Instead, they just make the employee uncomfortable by changing their responsibilities, reporting lines (above or below them), or suddenly shift their performance ratings dramatically from top performers to serious issues with no warning. I saw it happen several times over, but always assumed there was more to the story than I could see, and there must not be anything unprofessional going on.
I had never even thought about how you can avoid severance by just making the person want to quit.
What a great financial strategy, right? Well, have you ever seen what it costs to get sued for wrongful termination? It is always more than severance.
This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats. It originally appeared in my Inc.comcolumn on October 31st, 2017.
