Thriving Through Job Loss: Creating and Sustaining Our Safety Nets
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You’ve recently lost your management job and are frustrated with your apparent lack of progress in finding new work despite your best efforts to spend hours in front of your computer submitting resumes and applications to potential employers. Further, you are losing energy in the process and feeling less and less motivated to take action. Consider the fact that maybe you may be missing one key ingredient to the process: social support.

One of the most challenging aspects of job loss is taking consistent action to land a new job. However, if our attitude or mood is depressed or pessimistic, we are far less likely to take the very actions that will help us succeed in the transition process. Thus, social support is particularly helpful for creating and maintaining an optimistic outlook. In this article, I will define what it means to thrive during a job loss with two case studies, identify some support strategies that people who have lost their jobs use, and conclude with an explanation of types of support that might make a big difference in your career transition process. I draw upon my experience in coaching managers through career transition, serving on a care team for hospice patients, and conducting dissertation research on the use of social support in helping managers thrive through the experience of Hurricane Katrina.

Thriving Defined: A Comparison
In order to illustrate the difference between people who grow or thrive and those who succumb to the loss of being downsized I introduce two typical client scenarios: Susan and Marco. In order to maintain the confidentiality of my clients, these cases represent situation factors drawn from dozens of individuals with whom I have worked.

Susan was a director in a hospitality company before being laid off. Although it was difficult emotionally to lose her job, Susan was well aware of trends in her industry and considered the possibility that this might happen. After taking off a week to grieve the loss, she accepted the reality of her situation and framed it as an opportunity to allow her to create some changes in her career. Past efforts to maintain her career viability paid off. Susan kept her resume updated and maintained a broad professional support network consisting of colleagues inside and outside her organization who were aware of both her abilities and her character. As a result, she was immediately able to launch a robust career search campaign and received three job offers after only a couple months being unemployed. Numerous friends passed along job leads based on Susan clearly communicating her job targets. She followed up on these leads and kept her colleagues up-to-date on her progress. During this period, she was able to capitalized on her time by reading professional journals, organizing her home and getting the gym on a regular basis. Susan also saw the period unemployment as a rare opportunity to deepen the relationship with her teenage daughter.

In contrast, Marco was an accounting manager in a financial services organization when he was laid off. Unlike Susan, Marco had not updated his resume in years and his professional network largely consisted of individuals in his department. The loss of his job impacted him strongly for several days. He found it difficult to get out of bed to take any substantial action on finding a new job and shared his experiences with few of his friends. For the former colleagues he reached out to, Marco made vague requests to let him know “if you hear of any good opportunities.” Because of his negative attitude and isolation, Marco felt little motivation or energy to reach out to these leads. As the weeks based and the end of his unemployment benefits approached, he became increasingly desperate and began considering a part-time job in a fast food restaurant. Marco felt angry and resentful, blaming his former employer for his misfortunes. He shared with others that his career would never recover from this loss.

In these two cases, Susan personifies a person who is growing or thriving despite adversity whereas Marco is succumbing to the loss. While there are a number of factors that contribute to the way in which Susan and Marco are coping with job loss, including many variables beyond their control, social support played a critical role.

Social Support and Thriving: Three Key Strategies
My experiences and research have led me to conclude that there are three critical strategies which managers who thrive in job loss employ:

• Build and maintain broad bases of support prior to job loss
• Request and receive the right type of support at the right time
• Maintain regular and consistent contact with supports throughout the transition

Let us now explore each of these strategies in more detail.

Strategy 1: Build and maintain broad bases of support prior to job loss
People who thrive amidst the loss of a job are able to tap personal and professional networks that they established prior to the loss. Creating and sustaining trusting relationships takes a considerable amount of time and energy. Thrivers recognize this and make the necessary investments of time and energy to build and maintain this social capital. These supports include both personal supports as well as professional connections in their organizations and industry sections. In essence, they create their psychological safety nets long before they need to find a new job.

My experience as a coach has shown that perhaps the worst time to attempt to build a support relationship is when you are in great need. I theorize that people pick up on the desperation in these individuals tend to back away. If you were to lose your job, can you identify 10 people you would call for support? If you can’t perhaps now is the time to start building your safety net through involvement with professional and industry-related trade groups, alumni organizations, and community groups.

Strategy 2: Request and receive the right type of support at the right time
Social support comes in a variety of flavors. People who thrive despite job loss know how to broker the right kind of support at the right time. Stress researchers refer to this as the matching theory – social support has the greatest impact when it is matched with the need. In addition, my experience has shown that the clearer my client’s have been in terms of the type of support they need, the more likely they are to receive it.

The research I conducted on middle managers that thrived during Hurricane Katrina discovered six types: emotional, instrumental, appraisal, informational, social network and role modeling support. I will review each and how they can appear for people who are in career transition.

Emotional support
Emotional support consists of empathy, understanding and acceptance. The shift for individuals from being a manager with power and perks to a job seeker is a dramatic change for most. This is particularly critical for people in career transition who may face periodic disappointment or setback, such as rejection from prospective employers. I often provide this kind of support to my clients by actively listening to their stories, eliciting information and demonstrating my understanding of their experience.

While emotional support is critical, it is also important to set to limits to the amount of emotional support one receives lest it reinforce a sense of hopelessness and cause a person to wallow in their loss.

Instrumental support
Instrumental support takes the form of specific acts others perform on your behalf, such as lending you money, tools or resources. For job seekers, this could take the form of colleagues or friends that facilitate introductions for you to their professional contacts, care for your child while you attend a job interview or lend you financial resources or other tools to help in your career transition. While I worked on my dissertation in 2008, my trusted friend Eileen took care of my dog on a number of instances so that I could completely focus on writing without distractions. Although the support she provided did not involve the specific challenge in front of me – analyzing reams of research data – the instrumental act freed up my time to focus on the challenge at hand, as well as providing the emotional assurance that my pooch was taken care of.

There is a relationship between instrumental and emotional support for some. The findings of my Hurricane Katrina study suggested that there are gender-based differences in what constitutes effective emotional support. Whereas women in my study were more comfort receiving emotional support in the form of openly communicating feelings with work colleagues, this was not true for men. Men tended to draw emotional support when colleagues provided instrumental support. Some studies have even found that when men receive emotional support, it creates more stress because it challenges social taboos that preclude men from talking about their feelings.

Informational support
Receiving information from others about the challenge you face is a critical form of support. During Hurricane Katrina, the lack of accurate information about the status of the floods proved to be a significant source of stress for those impacted by the storm. I often provide information support to my clients about the process of finding a job and how the recruiting process works based on a past role as a human resource director. Another example: colleagues who provide information about the internal culture of an organization you are targeting to help you decide whether it is a good fit for your personality.

Appraisal support
Similar to informational support, appraisal support comes in the form of information about you and your abilities. Career mentors are an important source of appraisal support for many job changers since they provide perspective on an individual’s career strengths and weaknesses. Because most of us are notoriously biased when it comes appraising our own abilities, appraisal support can be key to improving how we are perceived by potential employers. However, in many cases unless we explicitly ask for appraisal support from others, we may not receive it.

Social network support
During Katrina, social network support allowed participants in my study to thrive by experiencing a sense of belonging and identity with others in their organization facing the same challenges. It also offered a source of accountability to perform despite dire circumstances. Another recent study found that participating in a network support group had an overall positive effect on ones’ sense of optimism. For many individuals who have been downsized, this sense of connection and optimism can be key to staying active in a job search. Optimistic people are far more likely to take action and therefore land a new job sooner.

Numerous clients have describe the powerful impact of attending job search or professional networking groups as a means for feeling support by others who also lost their jobs. With this support, they were better able to maintain their orientation on taking concrete actions to move forward in their job searches.

Role modeling support
During Katrina, a number of research participants described the presence of others in their workplace positively influenced their ability to cope during the chaos that ensured after the levees broke. In essence, some of these individuals observed a boss or colleague who – despite having lost more than the participant – were able to stay focused on recovering their organizations. In other cases, certain individuals stepped up and took on leadership positions despite not being in formal leadership roles thereby modeling powerful behavior for others.

For a number of my career transition clients, career mentors provide valuable role modeling on how to maintain their focus despite the job loss. As a coach, I often suggest that job changers read stories about individuals who have faced and overcome great adversity to help empower them to thrive. The flip of role modeling is also true – hanging around individuals who model negative attitudes and behavior can have the opposite effect.

Strategy 3: Maintain regular and consistent contact with supports throughout the transition
The real challenge in navigating the loss of a job is the need to maintain a sense of hope despite the uncertainties of when you might actually land a new job. Typically, when people first lose a job, they have plenty of colleagues and friends offering them support. Over time, this support tends to wane as people go about their lives, causing the individual who loses their job to perceive that they are alone. An important distinction is perceived versus received support. In other words, it is not necessary for us to actually receive support from a friend to help us maintain hope and take action. Simply knowing that support is available to us helps us take action in responding to a stressful situation like job loss. In addition, maintaining consistent contact with supporters throughout the transition process is essential to bolster the perception of support – and thus help sustain positive coping strategies such as asking for help and taking specific job search actions.

Thriving as a Choice
Whether we are aware of it or not, in any given situation we have a choice about whether we want to thrive or succumb to the challenge we face. The ability to thrive in the midst of a job loss is not an automatic outcome. The primary challenge is taking consistent action to achieve ones' goals for landing a new job. Social support is a critical means for maintaining a sense of optimism and hope, leading to action-taking strategies. Like Susan at the beginning of this article, by intentionally thinking about our social support network and the types of support we need during the career transition process we can improve the likelihood that the loss of a job can in fact be one of the best things to happen to us.