Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss [Paperback]

Martha I. Finney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0137021143 | ISBN-13: 978-0137021147 | Edition: 1

So, you've been laid off. Or you see it coming. You're not alone. And it's not your fault: you're just one of millions of smart, high-quality people who are being shown the door. But none of that makes it feel any better! What can you do? What should you do? How do you cope with the havoc that losing your job can cause? This sympathetic, practical book brings together all the answers you need to empower yourself, and come back stronger than ever. Author Martha Finney is one of the nation's leading workplace experts: her research has been featured on CNN, NPR's Morning Edition, and in major newspapers across the country. Drawing on powerful insights and personal stories from an enormous network of experts, she brings together all the knowledge and resources you'll need to regain mastery over your life. Finney answers questions like: How can I keep getting laid off from wrecking my life? How can I protect my professional reputation and career path? How do I get past the anger? Why haven't I heard from my coworkers? How do I keep all my options open? How do I tell my family, without damaging their faith in their own futures? What are my rights? Can I sue? Should I? How do I keep this from happening again? From start to finish, this book will help you identify your best next steps: the steps that'll help you get past the trauma and move forward, emotionally, financially, in your career, and in every part of your life.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Martha I. Finney is President and CEO of Engagement Journeys, LLC, and an internationally-respected expert in employee engagement and leadership communications. A business journalist for 20 years before becoming a full-time consultant, she specializes in helping organizations achieve greater employee loyalty, retention, and passion.

 

Finney is author or coauthor of more than 13 books, including The Truth About Getting the Best From People (FT Press) and HR From the Heart with Yahoo’s Chief People Officer, Libby Sartain. Her original research on the American workplace has been featured on CNN, NPR’s Morning Edition, and in major newspapers nationwide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rebound

Preface

We’re all human. And because we’re all human, we share the habit of marking the moments that change our lives forever. The majority of those moments are cause for celebration (or at least track predictably along what we consider to be nature’s plan): births, birthdays, graduations, weddings, babies, grandbabies, even the gentle, timely passing of dearly loved ones, are all cause for noticing and remembering.

But we also mark the times when everything we took for granted goes to chaos and yet another illusion is shattered. Those can be private tragedies or national catastrophes that rock our world and in a twinkling send us hurtling into the next phase of our lives. From the Baby Boom generation and moving forward into the Y generation, we have more in common than we might think we do. And that is this: We’re constantly being reminded that nothing is certain. And, come to find out, promises are made to be broken. Huh, what do you know?

The biggest promise that has been repeatedly broken in the past 30 years has been that the “system” (whatever that is) is airtight, foolproof, and self-perpetuating. A net of stability we can depend on if we simply walk the straight and narrow. Follow all the rules, make a plan and stick to it, go to college, pour heart and soul into your job, go above and beyond the call to make yourself indispensable, and you’ll be fine. That path leads to security. No? Oh. There goes another illusion.

Of course, every generation has had its share of troubles, and we’d be major babies to whine that we’ve gotten the raw end of the historic deal. I would choose these times over any prior era right this very moment. No question. However, for me, “these times” began in 1977—six months before I was due to graduate from college—when my father came home unexpectedly from an assignment abroad. After more than 25 years with the Central Intelligence Agency as an undercover case officer, he was in the middle of teaching a class in Mexico City when a rap on the glass door delivered a pink slip into his astonished hands. Adios, muchacho. Or as his students cooperatively called him, Señor Feingold.

From my perspective—self-absorbed and involved with schoolwork—he had merely come home ahead of schedule. But he left for work the very next morning, so nothing otherwise was out of ordinary. I would learn later that he had a meeting with an outplacement counselor his first day back. Incredibly, the counselor observed, “You seem angry, Mr. Finney.” (As if that were going to pry open a “cleansing” outpouring of emotions from a guy who kept secrets for a living.) If my dad were a member of a younger generation, he would have said, “Damn straight, I’m pissed.” But instead, he rose to his feet, walked out the door, turning his back on his life’s passion, mission, and calling. Why not? His life’s passion, mission, and calling had turned its back on him.

That happened right after a period when my father was anxiously and responsibly giving me the advice to choose a “recession-proof” career, and that meant—to his loyal way of thinking—a job with the federal government. But, as I was to read later, he was a member of the first of many waves of federal layoffs, called Reduction in Force. Thousands upon thousands of federal employees were to be tossed out of work during the Carter and Reagan administrations. So much for working for the feds. There goes another promise broken.

He spent the next year or so unsuccessfully trying to land another job. (I mean, how transferrable are the skills you learn in more than 25 years as a spy? Especially when you can’t actually say what you were doing all those years? Talk about a resumé gap.) After some ridiculous misfires in industrial security, one of which was as a security guard for a movie about New York thugs, which caused him to become an actual victim of a garden-variety mugging on the deserted Coney Island subway platform (there’s little more pitiful than an aging ex-spy with broken glasses and a bloodied nose), he eventually settled down to become an international political consultant with his former boss—who had also been shown the door.

But the moment I will always remember is the moment just weeks after my college graduation when he finally admitted to me that he had actually been laid off. Wait a minute! What? I had heard of layoffs before, of course, but they happened to other people—especially people who couldn’t keep up with the times, who couldn’t nimbly retool themselves fast enough to stay ahead of the axe, people who hadn’t taken care of themselves by getting a lot of education, making a plan and sticking to it, going above and beyond the call to make themselves indispensable so that they would be fine. Now this was happening to a dedicated, college-educated, multilingual genius (he was my father, after all) who over decades had more than demonstrated his immediate value to his company’s mission-critical objectives.

Being my father’s daughter, I took the news evenly, with no overt reaction of shock, or any sign of the seismic shift that extended from my brain and down through my body and deep into my own future. But that very moment, I came to the instant understanding that no matter who I worked for, I would always and only be working for myself (a conclusion that 20 years later would be echoed in the title of a book by Cliff Hakim, We Are All Self-Employed—or as my father’s Mexican students might one day be destined to read in their own round of dismissals, Todos Somos Autoempleados).

That was the moment that changed my life forever.

I laid myself off right then and there. Oh, I tried off and on throughout the ensuing years to go legit and get and actually keep a full-time job. But I kept returning to a truth that I understood at a most cellular level: The system is whack. Every time I depended on one source for my livelihood, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my own personal employment crisis was one decision away.

That was also the moment that handed me my own life’s assignment—to write about the world of employment. My father’s pain became my calling. I have since spent my career, the past 20 years especially, focusing on how people can marry their talents, passion, and sense of personal mission with truly sensible career management. Which puts me in an exquisitely perfect position to be the one to write this book.

At this point, for most of us, the actual concept of layoffs isn’t quite the sucker punch it was to my father’s generation. My generation and all of you who are younger have been exposed to layoffs, downsizing, rightsizing, and so on, in some way or another. Either your parents faced it, your friends’ parents, or your parents’ friends. Or your friends. Or you.

Unless you have been completely in denial, you know that there is no such thing as the job-for-life contract. Hasn’t been for decades. We come to this new world with the ironic advantage of knowing full well that the axe could fall, completely out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever.

Still, that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens to you or the ones you love, does it?

And this time, the lack of control and chaos seem to have ratcheted up several notches. As I write this Preface, the economy is in freefall, and the headline crawl at the bottom of my TV screen has just announced another loss of 240,000 jobs. Layoffs are everywhere, saturating communities or picking off individual households here and there while skipping over entire blocks.

And it’s impossible to track the craziness behind rounds of dismissals. Highly educated, high performers, even high producers are being shown the door. You know who you are. You’re the one who is educated; you tooled your skillset according to your passions and according to what all the magazines predicted would be the hot careers of the new century. You’ve been smart, you’ve been strategic, in every single step and decision you made in the construction of your career, your profession.

You knew your job, you loved your job. And you did it well. The system wasn’t supposed to play out like this, was it? But it did. And now here you are, holding this book in your hands. This book! Damn!

So what can you hope to get from these pages? A plan of action and understanding into how to build your entire life from here on out.

Getting laid off is more than just a career crisis. It touches every aspect of your life—your finances, certainly, your health, your emotional health, your relationships, your legal considerations, your future, your identity and self-esteem, even the future of your children and their ability to aspire to a happy life.

No one person can cover all this territory. Fortunately, over the past 20 years or so of writing about this stuff, I’ve made some very smart friends whose collective wisdom will give you the insights you need to take the next steps wisely. This book represents a gathering of some of the best minds in their respective fields. I have reached out to my network, and all my wonderful friends and expert contacts have in turn reached out to their networks. And together, we offer the best w...

Product Details

• Paperback: 187 pages
• Publisher: FT Press; 1 edition (February 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0137021143
• ISBN-13: 978-0137021147
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #929,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The daughter of a covert CIA operative, Martha grew up traveling the world and learning life's lessons from a man who was totally committed to his work. From those beginnings, Martha's own life's calling was set in stone -- to explore all the many ways people discover the work they love, land the jobs that they want, and, in turn, help make their companies successful.

Having spent the first part of her career as a journalist, she's now a consultant, speaker and author specializing in employee engagement and career management. She's especally excited about her new book, Rebound: A Proven Plan For Starting Over After Job Loss, and the forthcoming book, Unlock the Hidden Job Market, which she cowrote with the fabulous Duncan Mathison.)

She divides her time between Silicon Valley and Santa Fe, where she shares her honeysuckle-vine covered adobe writer's cottage with three cats, deadlines and a cherry red KitchenAid stand mixer. (Man cannot live on great jobs alone.)

Martha's work has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Time.com, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers around the United States.

Her books have been translated into Mandarin, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Which just goes to show that everyone wants to love their work.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some informative sections but most is just common sense, June 17, 2009

By 

Pavahotti (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss (Paperback)

(What's this?)

This book offers a lot of good advice about what to do when laid off. However, I am only giving it 3 stars for two main reasons: 1) The first third of the book is devoted to what you should do if you think you're in danger of being laid off. That's all well and good, but the title of the book is "Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over AFTER JOB LOSS." Most people picking up this book will already BE laid off. Indeed, although the advice in the first third of the book is useful, it's also very frustrating to read these chapters after one has ALREADY been laid off! (e.g. Part II, Chapter 5: "Financial: What to Do Before You Get Laid Off.") It's very likely that someone reading this book will have already been laid off, and probably didn't follow much of the advice for the pre-layoff, so the whole thing starts off on a rather irritating note.

The second reason I'm giving 3 stars is because the information in the rest of the book, while useful, contains no real epiphanies. The section on finances suggests that you control your spending. The section on landing your next job implores you to use social networking tools, be aggressive, ec. This is all common sense to most people looking for a job. Unfortunately, with the economy in the shambles it is, just following these common sense approaches barely gives you a leg up over the masses.

There are some gems in this book. I enjoyed the section about how to talk about your job loss in interviews -- that kind of thing will definitely come in handy. And the in-depth interviews with people who have lost their jobs and started over are enlightening. But these enjoyable, informative sections are just too few and far between for me to really recommend the entire book.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read before you are laid off (or in early stages), April 24, 2009

By 

Dr Cathy Goodwin (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss (Paperback)

Rebound is one of the best career books I've read in a long time. The author focuses on a single topic: getting laid off when you're in mid-career.

While some reviewers claim Rebound offers nothing new, I would say Rebound puts the information together in a compelling style that's easy to follow. Following the current trend in book publishing, she presents short, tightly organized chapters that answer very specific questions. What should you do when you anticipate being laid off? How do you handle the emotion? How do you deal with former colleagues?

Finney's advice is sound. Her chapter on networking is especially good. Most of my own career clients think "network" is a 7-letter word like some others I can't use in a review. They think of glad-handing and fake cheer. Finney's examples relate to my own clients: finding a new job from the source you least expected to deliver.

As another reviewer noted, Finney assumes that readers will want to get back on the horse (or treadmill, depending on your view). They will seek a new corporate job. I would never encourage anyone to stop searching. I sometimes recommend getting a temporary job just to pay the bills. But for some, self-employment can make more sense than pounding on pavements.

Another gap is the lack of reference to hiring help. While I agree with all Finney's suggestions to cut back financially, some people really need an objective outsider to assess their situation. Most career consultants charge $150 - $250 or more for a single hour (sometimes including follow-up and reading documents). But if a few hours can move your search faster by even a week or two, it's money well-spent. The key is to know how to choose your coach or consultant. A few tips wouuld have been helpful.

Definitely I'm going to recommend this book to my mailing list and my own clients.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Now is the Time to Prepare, Because Yes, It Really Can Happen to You!, March 15, 2009

By 

Jan Van Zant - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss (Paperback)

Chances are you know of someone, a family member, friend or neighbor who has recently been laid off. In my case, it was me. I just finished reading Rebound and recommend it to anyone who is going through a layoff or thinks it could happen to them, and especially if you think that it can't happen to you!

Not only is this book full of practical and inspirational advice, (addressing your feelings, fears, frustrations, finances and finding your next job), but each chapter ends with three action items: the best thing you can do, the worst thing you could do, and the first thing you should do. I recommend reading the appendixes and resources and suggested reading at the end of the book as well.