Member-only story
The Whys and What Now of Being Jobless at Mid-Life
Unconventional advice for middle-age executives who are struggling to find a new job.
I’ve always been an observer and critic of society. It’s part of my nature. Now having entered mid-life (47) and seen so many people lose their jobs — and then struggle to re-enter the corporate world, I’ve made a few unconventional observations of my own.
Warning: what follows isn’t a pleasant pill to swallow if you are unemployed at mid-life. But it just might be the plain, hard truth you have to accept if you want to get back up on your feet.
First of all, don’t blame yourself. I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people — both competent and incompetent folks. But the common thread is this. If you’ve lost a mid to senior level position with an attractive paycheck in your 40’s or 50’s, chances are:
- You are a relatively nice person who gets along well with others.
- You’ve done well in your career and rose up the ranks over time.
- But… your life is relatively unremarkable and ordinary otherwise i.e. nobody’s gonna read your autobiography.
Nice guys don’t finish
Why are ordinary but nice people most likely to be retrenched?
Well, at mid to senior level, it is common for managers to be fired from cushy jobs with a handsome paycheck when there is a downturn in the company’s fortunes or internal politics and power struggle.
Most of the time the individuals who are cut loose are nice folks who rose up the managerial route. Over time they’ve become well-paid executives who did very little actual work but instead spent most of their time managing people, sitting in meetings and dealing with politics.
They supervise. They have experience. They delegate, and they get paid a lot more than the juniors who do the actual work of producing or selling. In other words, they’ve become a layer or two removed from the actual activities that generate revenue or cut costs. More often than not, if they had to do it themselves, they wouldn’t know how. They’ve lost touch with implementation and lost their execution capabilities beyond theory and talk.
