There's No Long Term Future for You Here

My Story Part 1 - recovering, reinventing and rebuilding

Photo by Patrik László on Unsplash

Regardless of your career path or industry, at some point things may come to an abrupt and unexpected end.

Sometimes you see it coming and are half expecting that conversation or others, it can be a bolt out of the blue that shakes you to your very core and leaves you questioning everything you ever thought you knew about yourself.

It’s not pleasant, its humbling and can be downright scary.

If you happen to be in your home country with lots of familiarity around you, the recovery and rebound can be fast and relatively straightforward.

If you happen to be living as an expat as I was, it can be a very different story.

Firstly, there is the question of can I find a new job or how do I find a new job?

Can I get my old job back?

How long do we have before we need to leave the country?

What about schools, and the children and their friends?

Whatever the circumstances that made you arrive at that particular moment in time, it can be a wholly terrifying and unsettling experience.

If you have been overseas for any period of time and while home life may seem to have stood still with the same friends, sitting in the same bar, drinking the same drink, talking about the same things, work life and your industry marches on relentlessly as if you were never there.

People and contacts get promoted and move on to their own new roles or perhaps new companies.

Your old job has already been filled by an excellent candidate, closing off that escape route.

The safety net that you once had to depend on, seems to have shrunk or vanished entirely.

All this happened to me and it sucked big time.

My story goes like this.

One day, I received an email from my then boss asking to meet me at the need of the day. She was heading to the office from Taiwan where she was based.

While this should have set off alarm bells in my head, it did not. I was perfectly at ease as only 48 hours before I had been reminded to make sure that my registration was complete for the upcoming internal Advanced Leadership Program that the company was running for its Senior Leaders.

The first hint that something was amiss was when I stepped into a meeting room, to be met by my boss and a representative from HR and was immediately told that, “there was no long-term future for me in this organization.”

The shock was immediate and intense and left me struggling for words.

My crime, she went on to elaborate was that that she had been told, (I still have no idea by who), that I had an interview with another company and that “they,” senior management weren’t happy about that and I was considered disloyal.

I was then presented with a severance agreement which I had 24 hours to agree to or I would receive nothing. I was then asked to leave and to return the next day with the agreement executed to finalize my departure.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well that night.

The following morning, reality had started to sink in and after a quick signature on a dead of release, that particular part of my career was abruptly over.

Hind sight though is a powerful thing and there are many things that I learned from this experience that I’d like to share.

1. First and foremost, keep calm and your emotions in check. With a clear head, you can make balanced and thoughtful decisions. By not loosing your temper or cool, you can greatly influence the outcome of the conversation. Simple, but certainly not easy.

2. Remember you have rights. Certainly these differ from country to country, but in most, the employee has far greater protection than the employer. Its more than a good idea to understand these way ahead of time as a “just in case,” so that you the have confidence to draw on and manage in the moment.

3. Seek legal advice. This goes without saying, especially if you are in a senior role and have these contacts already in place. In my case, I failed totally in this regard and was lucky that I received what I was entitled to. The situation could though have ended so very differently.

4. Check your work permit and immigration status. It’s not always that you need to immediately leave the country. You will often have a period of time to seek out a new sponsor. Each country is different in how it treats terminated work permit holders and in my case here in Hong Kong, I was fortunate that mine had just been renewed long enough to take me beyond the seven year requirement of permanent residence.

5. Don’t be afraid to ask for more. In all likelihood your employer wants this to all go away as quickly and as quietly as possible too. Asking for an extra month of two’s compensation is likely to be a small price to pay for an employer skirting the margins of legality when the alternative are significant legal expenses. Ask yourself, what’s the worse that can happen?

A difficult employer and especially a weak line manager will rely on the “shock and awe,” approach.

They know that in your moment of vulnerability, the risk of nothing is a huge motivator for action, especially when a family is involved.

It’s hard, but in my experience, it’s important to resist this, politely and professionally remove yourself from the meeting and call your lawyer.

Be polite, be professional and hold your head high.

It was now time to take stock and think what next.

It was time to dust myself off and move forward and find a new adventure.

To be continued……