One ending, one beginning
Sixteen years ago, I walked into my boss’s office for our regular Monday morning meeting and saw Sharon from HR sitting there. It took me about three seconds to realize what was happening. I had just finished laying off someone on my own team as part of a reduction in force, and now it was my turn.
I remember chuckling and saying, “I don’t think this is going to be a great meeting. For me.” It wasn’t. They told me my role was being eliminated and rolled into my second-in-command, walked me through the package, and gave me a couple of days to wrap things up. I nodded like a professional, took it all in, and then went back to my office and called Sheila in a bit of a tizzy. She didn’t hesitate. “We’ve handled tougher things than this,” she said. “And hey, you’re the resilience guy. Now you get to prove it.” She was right, although I didn’t fully appreciate it in the moment.
In the weeks that followed, I found myself doing something I didn’t expect. I kept looking backward. It had only been five years, but they were five intense years at Pittsburgh’s largest healthcare system, and a lot had happened in that short period. The thing I kept coming back to was the smoke-free campus initiative.
I can still picture the moment it clicked. I was walking up to the main hospital entrance when, right outside the emergency room doors, patients, physicians, nurses, and staff were standing, smoking. You had to walk through it just to get inside. I remember thinking, ” How can this possibly make sense? From there, it became one of those issues that sounds obvious until you actually try to change it. We brought in everyone: hospital administration, physicians, nurses, staff, patients, and visitors. It was messy, political, and slow, the kind of change that looks simple from the outside but isn’t once you get into it. But we got it done, and I was proud of it. There were other things I could point to from those years, but that one stayed with me.
What surprised me was that after a while, none of that reflection actually helped. The work mattered, and I was proud of it, but replaying it didn’t move me forward. There’s only so far you can go looking in the rearview mirror before you realize you’re not getting anywhere new. At some point, I had to stop asking whether it mattered and start asking what it said about me.
What I needed wasn’t more proof that my work had mattered. I needed to remind myself that if I could do that, there was plenty else I could do. That turns out to be a very different exercise. The smoke-free campus wasn’t just a result I could point to; it was evidence of how I operate when something is difficult, unclear, and a little uncomfortable. That’s the part that travels with you when you leave a role. Not the title or the organization, but what you actually did and how you went about doing it.
Over time, my work shifted into corporate consulting, leadership development, and succession planning, and I found myself spending more and more time with people in transition. Those moments are interesting because most of us try to get through them as quickly as possible. We don’t spend much time sitting with them or asking what they might be trying to show us. I understand those moments differently now, not because I studied them, but because I lived one.
When I sit with someone who’s been pushed out, or is stepping away, or simply knows something is changing without being sure what comes next, we don’t start with strategy. We start by separating what they’ve done from what they’re still capable of doing. Those aren’t the same thing, but they often get tangled together, especially when something ends abruptly.
Last year, I ran into the CEO who had overseen our division back then at a charity event for the Women’s Center and Shelter, where I serve on the board. She had been a strong supporter of the organization for years and was getting ready to retire herself. We had crossed paths many times over the years, usually just a quick hello and a brief update. This time, I walked over to her table with a little more intention. I congratulated her, thanked her for her support of the organization, and told her I wanted to thank her for two personal things.
First, she was responsible for bringing us to Pittsburgh, and we’ve come to love this city. Second, she was the one who fired me.
She paused for a second, not quite sure where I was going with that. I told her that losing that job had forced me to find the work I’ve found so satisfying over the past fifteen years, work that fits me better and that I probably wouldn’t have stepped into if things had continued the way they were. She smiled, a little surprised, and gave me a quick hug. It wasn’t a dramatic moment, just a brief exchange at a crowded event, but it felt like I had completed a circle.
Not everything that ends is a loss. Some things just take time before you understand what they made possible.
Thanks for sharing your comments, observations, and experiences with your successes.
P.S. If you or your organization is in one of those moments right now, where something has ended, and you’re trying to figure out what comes next, don’t rush past it. There’s probably more there than you realize. Let’s get together and talk about it over a cup of coffee and see what comes of it.
