The Identity We Borrow

When I was six years old I found out my dad had been laid off. He was a physician who split his time between two hospitals. When one institution laid off their part-time physicians and the other didn't have the budget to bring him on full-time he came home and told our family what happened. He developed a thick skin over his lifetime, having been through a divorce in his late twenties, cancer in his early thirties, and experienced antisemitism his whole life. But even as a six-year-old kid, I could tell this cut deeply.

He decided to pivot his career entirely and took the GMAT on standby because someone didn’t show up for their exam that day. He earned his MBA and built an impactful business consulting hospital administrators and physicians on how to collaboratively improve clinical and financial outcomes. Years after his layoff I asked him if he missed practicing medicine full-time and I will never forget his response. He said, “In medical school we were taught to follow a certain track, and when you follow that track you never think there will be a day when the hospital doesn’t love you back.” But what they didn’t teach in medical school was that the relationship was never meant to be reciprocal.

I recently had my own version of that lesson. After years invested at my last company and after sitting on the HR side of countless layoffs, the tables turned and I was on the other side of the Zoom screen. My dad’s words, “...when the hospital doesn’t love you back” kept ringing in my ear.

Thoughts like, how did I let this happen? Was I not visible enough? Did I not show the impact of our team’s work well (or often) enough? I thought about the late nights in front of my laptop or all the times I willingly stayed online to finish one more slide deck or to respond to one more employee. I took pride in the fact that I worked at a company people knew and used as a verb. I loved helping leaders through difficult situations and I loved feeling like I was contributing to something bigger than myself. But, looking back I can see I wasn’t just grieving a job. I was grieving an identity I had spent years building.

Over the years I’ve coached leaders through reorganizations, promotions, layoffs, acquisitions, and moments where the career they thought they were building suddenly shifted beneath them. What surprises me is that regardless of title, the first question is rarely: what should I do next? It is almost always: what does this say about me? 

Somewhere along the way many of us start measuring our worth by our company’s opinion of us. We confuse being valued by an organization with being valuable. But, organizations aren’t families or lifeline commitments. They’re priorities, leadership teams, budgets, and goals change quickly and often. When we expect them to give us identity or something permanent, we are asking them to do something they were never designed to do.

What I’ve seen though is that the strongest leaders can build an identity outside of those changes. An organization can validate our leadership skills, but it cannot and should not create it. If our leadership is rooted in who we are rather than where we work, our identity doesn't have to disappear with it. 

My dad passed away in 2015 after an 11-month battle with Stage 4 cancer. As I mature in my career there are many questions I wish I could ask him. In particular, was the original path he followed to be a well-respected surgeon and researcher one he actually wanted or was the layoff the push he needed to pivot and make an impact in a way that aligned more with his values and interests? I often wonder if the pivot to business school and founding his own company was the ticket to the balance and fulfillment he later found, which helped him show up stronger as a husband, father, son, and brother.

These days, when I coach leaders through unexpected change, I often think about my dad. Not because he was laid off, but because he eventually discovered that losing one identity made room for another: one less rooted in prestige but more rooted in purpose, ultimately helping him become more aligned with the person and leader he knew he could be. When I was six years old I thought my dad lost something, but looking back I know he found it.