The Identity We Borrow

When I was six years old I remember finding out from my parents that my dad had been laid off. Working as a physician, he split his time between two hospitals. When one institution laid off their part-time physicians and the second didn’t have the budget to bring him on full-time he came home and told our family what had happened. He had 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 I could tell this cut deeply. 

Years later after he had pivoted, gone to business school, and built an impactful business consulting hospital administrators and physicians on how to collaboratively improve clinical and financial outcomes, I asked him if he missed working full-time in a clinical setting. I’ll never forget his response. “In medical school we were told 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 experience with a layoff. After years invested with my last company and having been a part of the reduction in force process in my HR roles many times over, the tables turned and I was on the other side of the table (or Zoom for that matter).  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? Did I not show the impact of our team’s work well (or often) enough? were circling in my head. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me, thinking about the late nights I had spent in front of my laptop, and the sacrifices I had, albeit willingly, made to finish one more slide deck and respond to one more employee. I took pride in the fact that I worked at a company people knew and used as a verb. The coaching calls I had with leaders made me feel like I was helping to influence the organization brick by brick. But, I wonder how much of my self-worth I’d handed over to my employer without realizing it. Looking back, I realize I wasn't just grieving a job. I was grieving an identity I'd spent years building.

Over the past several 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's almost always, What does this say about me?

Somewhere along the way many of us quietly begin measuring our worth by our company's opinion of us. We mistake being valued by an organization for being valuable. But, those are two very different things. Organizations aren't families or lifelong commitments. They're institutions with changing priorities. When we expect them to give us identity or permanence, we're asking them to do something they were never designed to do.

The strongest leaders build an identity that can survive those changes. An organization can validate our leadership, but it cannot create it. When that validation disappears, our leadership, if rooted in who we are rather than where we work, doesn't have to disappear with it. 

My dad passed away in 2015 after an 11-month battle with Stage 4 Cancer, and 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? Was the layoff the push he needed to pivot and make an impact in a way that aligned more with his values? I often wonder if the pivot to business school and founding of 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 think about my dad often. Not because he was laid off, but because he eventually discovered that losing one identity made room for another. One rooted less in prestige but more rooted in purpose, ultimately helping him to become far more aligned with the person and leader he wanted to become.

When I was six years old I thought my dad lost something, but looking back I know he found it.