"up In The Air" Crashes

For those of you who are movie buffs and recently watched the Oscars, one of the Best Picture nominations was for a film called "Up in the Air" starring George Clooney. While the acting was quite sound, I have to confess to happiness that it did not win best picture. Why? Because, for anyone who has ever been involved in the process of letting employees go, the premise was so objectionable and so unrealistic that I found myself totally distracted and non-engaged.

George Clooney plays the part of a consultant who gets hired to fire people (sometimes on mass). Rather than the incumbent manager ( and/or associated HR staffers) within an organization stepping up to the direct responsibility for one of the most sensitive and life-altering communications imaginable, the duty is farmed out to a third-party consultancy. Worse yet, the consulting company, in an attempt to become more operationally efficient , starts experimenting with video chat as the communications platform for these dismissals versus in-person meetings.

Now movies are movies but this was passed off as a real-life drama. Please tell me none of you ,nor anyone you know, has ever fired or let go of an employee deploying a 3rd party consultant to communicate the dismissal news?

In this day and age, with a weak economy, and unemployment high, the fact is that many companies are forced to reduce staff. Great companies however, handle these dismissals with the kind of sensitivity and caring that would motivate the best of these employees to boomerang back into the company if the opportunity were to present itself in more stable times. Other than the death of family and friends, there may not be a more heart- wrenching or stressful moment than the loss of job and financial security. As a manager, if you don't dread those conversations, you don't deserve to be a manager. And as a manager, if you are not courageous enough to even be the communicator of your decision-making, you have no business being in the business of managing people.

As for the notion of firing someone over a video monitor, as an employee of a company employing that tactic, I'd say "hallelujah, I'm gone". If that is the methodology of choice, I wouldn't want to spend another day at that god forsaken would-be workplace.

Finally, although the film only dealt with the devastation of job loss from the perspective of the people let go, it completely side-stepped another critical aspect of the collateral damage caused by layoffs...and that is the fragile mindset of the employees who remain in their jobs. Of critical importance in any communications game plan is what is said to the remaining employees in the aftermath of a layoff. Those words can make or break an organization's future productivity.

Oh well, it wasn't a documentary thank god.

By: Barry Briggs

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Barry Briggs is a Principal at Jackson Hole Group, a San Francisco-based executive consulting firm. Prior to Barry joining Jackson Hole Group, he was President & COO of CNET Networks. Prior to serving CNET Networks, Barry was President of ZDNet, the interactive division of Ziff Davis Inc., the leading publisher of technology-focused magazines.