I decided to start my research at a local pub that had been the Friday night after work stop-off for many of the people who had worked at the factory.
When I arrived I bumped into Peter who used to be the trade union convenor at the factory. To my surprise he was very warm and clearly pleased to see me. He bought me a beer and told me his story.
Peter was a carpenter, a very skilled carpenter. He told me that he was very low when the factory closed and felt that he had let his members down because he had been unable to stop it happening. He said that during the months following the closure he did very little and couldn’t even bear to think about how to move forward. Then an aunt phoned him and asked for his help.
His aunt needed to fix a door and knew that Peter was good with his hands. She was pretty old and unsteady on her feet.
Peter told me that fixing the door was easy but that while he was at his aunt’s house he noticed that it was like most other dwellings, designed and arranged for someone who was reasonably fit and active.
He had loads of time on his hands and using his carpentry skills, he started playing with ideas for making his aunt’s home environment more conducive to her particular needs.
When I met Peter at the pub he described his new business in shaping home environments to support people with a range of disabilities. And he told me that he had been joined in his business by two of his former workmates at the factory.
Peter said that he had never been happier; he was also making an excellent living and was marrying his childhood sweetheart the following month. I got an invite!
I went to Peter’s wedding, as did many of his former colleagues at the factory. There was Sue who had worked in the stores. She was now managing a warehouse for a local builders merchant. Sue was with Ahmed who had gone back to college when the factory closed and his job as an accounts clerk disappeared and was about to qualify as teacher of English as a second language.
Arthur, a metal worker at the factory, had retired early when it closed but told me that he had fallen into renovating old cars, had never been busier and had just fulfilled a life long dream by buying a share in a 1929 Bentley racing car.
Peter insisted that I talk to David who had been a troublesome factory cleaner who I was about to fire when the dispute started. The problem with David was that he kept disappearing off the job to be found reading a book in some hidden corner of the factory site. David was about to have his first novel published by a major publisher. What a surprise and what a thrill!
I heard more of these stories and whether they were of major or more modest transformations or even stories about missing the past, it was very clear to me that almost all these people, who were so down as they filed past me in the village hall a year earlier, had moved on, in many cases to greater, sometimes much greater things.
I was an HR professional. I knew the theory, denial – resistance – exploration – commitment and so forth. My experience with Peter and his wedding guests brought the theory to life but added something much more profound: people often cannot see or realise their true potential when they are ‘protected’ by a secure working environment.
They experience their world as it is, with its conventions, rules and what appear to them to be very real boundaries. When life forces them to re-evaluate to survive, they often discover that they are much more than they thought.
Since this experience both as an HR professional and in other roles, I have helped many people to identify redundancy as a shock, of course, as a challenge most definitely but also as a fantastic opportunity to explore their true potential and move on to a new and more fulfilling future.
Other articles by this author:
- Career breaks, sabbaticals and personal transformation.
- Working longer and portfolio careers.
- How to: Give presentations that move people to action.
- How to: Understand what your people really think.
