For 9 years I worked for L Brands and just writing that sentence in past tense is strange for me. I didn't think I would work there forever (common wisdom was that nobody retires from L Brands), but still after that amount of time it is still strange for it to be over. I had worked worked in Pink MP&A, Store Operations and for the last 4 years in Finance. I was promoted twice (with the last promotion happening one year ago) and during my time I had seven different managers. The job gave me the opportunity to travel from from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean and see about 200 malls in between. I was there long enough to see our paternity leave policy change from nothing (for the birth of my first child) to two weeks (for the birth of my second child) to six weeks (which I didn't take advantage of). I was there for the rise and eventual (but certainly not complete) fall of Pink. I was there in 2015 when LB's stock reached an all-time high of $100, and I was there when during the middle of COVID it dropped all the way down to $8.
Unfortunately I am using past tense becausse I was part of the layoffs that impacted 850 of my coworkers. I knew there was a chance get let go during this round, but obviously I hoped for the best. I had been lucky to survive the great recession and then the layoffs at L Brands in 2016. I have worked for 3 large corporations for 15 years and it was my time for bad luck.
The layoffs happened obviously during the middle of a pandemic, so it had to be through Microsoft Teams. And it just so happened that it was when I was on vacation in Florida, which made it stranger. It all started with an email the night before announcing that 1) layoffs were happening tomorrow 2) people would get "transition meetings" on their calendar, which could mean anything from being let go to getting a new job or a new boss. I didn't sleep well that night - especially since I got a "transition meeting" for 11am. I thought (correctly it turns out) that an early morning meeting was bad because normally companies do layoffs first in the day. We also had an 8:30am meeting, where our department leader explained that yes layoffs were happening. (Thanks for compounding my lack of sleep with an early morning meeting that reinforced the thing we already knew.) So I listened in on the 8:30am call and then just waited. My family went to the beach. I waited. The "good" news is that at 11am I knew immediately that I was let go because the two people on the call (my HR partner and my boss's boss) both look very sad. I tried keeping my composure and asked the questions that I had just googled (it's not a good sign to be googling "what to ask if you are let go"). And then I went to the beach and tried to enjoy my time with my family and forget what just happened.
I wish I could say I handled it all well, but I had many sleepless nights rehearsing questions that would likely never be fully answered. Also, I had a brief panic attack after thinking about the challenges of finding a job during this job market. I'm not one of the people who believes "everything happens for a reason" and I was really struggling with the "why me" part of the layoffs. I had been doing a good job (again I was just promoted last year) and i worked in a critical area for the company. But eventually I picked myself up and started reaching out to contacts. It's not that I was sad about losing my job, but I still needed to try and find a new job.
Thankfully things seem to be working out on the job search standpoint. I recently accepted a Senior Manager of Testing role with DSW. I am thrilled for the role and the opportunity to build out my own team. It will be a new company with a new group of coworkers, but thankfully the role itself is familiar. I wish I had some big way of ending this, but I don't. There is no grand lesson, but a lot of smaller lessons I've learned through this whole thing. Those lessons will have to wait for another blog post.
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