Let the decency of my father inspire you to save people’s jobs
My father died this past month. He was 95. Like so many these days, he died alone. He was in the hospital when his heart gave out.
His funeral wasn’t much of a service, just my three brothers and me. My 89year-old mother who lived with my father in an assisted living facility wasn’t permitted to attend.
It’s not easy only having 60 seconds to speak about someone who had such an impact on my life. For days I thought about the appropriate words. The many stories I wanted to share - a lifetime of wonderful memories.
In the end, I simply said he was a good man: A loving husband, a caring father and told how he dealt with losing his job at 59 years old. (I’ll come back to that.)
Two members
of the Army Honor
Guard were present. God bless them. They played taps, then folded the American flag that draped my father’s casket. In handing the flag to my brother, they noted it was a symbol of appreciation on behalf of a grateful nation. Then it struck me, those were the words I was searching for: “A Grateful Nation.”
The Greatest Generation served
My father served as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, earning a Bronze Star, and later as a lieutenant in the Korean War. He was one of those special people who made up The Greatest Generation, serving his country, coming home, completing his education and then spending his life working and raising a family.
Then, after working for 27 years with the same company, he lost his job after it was sold. Something about maximizing shareholder value. It was hard for him. Even harder for my mother. It took him more than a year to find another job, at a much lower position. But he never complained, like everything in his life, he handled it with dignity and grace. But it was hard.
You can save jobs at a critical time
This piece, though, is not about my father. It’s about asking those of us in management to please consider not laying people off during this pandemic. As a business school graduate, I understand the concept of shareholder value. If you are a public company, your stock price may suffer. Even if you are not, your reserves will be further depleted.
But if you have cash in the bank, if you reduce your own salary, and the salary of others, especially managers, you could save a lot of jobs at this critical time.
Leading an organization is certainly different than serving in a forward deployment overseas, or as an emergency room nurse, truck driver, first responder, or grocery store cashier, all of whom we realize today are heroes.
But if this is what we were created to do, to manage, to lead, then shouldn’t we respond with the same courage, with the same sacrifice as these heroes?
Isn’t this the least we can do for those who have sacrificed so much?
Your decency will be remembered
Maybe someday, possibly at our own funeral, some of our employees will recall that in 2020 we set aside the traditional business practices of streamlining operations and laying-off staff, in favor of keeping our people employed – especially our lower-paid employees for whom a job is everything right now.
And maybe they will even recall not only how grateful they were to have kept their jobs, but their sincere appreciation on behalf of a grateful nation.