Towards a Strategy for Helping Redundant and Retiring Managers

During the recent recession redundancies and early retirements of managerial and professional staff have mounted astronomically. Although some of the reductions in staff represent &dquo;house cleaning&dquo; which the affected organisations have put off for some years, there is every indication that the problem will become chronic and will remain with us for the foreseeable future. In this paper I shall present a conceptional framework for planning help for those facing redundancy and retirement and review some concrete approaches which have proven useful elsewhere or which appear promising. I take the point of view that planning to help redundant and retiring managers is a behavioural problem. This by no means implies that economic and administrative aid and the provision of concrete information is not an important part of the helping process. From the point of view of the affected individual, however, redundancy and retirement are events which affect the individual’s life patterns extremely deeply. It is not rare for them to cause traumas and dislocations from which the individual never completely recovers. Help which does not recognise the depth and pervasiveness of the impact of these events must necessarily be superficial and quite possibly misguided.