iStock, Yutthana Gaetgeaw

A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with a biopharma executive who recently had to announce the downsizing of her team. Her own role was safe for the time being, but she was sure it was not for long. She told me her plan for moving forward. She was going to wait until every single person on her team landed somewhere new before she started looking for her own opportunity. It sounded noble. It sounded like the kind of leadership we say we want more of. It just wasn’t the right strategy.

She asked me if, as a recruiter, I’d ever seen a whole team, including the manager, land somewhere together, intact, like someone just cut and pasted the org chart onto a new company. I told her that was a nice thought, but nothing I had observed before. As much as her team might like to work together again, the chance of them all getting hired at the same new company was slim.

My answer disappointed her, and then she explained how much the downsizing was bothering her. She knew these people. She’d recruited most of them herself and gotten close enough to know about their families. She was fully aware of what was at stake for each person, and frankly, she was sick about it, so she wanted to make sure everyone was securely in a new role before she was.

I questioned her plan, asking her if waiting was really the loyal move, or whether getting herself placed quickly served her team better. A leader with a new seat can do something a leader still job-hunting can’t. She can open doors from the inside. The situation reminded me of a mother who wouldn’t serve herself a meal until everyone else at the table had eaten. It’s a loving instinct, but it’s also a losing one if she starves herself out of the one job opportunity that could feed everybody else faster.

I explained to the executive that there’s a name for what people feel when they survive a layoff: survivor’s guilt. Remorse sets in from still having a job when those around you don’t. What she had wasn’t quite that, though. I told her it was more like leader’s guilt. Though she had not decided the layoff, she’d had to announce it. Plus, she was the one who had recruited these people into the seats that just disappeared. In her mind, she had gotten them into this. She felt guilty for an outcome that was never hers to control. There was only one real fix for her leader’s guilt, and that was the one I mentioned above: Land somewhere where she could bring people with her.

I told her the term I hear people using in industry is “coat tailing,” where junior people ride the coattails of a strong leader from job to job. I think of it more like drafting, the way a smaller car tucks in behind a semi and rides in the pocket of air it clears. Most of her team had already done that when they had followed her into this job in the first place. The fastest way she could help them do it again was to find her own seat as soon as possible.

When I told her that, she admitted something else. She wasn’t emotionally ready to interview with another company. I told her that made sense. It’s the same as when someone loses a dog, and a well-meaning friend says, “Just get a new puppy.” It’s almost like she was grieving the death of something she loved. Not just her team, but the company itself, the one she’d poured years into, the one that didn’t really exist anymore, not the way she’d known it.

However genuine those feelings were, I explained that grieving doesn’t mean putting life on pause. She could work through those feelings while building whatever came next. She didn’t have to wait to interview until she felt ready. The guilt and the grief didn’t have to resolve first. Moving forward was the fastest way to help the people she wanted to help.

I added a balancing statement, that even if she started looking for herself first, it was no guarantee she would land before everyone else. It could happen, but it was unpredictable. Executive interview processes take longer than individual contributor searches. Who would get a job first, them or her, remained to be seen, but at least she would put herself in a position to get a role and let her former team coattail.

Before we hung up, I said it simply: Don’t wait. I encouraged her to go after her next role with everything she had while also helping her former team with calls and introductions. Action would ease guilt and grief. And, if she landed somewhere new that could also employ people from her old team, she would have done right by herself and by those hoping to work with her again.