Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations

7.7. Two Denial Traps

For reasons of psychological comfort, short-term orientation, and a need to displace their anxiety with any form of action regardless of its value, managers often deny the reality of what is going on around them. I call these denials traps because they are short term, illusionary, and trap the managers into taking actions that will not help them or their organizations increase the odds of survival. Here are two examples.

7.7.1. Denial Trap 1: Spurious Self-Actualization

A medical technologies firm whose specialty medical device had captured a large percentage of a narrow market niche had grown from fewer than thirty to just over five hundred employees in less than six years. At about the same time as the competition caught ...