When One Door Closes..., Part 1

Back when I learned my Vice President position at Salem Hospital was being eliminated, I tried to see it as an opportunity.  Sure, it would be a little inconvenient not knowing where I would land for the next few months, but I was certain I would land in a good place, either as a Vice President again, or if I played things right, I might actually be able to leverage this change into a better job as a Chief Operating Officer or even a Chief Executive Officer of a smaller hospital somewhere.  So I decided to face the future as an opportunity in the making.  The question was what hospital would I land at, and in what capacity?  The idea of leaving hospitals altogether never entered my mind.  How could it?  You see, it wasn't that I "did" hospital administration for a living, I had "become" a hospital administrator. 

Salem Hospital

(Salem, Oregon)

My beloved career had become my identity and even though I hadn't realized it, I had become trapped......trapped in an environment where I had allowed my success or failure to be determined by others, by my boss, by the budget, by the decisions of people I really didn't even know on the Board.  And "their" decisions, whoever "they" were, had the power to determine not only who I was, but what I thought of myself and what I felt.  I can now see it was a place no one should ever go.  It was a place of utter helplessness.

So, when the message came that I was no longer needed at the hospital, a flurry of emotions rose to the surface.  "What do you mean?"  "Don't you remember it's me that gives 150% to this place, that works late, that volunteers to come in and serve the staff on Christmas Day, that has the highest employee satisfaction rates of any member of the senior leadership team?"  But what I quickly came to realize is it was indeed me, and all that other stuff, things a "loyal up and comer" does, really didn't matter.  The budget needed to be cut.  I had fallen out of favor.  My number was up and I was gone.  End of story.

As I left my office that last day, with my personal trappings neatly packed into three cardboard boxes, I left rejected but invincible.  I was determined this wasn't going to be the end of MY story.  And in fact, it wasn't.  It was only the beginning.

I'll tell you more of the story next time, but here's a visual preview of the final chapter.