The Layoff Leverage Plan

This plan is written for one specific woman: 12+ years in, senior IC to VP, the person leadership relied on when something mattered, and still laid off. If that is you, the most dangerous move right now is the reflexive one: rewriting your résumé tonight and mass-applying by the weekend. Speed without positioning sends senior women into roles that underuse them or recreate exactly what burned them out.

Work the three phases in order. Each one exists to protect something: first your judgment, then your evidence, then your options.

Days 1–30: Stabilize and protect your judgment

The first month is not a job-search month. It is a decision-quality month.

• Do the real runway math: severance, savings, partner income, COBRA or insurance costs, vesting and equity dates, tuition, mortgage. Write down the actual month pressure begins, not the month panic says it begins. Most senior women discover they have more room than fear told them.
• Handle the administrative layer on a deadline: severance review, benefits elections, unemployment filing, equity deadlines. Contained tasks, contained time.
• Separate the event from your value. The layoff is data about the company’s structure, not an objective review of your capability. Write the sentence: “The organization eliminated a role. It did not erase 15 years of work.”
• Draft your three-part narrative and practice it until it sounds factual, not defensive: what changed, what you built before the change, what you are targeting now.
• Tell your inner circle, the 5 to 10 people who saw your work, before you announce anything publicly. Ask each one: “What did you rely on me for?” Save the answers verbatim. That is the beginning of your evidence bank.

Days 31–60: Recover the evidence before you choose the title

Inside the company, everyone knew what you were worth. Outside it, your story has to carry itself. This month is for translation.

• Build a 10-problem inventory: the ten highest-value problems you have solved across your career. Not job duties, problems. For each: the outcome, the complexity, the judgment call, who you had to align, and the number or artifact that proves it.
• Find the through-line. A career that feels “all over the place” is usually a pattern nobody has named: bringing structure to ambiguity, rebuilding trust after damage, translating between technical and business teams. Name yours.
• Decide what the next move must protect: income and level, health and energy, time and flexibility, or growth. Rank them. Every option gets evaluated against the same list.
• Select one primary target lane and one adjacent lane. Only now do the résumé and LinkedIn get rebuilt, as positioning documents for that direction, not memoirs of the old company.

Days 61–90: Activate a system that does not consume your identity

An unstructured senior search expands to fill every waking hour and returns exhaustion. Run three channels on weekly output goals you control:

• 5 targeted relationship conversations with people who understand the problems you solve
• 3 thoughtful follow-ups
• 1 visible demonstration of expertise: a useful point of view, not influencer content
• 3 selective, well-positioned applications that meet your criteria at your level
• 1 weekly review: which channel produced information or movement, and what to adjust

Review the whole system at day 90. You cannot control how many offers appear. You can control whether you are running a search that positions you at your level, with your evidence, your language, and more than one viable option on the table.

Want this level of thinking applied to your specific career, decisions, and evidence? That is exactly what the private work is for.

See how we work together →