Meet someone who survived a career near-death experience

We’re suddenly in tough economic times. What should you do if your job is threatened, or worse, if you lose your job? How do you survive a career near-death experience?

I promised last month to share an executive’s career near-death survival experience. Here it is.

I started my recruiting career at a big global executive search firm called Korn/Ferry International, in New York. But this story isn’t about me. It’s about a manager I had the good luck to work for, a Korn/Ferry partner named Cindy Cottman. Cindy had spent a decade as a successful search consultant in the firm’s London office, helping banks hire senior executives. In 1999 Korn/Ferry asked her to move to New York and switch into a management role over a team of junior recruiters that included me.

Cindy was a great boss. She was American, but she brought back from London the British custom of keeping champagne in the office fridge and breaking it out when we had something to celebrate, like a new client or a big executive placement.

Once we were getting stonewalled by Cindy’s boss on an issue that was important to our group, and Cindy sat down in his office in Los Angeles and refused to leave until she got answers. I don’t even remember what the issue was, but I remember how loyal we felt to her, for sticking up for us like that.

Korn/Ferry went though a tough time in the first years of this decade. We grew fast with the dot-com bubble, and when that went flat in 2000, our business started to fall off. 2001 was worse. The firm laid people off (including me, eventually) and reorganized our group to lower costs.

Cindy was reassigned from her management role back to being a search consultant. This put her in a very tough spot. Partner-level search consultants were expected to be the firm’s revenue producers, and they typically spent years building up their client relationships into a book of business, as Cindy had done in London. Suddenly she had high revenue targets again, but all the best clients and most promising prospects in the banking industry in New York were being handled by other partners, so she was shut out from pitching to them. She had to start over from scratch, finding new clients nobody else wanted, in a new city, in a recession, and fast.

Other partners were struggling to meet their billings goals, and some were quietly leaving the firm. Cindy was in a worse situation than most, and she was not expected to last long at the firm. But with smarts, hard work and luck, she survived and thrived. How did she do it?

Next month: How Cindy survived her career near-death experience, and the lessons she can teach us.