Eleanor Clitheroe recalls feeling numb, disoriented and barely able to comprehend “what was coming down” five years ago, when she was fired from her post as chief executive officer of Hydro One in a controversy over expenses.
“It was an awful feeling … a hollow feeling … realizing what I had thrown so much effort into was now finished and over.”
Ms. Clitheroe's distress was amplified by the public nature of her firing. However, she adds, anyone who is suddenly fired or laid off is likely to be swept up by the same tsunami of emotions.
“There's a sense of loss of control and embarrassment, and a question of self-worth,” says Ms. Clitheroe, who tells her story in a podcast recently posted on the website of Ottawa-based coaching firm, CareerJoy (www.careerjoy.com).
Ms. Clitheroe, who is now an Anglican priest, said in an interview this week that her aim in doing the podcast was to help others adjust to life after a job loss.
“Whether it is public or otherwise, people will be very severely and strongly impacted by it,” says Ms. Clitheroe, who sold her $2-million home after she lost the top job at Hydro One and moved with her family into married students' quarters at the University of Toronto, where she studied theology.
Alan Kearns, founder and head coach of CareerJoy, says a layoff is one of the most traumatic events an employee can experience – and it makes no difference whether the person is a front-line worker or a top executive. (Although, from a number of negative e-mails he has received about the half-hour-long Clitheroe interview on his website, it is apparent there is far less sympathy for fired CEOs than for average working Canadians who have lost their jobs, Mr. Kearns concedes.) Still, he says, Ms. Clitheroe's story is instructive in terms of how to deal with the emotional trauma of a layoff, how to figure out what to do next, and how to “move on.”
To recap: Ms. Clitheroe, who initially trained as a lawyer, worked in senior roles at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and as a deputy finance minister with the Ontario government before moving to Hydro One, where she was appointed CEO in 1999, with a mandate to take the power transmission company private – a mandate that was later reversed as a result of changing political priorities. In June, 2002, the entire board of directors resigned in a power struggle with the provincial government over executive compensation. Shortly thereafter, Ms. Clitheroe was fired – with no severance – from her $2.2-million-a-year post and publicly castigated for her expenses, which allegedly included $330,000 in limousine services over three years.
Arguing that her controversial perks and expenses had been approved by the former chairman of Hydro One – in part to help her juggle her dual roles as CEO and the mother of two young children – Ms. Clitheroe launched a wrongful dismissal suit against the company. The case is still before the courts.
It was a hard fall from the top, says Ms. Clitheroe, who set about reassessing priorities and putting her life back together.
The job, she realized, had consumed most of her waking hours, to the detriment of her family life. And even if she had wanted to lead another company, “it was very clear that I wouldn't have the opportunity to do another significant job like that, at that time, in Corporate Canada … because of the controversy that was raised at that time,” says Ms. Clitheroe, whose wrongful dismissal case is still before the court.
