Smile,

You are right that having to make tough decisions about people working for you is difficult. When AT&T split off Lucent, I was given the job of managing the company-wide systems for Lucent. The first thing I had to do was to work with the person who was given the similar job for AT&T to decide how we’d split those information system employees and which ones we’d let go. Letting people go was the hardest, but there were also people who were afraid to leave AT&T and go to work for Lucent. As it turns out, those people’s fears were unjustified but you couldn’t tell them that then. I still remember how my stomach hurt after those meetings. And after it was all done I had 1200 employees working in my area, some of whom were really afraid of the future. On the good side, times were exciting and it was thrilling to help put together a new company.

Judy