Eighteen months after a supervisory board asked a listed industrial group’s CFO to step down, the internal note used four words: “mutual agreement, new opportunities.” Nobody in the trade press believed it, and she wasn’t in a position to say more. In the silence that followed, a different story took hold — a half-remembered rumor about a restatement that was never actually hers to own. She spent most of the following year correcting an account she never got the chance to tell first.
Two floors down, in the same building, a COO left the same year under arguably less flattering circumstances. She did something almost nobody advises in the first two weeks after an exit: she called five people — a former chair, two portfolio-company CEOs, one journalist she trusted — and told them plainly what had happened and what she was doing next. Nobody remembers the specifics of her departure today. They remember that she told them herself.
Same building, same year, same rank of seniority. Two entirely different outcomes. The difference wasn’t the exit. It was who got to narrate it.
A Phrase That’s Nearly Twenty Years Old
In January 2007, Harvard Business Review published a piece by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Ward with a line that has outlived almost everything else printed that month: “The leader’s fall from ‘Who’s Who’ to ‘Who’s that?’ is full of stigma and shame. But the story doesn’t have to end there” (Sonnenfeld and Ward, HBR). Sonnenfeld and Ward were writing about comeback — the steps leaders take after a very public fall. But the line has aged into something more useful than a comeback framework. It names a feeling almost every senior leader recognizes and almost none discuss out loud: the fear that leaving, however it happens, quietly erases who you were.
That fear isn’t a personal weakness or a sign of thin skin. It’s a documented, near-universal response to job loss, studied across decades and geographies. Researchers describe it consistently as loss of self-esteem, loss of status, and — the word that shows up again and again — shame, even among people whose departure had nothing to do with their performance (qualitative study on the psychological impact of unemployment). One study of unemployed adults found participants describing feeling “not good enough” and “embarrassed to be me,” language that shows up regardless of seniority or how the exit was framed on paper (peer-reviewed study on mental health and job loss).
Senior leaders aren’t exempt from this. If anything, the fall is steeper, because more of their identity was built in public. WiseForce has written before about the identity work that follows a departure — the disorientation of the neutral zone that sits between an old title and whatever comes next. What that piece doesn’t cover, and what deserves its own attention, is what happens in the world outside that inner process — the account that gets built, by someone, about why you left. That account, it turns out, matters more than most executives assume.
The Research That Actually Matters Here
A 2018 study in the Strategic Management Journal asked a sharper question than “are dismissed CEOs stigmatized?” It asked: under what conditions? The answer, based on a large sample of CEO dismissals, was specific. Stigma and its career consequences were not uniform. They spiked hardest, and reemployment odds fell furthest, when the public account of the dismissal questioned the executive’s character rather than pointing to circumstances — market conditions, a board disagreement, a strategic pivot (Schepker and Barker, Strategic Management Journal; summary via Strategic Management Society).
Read that finding carefully and it reframes the whole problem. The exit itself, in most cases, isn’t what does the lasting damage. The account of the exit is. And an account is not a fact — it’s a story that someone tells, and if the departing executive doesn’t tell it, somebody else will, usually with less generosity and less accuracy than the truth deserves.
This is also, quietly, good news. A widely cited study of 2,600 business leaders found that 45% had experienced a major professional setback, including being fired outright — and more than three-quarters of that group went on to become CEOs anyway (The Professional Guide, citing HBR research). The base rate of recovery is high. What separates the leaders who recover quickly from the ones who spend years undoing a false narrative isn’t talent or luck. It’s whether they treated the account of their departure as something to design, early, rather than something to survive.
Why Everyone Reaches for the Same Softened Language
If the account matters this much, it’s worth asking why so many departures are described in nearly identical, deliberately vague terms: “pursuing new opportunities,” “mutual agreement,” “stepping back to focus on family.” Fortune reported on this pattern directly, noting that companies increasingly avoid the word “firing” altogether, replacing it with softer alternatives specifically because of the stigma the word itself carries (Fortune). One survey found that 80% of business leaders admitted to describing a firing as a layoff, largely to protect morale and spare feelings (WROR survey coverage).
The intent is usually kind. The effect is often the opposite of what everyone hopes for. Vague language doesn’t neutralize a departure — it leaves a vacuum, and vacuums get filled. When nobody involved says anything specific, the people watching from outside fill in their own version, and their version tends to assume the worst, precisely because nothing was offered to contradict it. The CFO in the opening story didn’t lose ground because the company’s language was too harsh. She lost a year because it was too vague, and she wasn’t the one who filled the silence first.
The Instinct to Disappear, and Why It Backfires
Faced with that vacuum, the natural instinct for most senior leaders is to go quiet — to let the news cycle move on, to avoid saying anything that might be read as defensive, to wait until there’s better news to share. It feels dignified. It often isn’t strategic.
Silence doesn’t read as dignity to the people who matter most in a reputation-dependent career: search consultants, former board colleagues, journalists who cover the sector, the next chair who’ll eventually call a reference. To that audience, silence reads as either confirmation that something is being hidden, or as an opening for whoever speaks first — usually the company’s HR or communications function, whose job in that moment is to close the file cleanly, not to protect the departing executive’s story. WiseForce has documented what those first two weeks actually require in practical terms — legal review, severance terms, timing of announcements. The account of the departure belongs on that same list, on the same timeline, not as an afterthought handled once the shock wears off.
Managing the Account Without Overcorrecting
None of this means a departing executive owes the world a press release or a tell-all. The two contrasting stories at the start of this piece make the point cleanly: the COO who came out ahead didn’t over-explain or self-promote. She made five calls, gave a plain account to the people whose opinion would eventually matter, and let the facts — not a defensive campaign — do the rest.
That’s a materially different posture than either extreme most executives default to: total silence, or a scramble to control every mention of the exit. The middle path is deliberate, not reactive: decide early who the handful of people are whose account of your departure will actually shape what happens next, and make sure they hear it from you, in your own words, before they hear a version of it from anyone else.
The Story Doesn’t Have to End at “Who’s That”
Sonnenfeld and Ward were right in 2007, and the discomfort they named hasn’t gone anywhere in the two decades since. The fall from recognition to anonymity is real, and it is, for almost everyone who experiences it, full of a shame that has very little to do with what actually happened. But the research is equally clear that the shame is often disproportionate to the actual risk — and that the leaders who come out of it well are the ones who treat the story of their exit as something they design, not something that gets decided for them in the silence.
Facing a transition of your own and thinking about how the story gets told? See how WiseForce Advisors helps senior leaders manage this exact moment.
