Your Role Was Disestablished. Not You.

The letter uses careful, procedural language. "Your position has been disestablished." It is, on paper, about the role, not the person. But almost nobody reads it that way in the first 48 hours. What most people hear is something closer to: you weren't worth keeping.

That gap — between what redundancy actually means and what it feels like — is where a lot of unnecessary damage gets done. Not by the company. By the story we tell ourselves in the weeks afterwards, usually alone, usually at 2am.

After fifteen years in recruitment, I've sat on both sides of this. I've been in the room when roles were disestablished for reasons that had nothing to do with the person in them — a restructure, a lost contract, a function moved offshore, a budget line that simply stopped existing. And I've talked to those same people six months later, once the shock wore off, who could finally say: "I know now it wasn't about me. It just didn't feel that way at the time."

What Redundancy Actually Is

A genuine redundancy is a decision about a role, driven by the organisation's structure or finances — not a performance judgement on the person who held it. That's not a comforting platitude; it's the legal and practical basis for redundancy in New Zealand. If a role is disestablished, the position itself has to genuinely no longer be needed, regardless of who was in it.

Which means the honest, if uncomfortable, truth is this: a good, capable, hardworking person can absolutely be made redundant. Being made redundant is not evidence of anything about your competence. It's evidence that a role stopped existing.

Why It Doesn't Feel That Way

Knowing that logically and feeling it are two different things, for a very ordinary reason: most of us build a chunk of our identity around what we do. When the role goes, it can feel like part of you went with it. Add in a mortgage, a family depending on that income, and a market that feels harder than it used to — and it's no wonder the brain reaches for the most personal, most painful explanation available.

This is where I see people get stuck. Not because they can't find another job eventually — most do — but because they spend months operating from a story ("I wasn't good enough") that was never actually true, and it quietly shapes every decision that follows: which roles they apply for, how they talk about themselves in interviews, whether they aim for something better or just something safe.

The Tell: Listen to How You Explain It

If you catch yourself explaining your redundancy with a slight apology — "well, I probably should have seen it coming" or "I guess I wasn't bringing enough value" — that's the personal story talking, not the facts. The factual version usually sounds much more boring: "the team was restructured" or "the function was centralised." Boring is accurate. Apologetic is usually fiction.

What Actually Helps in the First Two Weeks

Redundancy support tends to focus on the practical — and the practical does matter. Understand what you're entitled to (notice period, any redundancy compensation, outstanding leave), get that in writing, and don't rush to sign anything you haven't had time to properly read. If you're unsure of your specific entitlements, Employment New Zealand is the right place for the facts — this article isn't legal advice, just a place to start thinking clearly.

But the practical checklist isn't the part that actually determines how the next six months go. The decision underneath it is: what do you do with this, now that it's happened? That's a different question from "what's my CV look like" or "how fast can I get another job." It's closer to: is this the moment to do the same thing again, somewhere else — or the moment to ask whether the same thing again is actually what you want?

Separating the Facts From the Story

A useful exercise, if you're in the middle of this right now: write down, plainly, what actually happened. Not how it felt — what happened. "The team was reduced from six to two. My role was one of the four removed." Then write down the story you've been telling yourself about it. Read them side by side. Usually the gap between the two is enormous, and usually the story is doing all the damage the facts never claimed to do.

This isn't about pretending it doesn't hurt. Losing a role you were good at, worked hard in, and maybe even loved is a genuine loss, and it's allowed to feel like one. The point isn't to skip the feeling. It's to stop the feeling from quietly rewriting the facts into something crueller than what actually happened.

The Real Question Isn't "What's Next" — Yet

Most redundancy advice jumps straight to the CV, the LinkedIn profile, the job search. Useful things, eventually. But if you skip straight to "what's next" before dealing with "what was that, actually," you risk carrying an inaccurate story straight into your next interview — and it shows. Hiring managers can tell the difference between someone who left a role that ended and someone who thinks they were personally rejected. One presents as ready. The other, understandably, doesn't.

So before the CV, before the applications, it's worth thirty minutes of honest thinking: what actually happened here, what does it mean about the role (not you), and what do you actually want the next chapter to look like — not what you feel obligated to do because it's what you did before.

The Bottom Line

Your role was disestablished. That's a fact about a position on an org chart. It is not a fact about your worth, your competence, or your future. The organisation made a structural decision. You get to make a personal one — about what happens next, and on what terms.

That's a different kind of decision to "just get another job as fast as possible." It's worth treating it that way.