In 2022, Kalifa Oliver was riding high. She'd just been promoted to a vice president-level position at her company and had held a Zoom call with family members to celebrate the good news. 

Four months later, she was laid off.

Up until her abrupt, unexpected termination, she was a self-proclaimed "career girl," she says. Work was her life. It was a huge source of her happiness and validation.

Losing her job helped change her mindset, says Oliver, 41, an author, executive advisor and now the global director for employee experience at Ford who lives in South Carolina. She got her Ph.D. in organizational psychology from Clemson University in 2012.

In fact, the worst professional advice she's ever received, she realizes now, is that "work should be my whole life and I should be loyal."

Loyalty "is what I get from my marriage," she says. "It's what I get from my relationships." It's not what she should unquestioningly offer up to, or expect from, her employer.

Losing her job thrust Oliver into a crisis she didn't see coming. "I couldn't get out of bed. I had to go on a whole retreat, and then I had to realize [I] had an identity that was work, and somebody took the identity away," she says. "I met with my therapist, and she said, 'Who are you without a job?' And I couldn't answer her."

Today, Oliver recognizes that she's more than a title: She's a mom, a friend, a daughter, and a bit of a comedian in her own right. Though she's proud to be in her current role as an executive, Oliver doesn't let the job define her, and she doesn't put the company over her own happiness and well-being.

'It's disingenuous to tell your team that you're family when you're actually in business'

Plenty of American employees have an outlook similar to the one Oliver once had. About 4-in-10 workers who aren't self-employed say their job or career is extremely or very important to their overall identity, according to a 2023 report from Pew Research Center. For postgraduate professionals, that number increases to 53%.

This mindset can lead you to glean too much of your happiness and satisfaction from your 9-to-5, overwork yourself for the sake of the company, or stifle your own interests, goals and needs, Oliver says.

The "family" culture that some organizations pride themselves on can make this problem worse, Oliver says. While you may feel close to your boss or lean on your teammates for support, they aren't your family.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer learned this lesson the hard way. When he had to conduct Covid-era layoffs, Chesky told Adam Grant's "ReThinking" podcast in May 2024, he wrote a note to employees, saying, "I have a deep feeling of love for all of you." He later recognized he could have worded that better.

"I wrote that letter fairly quickly," Chesky told Grant. "I wrote what I felt and that's what I felt." These days, though, Chesky would frame his appreciation differently. The word "love" can make people think of their closest relationships, including siblings, children, and spouses. But "you don't fire members of your family."

As he acknowledged to Grant, "a company's not a family. In fact, we had to make that pivot."

Meyer originally prided himself on his companies' "family values," he said during a keynote at the Qualtrics X4 Summit on May 19. Then circumstances forced him to reevaluate.

"Sometimes, businesses have to exit people. When was the last time you fired a family member?" he said. Ultimately, "it's disingenuous to tell your team that you're family when you're actually in business. It's just not right."

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