Dise & Company once got a call from a client in Boston late on a Wednesday afternoon. They had scheduled a termination of their GM the next morning, an “emergency” based on a key customer visit the same day. They really needed support. That evening, we met the HR manager at the airport in Boston. Looking relieved, she said, “For a moment I had the terrifying thought that I would have to do this deed without Dise.” The GM had been there for 18 years and was known to have a temper. The client trusted us to carefully bring calmness and sanity into a potentially explosive situation. No one knew how he’d react, but after more than 8,000 individual outplacements, we have developed a feel for how to best handle situations of this nature. At 7:30 the next morning we were with the HR leader and the CEO, and when we left, the affected employee was ready to move forward with a new career direction and the workplace remained calm.