About Silver Linings
The Financial Case for Strategic Outplacement
Bridging the Gap: Business Reality and Human Dignity
You've spent years crafting a culture where people feel valued and safe. Your mission is the heartbeat your organization lives by. Your brand is built on loyalty and innovative solutions that empower people. Then the market shifts, a merger lands, and you're facing the reality every purpose-driven leader dreads: a restructure.
I've sat on the other side of that table. Twenty years running layoffs and choosing the outplacement vendors that were supposed to catch people on the way out. I delivered the news myself more times than I want to count. I know the version of you that's up at 2 am, running the numbers again, looking for a way to do this without losing what you built.
Here's what the research confirms. One layoff is followed by 2.2 additional resignations among the people who were chosen to stay, concentrated among people like the ones who left (Academy of Management Journal, 2023). And it's not the size of the cut that does the damage. It's how it's handled. Companies that keep investing in people through a layoff see productivity rise. The ones that pull back watch it fall by more than 20% (Academy of Management Journal, 2006).
You can protect your company's future and honor the people who helped you build it. Done right, the way you say goodbye becomes proof of exactly why your company leads in your industry. Your legacy of social impact stays intact, even in a season of change.
Ready to lead this transition with integrity? Book a discovery call, and let's talk about how.
Meet the team behind Silver Lining Strategy
Rachel MacDonald, PhD, Founder
Board Certified Life Coach, CareerCOACH
Rachel MacDonald brings more than 20 years of global HR leadership, executive coaching, entrepreneurship, and academic instruction to her work guiding leaders and professionals through transition. She founded Silver Lining Strategy after two decades of leading through change in organizations, and more importantly, leading self-change. She is based near Seattle.
She's held leadership roles within Fortive Corporation, Willow Technologies, ExecuScribe, and the Jewish Community Center of Rochester, specializing in leadership development, organizational design, and people strategy across culturally and geographically diverse teams. She's coached hundreds of professionals through career transitions, inclusive leadership, and psychological safety, and has designed and delivered executive coaching programs across those organizations.
A Certified CareerCOACH™, Rachel works with transitioning executives and pivoting professionals through her programs at Silver Lining Strategy. She's also graduate faculty at Park University, where she teaches Adult Learning and Organizational Leadership. She’s authoring Wounded at Work: Surviving the Bully, targeted for release in late 2026.
Rachel makes sure support doesn't end with the people who leave. She works directly with HR on strategy through a transition to support your employees who stay, helping them manage the stress of change from the inside.
Laura brings 15 years of Fortune 500 HR leadership experience and master's-level training in both business administration and clinical mental health counseling to her work, a rare dual perspective on career coaching. She helps professionals work through stress, change, and high-stakes decisions, while honoring how deeply work shapes identity, financial security, and emotional well-being.
Throughout her HR career, she's coached leaders through performance challenges, role expansion, organizational change, and career advancement, across industries including technology, advanced manufacturing, oil and gas, and real estate. She takes pride in helping clients build a life that actually matches their values.
Laura supports the employees who remain, helping them manage the stress of change from the inside, and your exiting employees as they build resilience & capacity for what’s next.
Mental Health Coach
Laura Handley, MBA
John Hildebrand is an organizational change strategist and executive coach, and founder of Hildebrand Consulting LLC in Kansas City. He holds a Master of Positive Organization Development and Change from Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management, serves on the faculty at Rockhurst University's Helzberg School of Management, and is a Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths coach and facilitator.
He supports senior leaders at mission-driven organizations through layoffs and restructuring, before, during, and after the transition, so performance holds and the people who remain find steady footing. His approach draws on strengths-based frameworks like Appreciative Inquiry and Intentional Change Theory, built around a model he developed called the Disruption Spiral: How organizations break down under pressure, and how leaders reverse it.
John works directly with your organizational leaders, guiding them and their teams through the process of minimizing internal disruption while culminating perspectives that can be hard to find from the inside.
Organizational Change Strategist
John Hildebrand
Andrea Edmondson
Executive Coach, Founder of NeuroSmart™
Andrea Edmondson is a leadership coach, keynote speaker, and educator based in the UK, with over two decades of experience in leadership development, nervous system science, and coach training. She holds a Master of Education and is the creator of the Capacity Before Strategy framework and the NeuroSmart™ coach training methodology.
Andrea helps leaders and organizations close the gap between where they are and what they're capable of, starting with the biological foundations that make real change possible. Her own experience of burnout shaped a central insight in her work: capacity is a structural challenge, not a motivational one. She's coached executives through high-pressure growth and organizational change, and trained coaches to bring that same science into their own practice.
Andrea works with your executive-level outplacement clients doing the nervous-system work that makes the rest of the transition possible.