How to Keep Your Job in a Tough Competitive Market

Michael J Kitson, Bob Calandra

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781440519956
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Mergers, outsourcing, and downsizing are the order of the day—and tomorrow as well. And employees everywhere now live in fear of layoffs. In this no-nonsense career guide, HR experts from the front lines demonstrate how to become invaluable at work and fend off a pink slip. The authors explain how to:

• Make yourself and your contributions visible
• Stay aware of trends, anticipate change, and adapt
• Acquire a reputation as a positive team player
• Become the "go-to" person

It is possible to weather the storm that's swiftly tearing through every industry in America. With this book, you get an insurance policy to you them hold onto you paycheck and remain gainfully employed!

Part I

Create Your Brand
and Build Your Career

Every product has a brand. The most popular and financially successful brands, however, are those whose names become synonymous with a particular product. Think about it. When people need a tissue, they ask for a Kleenex. And copying a document is referred to as Xeroxing. And when kids want gelatin, they ask for Jell-O.

As an employee, you want to become your company’s Jell-O, especially when the flavor of the day is Unexpected Falling Economy. You want everyone in the company, from the executive above you to the newest intern, to know that you are the person to go to when it comes to particular aspects of your job.

“Brand is different than just talking about what your job is,” Philip Berry, managing principal of Berry Block and Bernstein LLC, a New York consulting firm. “You can have five people who are doing the same job. But if an individual is focused on creating their personal brand, then they are identifying the unique ways they contribute to the organization in a way that others don’t.”

Several ingredients go into creating your brand. The first is patience. It takes time, hard work, and slavish attention to detail to develop a unique brand. But all the effort of developing, cultivating, and marketing your brand is well worth it because your brand, in a down economy, can help save your job in bad times. How? By setting you apart from your coworkers. Your brand tells an employer that you possess a certain value that is different from what every other employee brings to the company, even among a group of people performing the same or similar jobs. Decide what you want your brand to say about you and then get started creating it.

Establishing your brand is important for several reasons, not the least of which is that it provides a solid foundation upon which to construct your career. Building a career is not unlike building most other things. You start by determining your goal. Say you are building a house. You begin with the style of house you want. Then you sketch out a plan that details each section of the final product, including the decorating touches. Once that is accomplished, it’s time to lay the foundation, followed by constructing the structure’s frame. Then come the walls and roof. Next, it’s time to work inside on the plumbing and the electrical. Finally, the drywall goes up, and the flooring goes down. Add some paint and decorations, and the house is finished.

You can follow the same plan for building a career, beginning with what you want to do, and where you want to be when the journey ends. But instead of using wood and nails, and drywall and spackle, the materials you will use to build a career are contacts and conversations.

“Sit down and have a conversation with key people around the organization,” says Roy Roper, president of the Delaware-based Roper Consulting Group. “That includes your boss. Explain what you are trying to do, and seek their advice. You are going to learn some things. But people are also going to have the opportunity to learn about you, which gets you some visibility.”

Don’t limit your conversations to the executives above you, Roper says. Find out who the key people are inside the organization and seek out their counsel. Ask them how they built their careers and what ideas and recommendations they have for you. The goal, Roper says, is to gain the perspective of people who have launched, and are maintaining successful careers.

“In those conversations, I think it is important for you, as the one seeking information and looking to build a career, to be strategic and ask what, if anything, you can do for that person. From a career-building standpoint, that is a smart political move, and it may get you exposure to some of the types of things that could help support building your career.”

All right, it’s time to forge your brand and pull out the schematics and start building your career.

1. Come in Early and Stay Late

Arriving late to work is never a good idea. But when a business is floundering, sauntering in late or leaving work early makes you stand out as a target for an employer looking to trim payroll. When a company is in trouble, employers notice the little things, like who shows up early and who bolts for the door like an Olympic sprinter at quitting time. To keep your job during a down cycle, reinforce your brand as a hard-working team player who is willing to pitch in any way possible to help the company.

But in tough economic times, just doing your job, no matter how well you do it, is not enough. If you regularly chew through a day’s worth of work in six hours, great. But don’t waste the rest of your time trying to look busy. Instead, be busy. Any manager worth his pay grade knows his workforce. So don’t think that your fake industry is fooling him, or for that matter, anyone else. And really, why waste energy working at nothing when you can apply yourself and make a great impression? Go to your manager and say, “I’ve finished everything I was working on. What can I do to help?” You can even suggest where your talents might best be utilized—marketing, sales, public relations.

That extra effort almost certainly will mean more hours at the office. But when business is off, extra time behind your desk isn’t such a bad thing. Being seen working after regular business hours is just politically smart when the market is bad. But let’s say you are that super efficient and effective worker who flat out does more work in six hours than your colleagues can do in ten hours. If everyone else in your organization is logging extra hours and you’re not, the boss is going to notice your absence, and not in a, “Boy, I’m sure glad Mike went home because he works so hard,” kind of way. If your coworkers stay and you don’t, not only do they win the perception-is-reality competition, but you have probably lurched ahead in the unemployment derby.

If you rise before the sun comes up and go into the office extra early, chances are your manager won’t be there to greet you or see that you are logging those additional morning hours. Don’t be shy. Make sure the people in power know that you are an early bird. Send your boss an e-mail. Leave a voice message. Drop off a note. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Just say, “I’m usually here around 7 each morning. If you need something done, just put it on my desk.”

BE SUBTLE

Jeff Kaye, chief executive officer of Kaye/Bassman International, a Plano, Texas, recruiting firm, says it’s not unusual for employees who work late to poke their heads into his office to say goodnight. In fact, he applauds their effort because he believes that it’s important to master the art of getting noticed.

“The whole purpose wasn’t to say goodnight,” he says. “They wanted me to know that they were here until 7:30 p.m. It worked. I don’t begrudge it. I respect it. Letting yourself be seen so that people who might not otherwise have any idea what you’re doing know what you are doing—there’s nothing wrong with that if you do it subtly.”

2. Build a Reputation as a Hard Worker

Strive to make your brand synonymous with “hard worker.” Developing that reputation starts with showing your manager and colleagues every day your pride and dedication to your job, the high quality of your work, and how, combined, they represent who you are as a person. In business, the people who are successful recognize that they are a brand and understand that they must protect and market that brand’s reputation. To accomplish that you must:

Consistently deliver what you promise.

Be fair and ethical.

Have personal integrity.

Show people they can rely on you.

Once your brand is established, you want to remain in sync with your manager’s or the company’s goals. To do that, you must clearly understand what your manager expects from you, and, in turn, what kind of help you can expect from your manager. You can exchange that information through a framework of ground rules, or what can be called accountabilities and expectations. Having accountabilities and expectations in place makes it easier to track whether or not you are fulfilling your job responsibilities. Another way of thinking about accountabilities and expectations is as your personal mission statement. Every company has a written mission statement, a vision, and a set of core values that explains what it embodies. Most also list the company’s goals and where it wants to go in the future. How many employees do you think have even taken the time to consider a personal mission statement, let alone define their values, career vision, and long-term professional goals? Very few. In fact, odds are better than even that you have never written down a personal mission statement. Well, now is the time to do it.

Building a framework of accountabilities and expectations begins with a detailed description of job responsibilities. Together with your manager, create a very specific, quantifiable list of precisely what each side can expect from the other. For instance, you, as the employee, might say you can be counted on to:

Be at work every morning by 7 a.m.

Return phone calls as promptly as possible, say within twenty-four hours.

Be available in an emergency.

Make a deadline once you have committed to a project and a timeline, and if you cannot meet the deadline let the supervisor know 72 hours in advance.

In turn, your supervisor might agree to:

Tell you if you are not performing to a level exceeding expectations.

Explain the gap between what you could be doing and what you are doing.

Give you the opportunity to correct any deficiencies before letting you go.

When you have a list of agreed-upon points, each party should sign it. You can use the same process with the people who work with you and those who work for you. View your accountabilities and expectations as a way of measuring whether or not you are attaining the goals that you have set for yourself, and if you are receiving the right kind of feedback to correct any problems.

If your supervisor won’t agree to a formal list of accountabilities and expectations, ask her to acknowledge these basic ground rules:

If you don’t hear anything from your manager, it means your work is fine.

You cannot be demoted, fired, or otherwise punished for work if you have not been previously told what you are doing wrong.

You will be given a chance to correct problems.

Your manager must be accessible and willing to talk about issues.

BEING A HARD WORKER LEADS TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Before becoming a business consultant, Mary Crane attended the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. During a six-month externship at the world-famous Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, the executive chef told the students that they could use their time off to practice making different dishes at the Greenbrier’s expense. Crane pounced on the opportunity, spending most of her free time in the kitchen. A few months after graduation, Crane got a call from the chef, who had moved to a new address—1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C. He asked Crane to join his staff because she had proven her dedication to cooking by giving up her private time to improve her skills while at the Greenbrier. He knew that she would deliver for him as a member of his White House cooking staff.

Crane spent two years as assistant chef at the White House, where she learned a lot about food, life, and literally p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Create Your Brand and Build Your Career
• Part II: Keep Your Job by Helping Others
• Part III: Keep Your Job by Helping the Company
• Part IV: Master the Art of Office Politics