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Make a Commitment to Be Part of the Solution
When an assistant marketing manager attended a friend’s wedding instead of the company’s largest promotional event in history, his priority for friendship wasn’t much appreciated. Although no ultimatum was given, he had trouble recovering from the perception that he wasn’t committed to organizational goals and priorities.
Balancing work and personal needs is a tricky business in organizations where the work seems to mushroom out of control. To get what you want for yourself, you must demonstrate a genuine commitment to the company’s efforts as well.
People who get ahead in downsizing organizations are the ones who take the initiative to be part of the solution rather than the problem. Instead of railing against the boss, they do their best to add value wherever they can.
When Baxter Healthcare Corporation began its downsizing initiatives 10 years ago, it needed a human resources professional to staff its outplacement center. No one wanted the job because it seemed too temporary. Now, 10 years later, many people who thought that job would be too short-lived are gone and Maureen Gold (who accepted it) is still there going strong. In fact, the company’s career center has not only outlived its skeptics, it’s become one of the more enduring parts of the organization. In the process, Maureen Gold has discovered her own professional mission. A former teacher, she loves “to see the light bulb go on in people’s heads when they realize they have choices.”
Gold’s message is one of empowerment. Regardless of whether you stay with the company or leave, she says, the important thing is to realize that it’s still up to you to manage your career. “Through all the craziness, you can find opportunities to grow,” she says.
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Attitude Is a Key Variable
When a national chain of bookstores consolidated its operations and eliminated several suburban stores, the company’s advertising manager suddenly found herself saddled with public relations responsibilities as well. Although she hadn’t been familiar with PR, she viewed it as a “learning opportunity”—a chance to expand her skills and experience into other arenas.
“I could have sat around moaning that I’m not a PR person, or that PR isn’t my job,” she says today. “But what good would it have done? Like it or not, I’m a PR person now. Fortunately, it’s kind of fun.”
To maintain your sanity and self-esteem, you need to accept responsibility for your decision to stay. If you can’t do that, make arrangements to leave. After all, what’s the point of holding onto your job if you end up becoming a physically and emotionally charred wreck in the process?
“When you accept that you’re 100 percent responsible for who you are and where you work, you lose the need to blame others or hold them emotionally hostage,” says Linda Bougie.
After that, there can be a joy in staying, says Gold. When you’re able to see the changes around you as an opportunity to invest in yourself, you won’t feel like you’re just holding onto your job. You’ll realize that you’re developing skills and experience you can take with you when you leave. “In this day and age, everybody needs to learn how be a change manager,” says Gold. “It’s the most marketable skill there is.” Unfortunately, most employees are so busy bemoaning their fates that they lose out on that window of opportunity.
“Survivors are afraid to get their hopes up,” says Phyllis Edelen, a human resources consultant in Dallas, Texas, who’s managed career centers for AT&T and Kraft Foods. “Instead of getting involved, they sit around waiting for the other shoe to fall.” She understands their fears but questions their lack of motivation. “People may be waiting for the next disaster, but in the meantime, they don’t do anything to prepare themselves for that day,” says Edelen. “Despite all that
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mental anguish they put themselves through, it hits them just as hard when they do get laid off.”
No job lasts forever, so why waste the time you have worrying about when the boom will strike? If you’ve chosen to stay (at least for now), focus instead on self-development. Use the days, weeks, and months ahead to build some new skills (including job search skills), experiences, and contacts that will enable you to build bridges out of your current situation.
View This as a Learning Opportunity
Yolanda Banks is a survivor who rose to that particular challenge. Banks is an environmental coordinator for a medical manufacturing plant in Niles, Illinois, that had a two-year plan to close down its local operation and relocate elsewhere. Every round of layoffs brought her one round closer to the day when she, too, must go. It also meant saying goodbye to treasured friends and co-workers, many of whom considered themselves fortunate to be among the first to leave.
For those who remained behind, a bitter legacy awaited them. For years, they’d worked together to make the plant a productive facility—and they’d succeeded. Now, everything they worked so hard to build had to be systematically dismantled.
Animosities ran rampant. Many people were frustrated and bitter. Productivity plummeted along with morale. The potential for accidents skyrocketed every day. Ordinarily, this would not be Banks’s problem. But her manager didn’t survive the first round of cuts and she did, which made her the ad hoc manager of safety and environmental health. She didn’t have the title and she certainly didn’t get a pay raise, but she accepted the responsibility. To do her job well meant to ensure the safety and good health of her co-workers. For her, that was more important than any personal grudges she harbored against her employer for closing its doors or doubling her workload.
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Banks’s attitude made her different. In an environment riddled with fear, mistrust, and anger, motivation was low and risk-taking almost nonexistent. Almost all the employees were nursing their wounds and waiting to leave. It had become bad form to show any enthusiasm or excitement for your job, let alone your employer, who was, in everyone’s eyes, Public Enemy Number One. Still, Banks understood that you can’t discover and express your talents while hiding under a rock and hoping the winds of change will blow over.
Even in an organization that’s redefining itself, there are things to be learned and accomplished on your way out the door. As Maureen Gold says, “It makes a difference how you leave.”
Yolanda Banks had never been a manager before, so this was her big chance to become one. She admitted she could use a mentor. But there wasn’t one available. She had to learn to mentor herself. Fortunately, she had the mental skill to do it.
To self-mentor, you have to be your own best role model. Create the prototype and then live it. This means taking responsibility for learning what you need to know to do your job. Banks is a good teacher who knows how to ask the right questions. This quality will allow her to resolve the problems she faces. When a drum of questionable origin showed up on the dock, for example, she used her research and investigative skills to figure out where it came from and how to dispose of it.
Banks already knew an important principle of leadership: Don’t wait for someone else to solve a problem. Instead, take the initiative to solve it yourself. That same initiative appeared again when the plant manager was seeking ways to motivate his remaining personnel to meet productivity standards and goals.
Toward that end, Banks recommended (and piloted) a stress ergonomics program that, for very little money, was already being implemented successfully at companies such as 3M. Stress ergonomics is a fancy name for a simple 10-minute stretch break, which (as most fitness
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experts will tell you) can do wonders to boost energy levels. The program has 98 percent participation, but it doesn’t play entirely to rave reviews. In spite of many enthusiastic supporters, it also has its fair share of detractors. Some say it’s a ridiculous waste of time. Others agree it’s a nice program—but too short and way too late (they complain the company should have instituted the plan years ago).
Don’t Let Others Hold You Back
When you approach your job with creativity and enthusiasm, don’t expect the people around you to rave, “Wow! What a great person!” More likely than not, you’ll encounter what Hawaiians refer to as a “crabpot mentality.”
When Hawaiian fishermen go crabbing, they throw the crabs they catch into a bucket with no lid. The Hawaiians learned long ago that there was no danger of the crabs climbing out and scurrying away. Whenever one crab reaches the lip of the bucket, the leader is pulled back into the pot by the others, who seem determined not to let any members of their group escape. Who needs a jail warden when you have each other to guard the gates?
Granted, great ideas are hard to achieve in downsizing organizations where emotional leakage and miscommunication run high. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Why not lose the chip on your shoulder and show some initiative of your own? For those of you with leadership blood in your veins, the time is ripe to separate yourself from the horde of naysayers that surrounds you. Exercise your leadership potential and you’ll truly stand out.
Managers (and aspiring managers) should display the courage to participate in the changes and, if possible, make change a more compassionate experience. Norbert Wiener, the founder of Cybernetics, said, “The world may be viewed as a myriad of ‘to-whom-it-may-concern messages.’” It’s up to you whether you want to heed their call. If you do, expect the road to get rocky.
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A senior customer service manager who’d made it through two years of continuous organizational change (including five different restructuring attempts) was determined to be more than just a survivor. He wanted to learn something from the process, even if it meant putting his personal career objectives on hold for a while. To him, it was a “developmental challenge” to keep his staff motivated and provide quality customer service in a constantly changing environment.
His advice: Use organizational change to become an expert in what you do. For example, he was able to experiment with a dozen different ways to improve customer service, even in the midst of business and staff changes. The hardest part was to keep his staff of 60 people motivated to provide quality service in the face of serious morale problems. Secrecy, he discovered, was his enemy. Communication— even if it meant over-communication—was his greatest ally. By sharing his concerns and frustrations with the staff, he motivated them to work hard, even if the company they worked for didn’t seem to appreciate their efforts.
“I wore a lot of hats with my staff,” says the manager. “Protector, advisor, parent. Sometimes, they acted like little kids who needed a ‘time out’ to get control of themselves. It was tough.”
Getting through the rough times might be easier if you recognize that you’ve entered a skill-building phase in your career that will make you more marketable elsewhere. “If I hadn’t known that my situation would be temporary,” says the customer service manager, “I probably would’ve been miserable.”
As it is, he isn’t sorry that his name showed up on a list of jobs to be cut. “Mentally, I’d already packed my bags,” he says. “The paperwork was just a formality.” Now that he’s in the job market again, he’s discovering that many employers are interested in his ability to manage through change. This is fine with him, but he has a requirement of his own: He wants to manage change that comes from growth rather than shrinkage. “I want to add staff and grow them,” he says. “Not fire people I’ve groomed as members of my team.” To achieve
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