News reports in the past few years have tended to emphasize the plight of unionized blue-collar workers, for their woes often make shocking headlines. It is compellingly dramatic when an automobile company shuts down a production line making many jobless. It is not as dramatic when a struggling company tightens its belt and phases out a few jobs in the advertising and accounting departments. That kind of small, quiet episode doesn't make good TV material--but to the people phased out, and to those left wondering who will be next, it is an experience full of the starkest terror.
White-collar people, most of them lacking unions or any other special protection, make up about half the total of unemployed--and they are my special concern. As a management consultant involved in executive-recruitment for clients, I'm in a good position to feel winds of change in the white-collar job market. I've never seen it as bad as it is today. My company isn't an employment agency and doesn't solicit job applications or career resumes, but I now find myself half buried in them.
There is a certain tone of desperation in many of the letters that pour onto my desk each week. "Please help me," begs a forty-year- old man who has just lost a middle-management job and cannot find another. "I don't know where to turn," says a young woman who fears her once-promising job with an architectural firm is about to be abolished.
These are, without doubt, the hardest times since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A job is no longer an inalienable right, something every high-school graduate takes for granted. There is no more guaranteed job security. Not today. A job, today, is something you keep as long as you are lucky. Or smart.
I am going to show you how to be smart.
In a hotel dining room one night not long ago, I inadvertently overheard part of a conversation at the next table. There were three people at that table: a man of perhaps sixty and a younger man and woman, both in their thirties. The older man was lecturing; the younger people were listening deferentially. Because of facial resemblances, I surmised that they were a family group, a father and his son and daughter.
The older man was delivering a standard fatherly lecture on the facts of business life. "All you need to keep in mind is one thing," he said earnestly. "Just learn your job. That's all. Learn to do it better than anybody else. Nothing else counts. Never mind getting involved in office politics and all that. Just master your job so well that nobody can ever take it away from you. That's it in a nutshell--the surest prescription for success."
The younger man and woman were obviously not completely convinced. They needled the older man with questions and gently cynical comments, and they offered details of their own job experiences that seemed to contradict what he had said. In the end, he backed down a little and admitted that he might have stated the case somewhat too baldly. "It isn't all that black-and-white," he agreed. "There are gray areas." But he stood by his basic statement. The younger man and woman finally subsided into puzzled silence. I understood their dilemma perfectly. Should they believe their father, obviously a man of long, rich, and varied experience in the business world? Or should they believe their own firsthand observations?
The father's statement could not be dismissed lightly, for it was not based only on his own experience. It had the weight of tradition behind it; it sounded something like a Great Truth. It was a preachment right out of the Old Work Ethic. Keep your nose to the grind stone. Do your own job and do it well; never mind what anybody else is doing. Whatever your job is, become superior at it. If you're good, the world will recognize it and reward you.
As the father defended this preachment, the tone of doubt seeping into his voice made me think he didn't wholly believe it either. He, too, seemed puzzled. The problem was that he had learned his basic career lessons in an environment that was profoundly different from the one we struggle in today. The 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s were years of virtually nonstop boom--the longest and most extravagant boom ever enjoyed by this country or any country. In a time like that, Horatio Alger teachings make good sense. Virtue does get rewarded. The dedicated employee who attends to the grindstone does, in time, earn raises and promotions. The pie is so big that there is a piece for everybody. Companies, buoyed by ever-expanding markets, can afford to be generous. People jockey for job positions and career advantages, but this jockeying lacks the desperate quality that can be seen at other times. If you lose out in one scramble, you plunge into another. Or if you choose to ignore the jockeying altogether--as the father urged his son and daughter--it can hardly hurt you and may even help.
Today, none of the above applies.
Let me tell you two stories of life as it is really lived in the 1980s. The first story concerns a woman. Call her Jeanne. Jeanne had a lower-level management job in a large company's marketing department. She was technically more than competent; she was so good at her job that some even called her a genius. However, she was clumsy socially. She tended to irritate people with her mannerisms, and sometimes she hurt them--not through any basic lack of kindness, but simply by not paying attention. She felt so secure in her job competence--which was indeed impressive--that she felt no need to study the ebb and flow of personal events around her. "So-and-so's opinion doesn't concern me in the slightest," she would often say loftily--so often that people mimicked her saying it when she was not around. She would point to a sheaf of papers and ask belligerently, "Were my figures correct or weren't they?" Of course, they always were. She believed that was enough.
She had an assistant and understudy named Ruth, Ruth lacked Jeanne's technical competence. Indeed, the fact should be stated a little more bluntly: Ruth's job performance was only mediocre. She made frequent mistakes. When this happened, however, she found other people willing to help her patch things up. For Ruth paid close attention to the people around her and the complex structure of job and personal relationships in which they all worked.
One day, while making a presentation to a management group, Jeanne criticized a divisional vice-president for his poor understanding of certain market undercurrents that were threatening to hurt the company. She was perfectly correct: the man did not have a good grasp of market undercurrents. By failing to act against them when they first became apparent, he had allowed a trivial problem to become a grave one. But there are good and bad ways to approach a situation in which you believe a superior is messing up his job, and Jeanne had chosen the very worst one. She stood up and expressed her views bluntly and publicly.
Over the next few weeks, if she had been alert to such things, she would have noticed certain warning signals. People began going to lunch without her. Conversations seemed to stop abruptly when she entered a room. Her name appeared to be slowly fading from various circulation lists, with the result that fewer and fewer memos and other materials came to her desk.
She went on insisting that other people's opinions did not concern her. She was still saying this on the day she was told she no longer had a job.
Her boss put it as gently as he knew how. He mumbled about "restructuring" and "phasing out." But it was all a kindhearted lie. Jeanne was being fired, plainly and simply. Ruth took over her title immediately.
The second story deals with a man I'll call Dan. He, like Jeanne, came to a stage in his career when he began to receive warning signals that his job was in jeopardy. Unlike Jeanne, he took the signals seriously and did something about them.
Dan was an executive with responsibilities in the area of finance. The company for which he worked had run into hard times during the middle 1970s. By the early 1980s the company was in real trouble. Its markets were shrinking. Its cash-flow problems were appalling. The directors had cut the common stock dividend three times in an attempt to conserve cash, but nothing seemed to do any good. The stock price had been sliding downward inexorably for years. Major stockholders were screaming. Everybody was mad at everybody else. Blame was being thrown in all directions like mud. A large glob of it landed on Dan--not because he deserved it, but because he happened to be a handy target. The company president and other senior executives, struggling desperately to save their own skins, blamed Dan for some faulty decisions in which he had played only a minor role. Some of the decisions, in fact, had been basically made before he even joined the company.
Recognizing that it would be useless to protest, Dan kept his mouth shut and waited to see if the air would clear, as sometimes happens in such situations. It did not happen. Instead, Dan began to notice more and more alarming signals. Senior executives failed to return his phone calls. A more or less monthly invitation to lunch with the president failed to materialize. There was a definite coolness in the office atmosphere.
But the loudest signal of all was Dan's accidental discovery that the president had called in an executive-search firm. The firm's assignment: find somebody to replace Dan.
Dan's first angry instinct was to quit on the spot. It would have been satisfying to tell everyone what he thought of them and then walk out. But Dan had learned early in life that temper tantrums, while they let off steam and feel good momentarily, seldom accomplish much in the way of solid, long-term resolution of problems. And so he cooled himself. He took a long weekend. He spent three days talking with his wife, playing with his kids, ambling about by himself, thinking. Piece by piece, he developed a plan.
It was a two-part plan. One part was designed to save the company. The other part was designed to save himself.
Over the next few weeks, Dan got together with bankers and divisional finance people. He presented them with some new ideas he had worked out for raising cash. Dan's show of initiative and his seeming optimism--which, in truth, he did not feel--lifted many of those people out of a swamp of dull despair in which they had been mired for years. They took his basic ideas, added to them, sharpened them, and improved them.
Dan then arranged a morning meeting with the president and told him about the new ideas. The president listened, astonished. If you had asked him, he would have guessed that morale in the company was so low that nobody had the energy to generate useful new ideas. Everybody was too busy trying to dodge the blame that was being hurled around--and that included the president.
Dan had thought long and hard about this meeting, and he conducted it with the greatest care. He said nothing about being unhappy. He uttered no protests over unfair treatment. He did not mention the secret executive search that he had discovered. Instead, calmly and quietly, he explained his ideas and gave the thoughts of the bankers and divisional finance people he had been talking to.
The president asked questions. Dan had anticipated them and was able to answer them tellingly. Finally the president nodded and said, "Yes, I've got to say these ideas are worth trying. So go ahead, try them and see what happens."
As Dan was walking out the door, the president called him back and asked, "You free for lunch?"
The story ended happily. Dan's ideas worked. Today he is the company's senior vice-president in charge of finance. It would be an exaggeration to say the company is once again enjoying unrestrained growth. The company has had to struggle hard to reach a state of good financial health, and the struggle continues--but the stock price is once again on the rise.
Dan's struggle continues also. I talk to him once in a while, and I know he will never relax his vigilance. He knows as well as anybody that it is not enough today simply to master your job. You must also be ready to do whatever is necessary to hold on to it.
Combing the business literature, past and present, I find that very little has been written on this subject. There is voluminous material on the techniques of landing a new job, but the topic that fascinates me--preserving and improving what you've got--has been but sparsely covered.
I'm not sure why. I suspect the reason may be that, to many who have taken only a casual look at it, the subject seems intimidatingly complex.
In some ways it is complex. If it were simple, people would figure it all out for themselves, and I would feel no need to talk about it. These precepts are not hard to understand, but they are not obvious to most people.
I have been in personnel work of one kind or another throughout my business life. I've worked for large organizations such as Gulf + Western and the American Stock Exchange. I am now head of my own management consulting company, which, among its activities, conducts executive searches and evaluations of corporate departments. All along the way, I've hunted for the differences between winners and losers in business.
When I was a young man, just starting out, I harbored the Horatio Alger notion that it is enough simply to know one's own job and mind one's own business. This notion was knocked out of my head by a man who breezed confidently into the company where I worked, established himself quickly as a climber, and shot up like a rocket. He was a man whose job competence was merely average. Yet he overtook many men and women of what I considered greater job talents. Before long, people far older than he and with many more years of job seniority were reporting to him.
I puzzled over his story for a long time. I talked to him and to people who knew him. I probed and pondered. I observed that, in some seemingly magical way, he moved rapidly to the front rank as he attained each new job level. He might be the junior person in a certain department in terms of time on the job, yet he was never among those weeded out in times of trouble and retrenchment. Somehow he made himself too valuable to dismiss or demote. Too valuable to whom? In what ways? What magical umbrella of protection did he raise over his head?
Gradually, puzzling over these questions, I began to understand what it was he did that other people did not do. I began to apply my growing understanding to my own career, and over the years I studied other people's careers--the successes, the failures, and the near-misses--to see whether the same lessons applied to everyone. They do. The precepts are universal.
The technical aspects of various jobs differ widely. A financial analyst, an advertising supervisor, and a production engineer might have a hard time explaining to each other what they do all day long, yet the forces of the job environment act on all of them in the same way. Similarly, a newcomer fresh from college might feel his or her job problems differ greatly from the problems faced by a mid-career veteran. Not so. The same basic precepts apply to both.
