How to keep your head while others lose theirs

Update:
Survival in a leaner workplace

Bruce Tulgan, author of "Winning the Talent Wars," offers six tips for dodging layoffs. Click here for an interactive rundown of them.

In this story: Build skills, relationships Performance wins 'game' RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Marnie Hunter
CNN

(CNN) -- It was a week of more rising nervousness -- and more falling stock indices. On Tuesday, Motorola announced it would slash 7,000 more jobs -- bringing its layoff total to more than 16,000. This, because of slowing sales in cell phones, pagers, semiconductors and more.

Before that, Cisco Systems announced between 5,500 and 8,000 layoffs to be completed by July. Those cuts were said to target 2,500 to 3,000 temporary and contract workers and some 3,000 to 5,000 regular employees -- some expected to leave through voluntary attrition.

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By the time the weekly United States jobless claims report came out on Thursday, Charles Schwab Corp., the country's biggest discount and Internet brokerage, was reporting that a 31-percent decline in stock trading by its customers had prompted consideration of layoffs. This, even as jobless claims remained flat last week from a revised total of 375,000 in the previous week.

The four-week average for initial U.S. unemployment filings came in at its highest level since July 1998. New York reported 9,908 layoffs in the past week, mostly in the service industry. California also reported pink slips in the trade and service industry. And by prior announcement, Chrysler is to slash 26,000 jobs in three years. WorldCom is expected to lay off up to 11,550 employees.

How is a careerist to face a climate of such darkening uncertainty? Well, if the clouds of impending layoffs are moving over your workplace, Bruce Tulgan says don't waste too much time contemplating them.

"The No. 1 thing is to be one of those people who gets a lot of work done very well, very fast," says new-economy consultant Tulgan. "Don't be scared into submission by all the downsizing activity. That's exactly the wrong message to take."

Instead, employees should remember that in the wake of layoffs employers will look to fewer people to work more efficiently, says Tulgan, author of "Winning the Talent Wars" (W.W. Norton, 2001) and "Managing Generation X" (W.W. Norton, 1995).

Tulgan's also the founder of Rainmaker Thinking Inc., a research, training and consulting firm that stresses new management practices in this era of lean and flexible companies. Among his clients are accounting and consulting firm Deloitte & Touche, Texas Instruments and the Internal Revenue Service.

A bottom-line lesson? If you can do several tasks well, ์then you're more valuable than you were before, not less valuable," says Tulgan, speaking from his offices in New Haven, Connecticut.

If layoffs are looming and your immediate goal is to keep your current position, immediately assess the available work to be done and start looking for projects under various managers, Tulgan advises.

"The thing you should be focusing on is not positions that are being eliminated, but positions that might be created," he says. "The one thing that there's still going to be plenty of is work to be done.

"Always be assessing your particular skills and your particular experience and your particular abilities and energies and interests, and matching them up with the available work to be done," Tulgan says. "And then be prepared to sell yourself into challenges."

Build skills, relationships

Good, marketable skills are always helpful in career navigation. While technical prowess is the talent du jour, Tulgan says, transferable skills are always ideal, regardless of the field.

"A technical skill would be the ability to use a particular software package very, very well," he says."But a transferable skill would be the ability to get up to speed quickly on any new software package and start being effective with it."

Having a great relationship with your boss isn't enough, Tulgan says. Employees need to create relationships with an array of decision-makers to better market their skills.

"If you only have one boss, you only have one customer. It's like being a business with one customer," he says. "You've got to make sure that there are many decision-makers who know how valuable you are."

How? Working on several projects for different managers will increase the demand for your work, making your position more valuable, Tulgan says.

Your job is one part of life in which too much modesty may not be an asset. Employees always should collect proof of their abilities and value in the workplace and be prepared to show them, he says.

"You need to have a good collection of tangible results with your name on them," he says.

Even if you didn't create the final product, he says, keep handy your work on a project's planning phases. Notes, drafts and spreadsheets are all proof of your value and shouldn't just be relegated to a file cabinet.

"If you're one of those people who gets tons of work done very well, very fast, and you can prove it, you're not going anywhere," Tulgan says.

Translation: You won't get fired, because you're the one they want to have left over when all the downsizing is done."

Performance wins 'game'

The new economy also has revised layoff criteria, Tulgan believes. Ten years ago, when downsizing hit the work force "like a freight train," seniority dictated who got the ax and who remained, he says.

"But I think now performance is the name of the game."

Yet under-performing employees aren't the only workers getting pink slips, he says. Restructuring and technological streamlining also have rendered some workers unnecessary, and employees with skills applicable to a market segment that's "cooling off" also are at risk, Tulgan says.

Tulgan's assessment of the economy sounds upbeat, in spite of a downsizing train that he says shows few signs of slowing.

"Let's remember, the unemployment rate held at 4.2 percent in February. That is still a near 30-year low unemployment rate," he says. "The labor market is still very tight."

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American economy experienced a net increase of nearly 400,000 jobs between January and February. People are finding work, even as companies restructure.

"The thing that people need to remember is that downsizing may be back on the front pages, but the downsizing never slowed down," Tulgan says. "Downsizing has been a constant and regular feature of the new working world, and it will continue to be."

Workers cannot always avoid downsizing, in other words. But they can control how they deal with it.

Schwab eyes job cuts
March 15, 2001
Jobless claims flat
March 15, 2001
New IT survey finds tech workers wary
March 6, 2001
'Corporate refugees': The biz of being jobless
February 7, 2001
Chrysler to cut 26,000 jobs
January 29, 2001
WorldCom to cut jobs
January 26, 2001
Labor after hard labor
January 18, 2001
Review: When talent calls the shots
December 25, 2000
Hiring and firing in America
November 27, 2001

Rainmaker Thinking Inc.

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