4 ways the current recession is affecting senior management

June 21, 2009 by 6 Comments

The human toll of the idiocy that was left to proliferate in our global banking system is immense. To talk about it as unemployment, redundancies, and pay cuts doesn’t really begin to touch the pain and confusion being suffered by the people on the receiving end. Had the same people been afflicted by acts of war or terrorism, or by a global pandemic, some great machine would have swung to our defence. The powers that be would have targeted and rooted out the source of the problem and heroically brought him, her or it to justice. But apparently soul death is not as important as physical death. And, because the perpetrators of this latest carnage come from within our midst and have been acting within the rules, we are all left to deal with the fall out by ourselves.

“apparently soul death is not as important as physical death.”

So how is this systemic psychosis manifesting itself for business leaders and other professional workers? Well, I’m seeing some interesting trends:

  1. Rabbit in the headlights. The speed of onset and the severity of the current situation have taken many by surprise. Their response has been to freeze, panic and focus on what’s immediately in front of them. It’s about today, this week, this month, this quarter. It’s about control, preservation and survival. In this instance survival is about “the business”. It’s about cutting costs, and unfortunately people are often inseparable in leadership thinking from the costs attached to them. I’m not suggesting that it’s wrong for those at the top to be taking a firm grip of the helm. I am suggesting that, if that’s all they do, and don’t get their head up off the desk and look to the horizon, there’s still the chance they’re going to be hit by the oncoming car.
  2. Turf preservation. Not a dissimilar picture from rabbit in the headlights, and indeed often seen in conjunction with it, this is where, experiencing the panic around them, those desperate to hang on to their jobs, pensions, status and positional power, begin to play internal games in order, in their imagination, to ensure they remain untouchable. Hide the money in the budget is one such game that gets played out with the Finance Director and colleagues. Slag your colleagues off is another such game. “Why are we spending so much time focusing inwardly when our battle ground should be out in the market?” comes the challenge from smart insiders. And to some extent they’re right. But what this kind of comment ignores is the personal, sometimes unconfronted pain that’s going on for the game players. What will happen to me if I lose my job? Who will I be without my brand name company? How can I control my life if my long-term game plan gets blown up?
  3. Disenfranchisement. This is where many of the people who make things happen for their companies are currently. They may have been told they’re at risk of redundancy, they may have taken pay freezes or even pay cuts in order to preserve their employment, they may have watched on as colleagues were exited with a reasonable package and some outplacement counselling. And they may be sitting there thinking “what’s in this now for me?”. Looking at their rabbit in the headlights and turf preservation oriented leaders, they are not inspired to hang around here. Except there’s nowhere else currently to go. So they keep turning up. They stop going that extra mile because they are uncertain why they’d do that. They’ll be working hard to deliver the day job, but that’ll be it. Maybe they’ll take a few more sickies than usual; think twice about struggling in on packed trains and buses during tube strikes. And they’ll be gone as soon as they can to some other employer who’ll woo them more than their current bosses imagine is necessary.
  4. The job leavers. Whether they’ve jumped or been pushed by the current crisis, I’m seeing three trends here:
    1. More of the same. These are people trying to get a job similar to the one they left in their last company, and they’re using more of the same kind of thinking to get it. Dust down your CV, focus clearly on what you want next, write the names of 200 people you know and make a plan to phone 5 of them every day. For so long as these people are consumed by the activity of their job search, they are okay. But there are few jobs out there right now; ever fewer senior and professional ones. And will work ever be the same again in your field? If so, will traditional networking do it for you?
    2. Riding out the recession. Strictly for those with cash in the bank, this is for people who are taking some form of time out during the recession, awaiting the return of more bouyant times. Cookery courses, serial holidays to far-flung destinations, working on getting your golf handicap down. Let’s hope the cash holds up.
    3. No going back. These are people for whom the recession is acting as a turning point; people who are allowing themselves the possiblity that their days as bankers, lawyers, IT specialists, consultants, marketers, or whatever, are over. People who are using the opportunity in the current crisis to reinvent themselves, and are asking themselves deeper questions:
      • Who am I becoming in the midst of this crisis?
      • What’s the purpose and meaning of this crisis for me?
      • What have I neglected in myself and in my life until now?
      • How do I want to spend my life now?
      • Who do I want to spend it with?
Filed Under: Corporate jobs Tagged With: ,

What is “work”?

June 12, 2009 by 2 Comments

“Work is about the search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Studs Terkel (1974)

Have you ever stopped to really think about this thing we call “work”? I don’t know about you, but pretty much all of my schooling was geared around what I was going to do “when I grew up”. And, growing up in a working class suburb of Glasgow, the Calvanistic work ethos was embedded in my whole way of being. Then, work meant getting a job. And, given that the official Scottish unemployment rate when I graduated in 1982 was something like 22%, a job – any job – was something to feel lucky about.

In the UK at least, work defines us. It’s how we introduce ourselves. “I’m a (blah)…” we say, proudly if we’re happy about it, and with embarrassment if we’re not. Knowing what people do allows us to put them in a box where we can understand them. “He’s an accountant, therefore he’s boring.” “He’s a banker, therefore he’s rich – though maybe not so rich currently as he once was!”

I used to have an Italian boyfriend with whom I spent much time in Italy. It was disorienting for me that, there, few people ever asked me what I did. They were more interested in knowing about me. But who was I without being able to brag about being the director of my own consulting company?

My partner, Steve, and I run workshops called “Tough at the Top” for senior people who have come to some sort of career or life crossroads and are asking themselves questions about their work. As part of a process of helping them recalibrate and change focus, we ask them questions about what work means for them; why they do it. They share some great things:

  1. “I always wanted to do what I do now.” Many people talk about having, if you like, a vocational interest in what they do that goes back, in some instances, to teenage or even childhood years. Many people, even at points of transition, recognise for themselves that there was always something about the career path they followed that was appealing to them.
  2. “I get a sense of achievement and satisfaction from my work.” A lot of people who work in senior job roles talk about the experience they have of doing something that makes a mark somehow; that makes them feel good about themselves.
  3. “At work, I get a sense of being connected to something much bigger than me.” It’s a common one: people often feel part of a community at work. They feel that, through identification with the brand name and the company of which they are part, they can do more than they are able to as an individual contributor.
  4. “I am paid well.” Funnily enough, money is not always the first thing out of people’s mouths when you ask them why they do what they do. But it’s normally on the list somewhere. Because, for most of us, work is the vehicle through which we earn money, which, let’s face it, is the currency we need to fund whatever else we want from life.

Which brings me on to some of the, well, let’s say, more murky reasons why people work. Reasons that, as they negotiate some form of work transformation for themselves, whatever that looks like, tend to make the whole thing stickier than it might be:

  1. “I need the money.” My lifestyle, they go on to say, is now such that I need to work, and earn very well, in order to keep funding it. Mortgages, second homes, cars, school fees, childcare, holidays, spouses who don’t work and whose lifestyles I support… I am handcuffed to my current job. I dare not do anything different, no matter how much I really rather would.
  2. “I work to keep up with the demands of my job.” This an interesting one. Often when you probe a bit further, what people are really admitting to here, without using these words, of course, is a kind of addiction to work. These people, not to be confused with the genuinely in-love with their work kinds who can be consumed by what they are doing for hours without realising it, have formed a deeply unhealthy relationship with work. In fact, work often turns out to be the key relationship in their lives. I should know as I was this soldier. My addiction to work at one time caused me a marriage: I was so caught up in working sixteen hour days that I hardly ever saw my husband, and when I did I was recovering my energy for the next onslaught.
  3. “What else would I do without this job?” Sometimes, they say, I think of doing something different. But what? Their jobs have become a safe place, something they resent, but can’t leave, fearful of the prospect of redefining themselves and perhaps finding that, underneath the suit there’s some hollow person with nothing worthwhile to offer the world. And that’s a pretty scary place to be.

What many of us don’t realise is that, in doing our big corporate jobs, we have bought into a system that by and large supports our increasingly out-moded, Post-Industrial Revolution economy. It’s a system that defines what work is through its lens, which tends to go along the lines of being employed by a “name”; having a job title, the bigger the better; getting a salary, a regular amount of money that magics its way into our bank accounts each month; and the benefits that go with it. With this often comes an implicit expectation of servitude; that you’re an employee and you’re here to serve “the business”, which means that you must expect at times to be treated like shit. And it’s a system that works for many, but by no means for all. Some of the more enlightened employers are switched on to thinking about the role people play in their business, but even so, it’s a woeful few who actually crack it.

Stand back and ask yourself:

  • What does work mean for me?
  • What do I get from it, good and bad?
  • How is that for me?
Filed Under: Reinventing work Tagged With: , ,

A Different Kind of Blog

June 7, 2009 by 7 Comments

Well, it has taken me several weeks to figure out how to use WordPress and then upload Thesis Theme and start to write this baby! But here I am!!! I can’t believe I’ve finally managed my way round my domain and the joys of FileZilla, not to mention a few hiccups along the way. I was hoping to use WordPress as a vehicle for some serious – and indeed not so serious!! – bits of thinking about how work is changing. What I hadn’t expected was another real experience of how my own work is changing. I mean, for goodness sake, I’ve virtually become a computer geek in the process of getting this thing on the road!

And isn’t that how it is these days? You start off thinking you’re a ………. – fill in the blank for yourself (In my case I’m variously a coach, facilitator and psychotherapist.) But then you realise that to operate successfully in the world, you also have to add to your job description stuff like admin manager, finance manager, marketing manager, entrepreneur. And that’s before you’ve thought about the joys of getting your head round the technology to support all of the above.

I have to admit that, before I got into this WordPress lark, I was pretty good with Microsoft Office Powerpoint and all those sorts of things, but I have outsourced website development and other “more technically oriented” things, believing that they were kind of beyond me. In fact, I thought that it’d be time better spent for me to be pursuing my direct client work, rather than trying to figure out backroom stuff like computers. But I’ve had a couple of awakenings recently. The first is that actually I have really loved learning all of this technical stuff. The second is that, if computers and technology used to be backroom, that mindset belongs to an era that has long since passed, and that the kind of thing I’m doing now, ie putting out my thoughts on the internet is how things are now.

I’m not at all sure where any of this goes and that’s the other thing that’s so exciting and liberating about all of this: you don’t have to know and it doesn’t have to be perfect, because you’re creating it, as a living entity day by day, week by week. Isn’t that just phenomenal?

Filed Under: Reinventing work Tagged With: , , , ,