How to Keep the Job You’ve Got

As I’m watching the hundreds of articles, reading the checklists, and listening to the bloviation about finding new employment and planning for your future when you lose your current job, it seems to me that we’ve overlooked the most important and simple solution—doing our best to keep the job we’ve got.

It seems to make sense that keeping the job you’ve got is a lot easier than trying to find another one, then another one, and then another one. Here are, from management’s perspective, the behaviors of those employees that have the most value, most of the time. These employees are likely to be retained when cuts or worse have to be carried out:

1. Do your job. Understand what your job is, get a job description, figure it out, and do it.
2. Make your budget or sales goal, if you have these responsibilities.
3. Make the plans or strategies you’re engaged in actually work.
4. Help others succeed and accomplish their part of the plan.
5. Reduce stress, tension, and contention. Be a peacemaker.
6. Get along. Help others be more comfortable in what they’re trying to accomplish.
7. Be a finisher. Get things done. Wherever possible, stop those things that will never be done.
8. Be a source of inspiration. Help others have better days. Most of the time, others will focus on what really matters because that’s what you are doing.

Did I miss anything?

For more information about layoffs, visit the article in my eNewsletter, The Dark Art of Laying People Off.

How to Lose a Job

As crazy as it seems, in times like these, there are people who are intent on getting high up on the list of people we can do without. When we look at who is on the list of people to separate first, here are the kinds of behaviors and attitudes that surface:

1. Making the boss mad by barking, shouting, or simply talking back.
2. Denying what everyone else already knows or what really was true—whether good, bad, or somewhere in between.
3. Getting angry and threatening others.
4. Acting like you’re a victim of forces beyond your control, but forces that should be controlled if those in charge really cared.
5. Trivializing real threats to the organization by focusing on just yourself; avoiding the truth.
6. Claiming that you’re being treated unfairly.
7. Minimizing the damage that your own behavior is causing and asking irritating, irrelevant, insolent questions.

If this is you . . . even if it’s only one or two of these behaviors or attitudes, you might want to examine your life and your attitudes. The more items on this list that reflect your daily habits, the more likely it is that, relatively soon, you’ll be working for someone else or not working at all. These are job killers.

For more information about layoffs, visit the article in my eNewsletter, The Dark Art of Laying People Off.