You`re thirty- or fortysomething. You`re ambitious. You`re working your tail off. You`re getting great job reviews. You`re fired.
It could happen to you. It already has to more than 500,000 Americans in the last 16 months. What makes the current epidemic of layoffs-which has claimed an average of 30,000 victims a month in 1990-unusual, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that about 75 percent of the pink slips are going to white-collar workers, many of them in blue-chip firms.
Blue-collar workers, typically the hardest hit in past recessions, are not immune this time. But, so far, they`ve felt the ax far less often than professionals and top and middle managers, like the man we`ll call Sam Cunningham.
”It`s a tough lesson, but doing a good job is no guarantee you`ll keep your job. That`s the new reality today,” says Cunningham, a recent casualty of the so-called white-collar recession, who prefers that his real name not be used. A bright, earnest 36-year-old M.B.A. and father of two, Cunningham lost his job as a vice president at a major New York-based financial services corporation when his entire department was eliminated in a ”downsizing” move in November.
Cunningham admits to a certain naivete about the workings of the modern workplace, but he was far from alone in his belief that doing a great job will put you on the fast track and keep you there.
That was, in effect, the credo of the yuppie generation. Ironically, having survived the buyouts and early-retirement programs that culled many of their older colleagues in the first wave of `80s cutbacks, yuppies like Cunningham represent a high percentage of the newly sacked.
So what is a white-collar worker to do when faced with the grimy prospect of unemployment? As the Boy Scouts say, ”be prepared,” but don`t stop there. Without the right survival skills in the new business badlands, ”Boy Scouts” and ”Girl Scouts”-nice, reliable people who do their jobs very well-are more likely to get pink slips than merit badges, according to Camille Lavington, an independent New York-based career and image consultant who operates as sort of a corporate wilderness guide.
”I do teach people to be very ethical and honest and never do a thing to touch their integrity, but, by God, they can learn the games, and I teach the games as fast as they want to learn them,” Lavington says.
A 25-year veteran of corporate life in retailing, advertising, marketing and merchandising, Lavington became a corporate consultant 15 years ago. IBM, General Electric, American Express, Touche Ross, Merrill Lynch, Chase Manhattan, The Equitable Life Assurance Society, Avon, ABC and PepsiCo are among the 30-odd Fortune 500 companies that have used her services. She has advised management on executive development for current staff and on outplacement counseling, for employees who have been fired.
”The world is getting fired,” says Lavington, a trim, elegantly dressed woman who can transform herself from motherly to Machiavellian without turning one of her well-coiffed blond hairs. Outplacement services, which firms typically engage for up to a year at 12 to 15 percent of the outgoing employee`s salary, are booming.
Eagle or mosquito
Nonetheless, Lavington says, you can survive this. Better yet, you might be able to avoid it. Lavington uses a 10-point approach with clients who want to thrive in their jobs and those who are looking for new jobs. Lavington, who often speaks on this subject to groups, also counsels individuals, for a minimum of three hours at $500 an hour.
A heady blend of inspiration, psychology, self-examination, presentation and hard-headed stratgy, which sometimes is shockingly direct, Lavington`s
”holistic” approach aims for results.
”You know, there are only two kinds of people, eagles and mosquitoes,”
she says wryly. ”You can either fly with the eagles or swarm with the mosquitoes. I teach people to fly with the eagles.”
Every would-be eagle has a different set of problems that are addressed by one or more of Lavington`s 10, in effect, Golden Rules for success. But, she points out, ”Talent is almost never a problem, it`s the way they carry their message that`s the problem.”
Often this comes from a distorted perception of themselves, the people they work with or the corporate environment, she says. ”They don`t get the broad picture; in fact, they don`t see what`s going on around them. And, the more that someone perfects their skills, the more they have a problem with this.”
Cunningham, who is one of Lavington`s corporate outplacement clients, is a case in point. His professional skills as a corporate planner were superb. His ”people” skills were feeble.
”I`ve done incredibly well, but I have never, in my estimation, received the promotions, rewards, bonuses, whatever, that I felt I deserved, whereas other people in comparable jobs did,” Cunningham says.
Having assessed his situation with Lavington, he says he has begun to discover why. ”I was always the `too good` person.” His super-efficient, single-minded, relatively humorless approach to the job, with little attention to developing a personal rapport with his colleagues and superiors, came across more as threatening than impressive, he concedes. People didn`t like working with him.
He unwittingly had violated Lavington`s Rules No. 6 and 8: ”Value others” and ”Cover your bases.”
”You have to present your abilities in an acceptable way,” Cunningham says. ”Yes, they like to have good people working for them, but they`d prefer to have good people they like working for them,” he says.
Wingtips out the window
Cunningham`s ”package” also needed some new wrappings (Rule No. 7). ”I was always stuck in the dress-for-success mode from the `70s,” he says. ”As a result, I came on as too goody-goody, too successful, too prim, proper and preppy.”
”That`s why I did away with the button-down shirts,” he says, noting that for executives who want to tap into the global marketplace of the future, spread-collar shirts are more international. He also traded his striped rep neckties for Italian silk prints, his Clark Kent horn-rim eyeglasses for a sleek, eye-opening design by Giorgio Armani, his wide belts for narrower looks, his boxy three-button suits for more continental two-button styles and his wingtips for more sophisticated tasseled slip-ons.
How much does all this really mean? ”Eighty-nine percent of the initial message to the brain is visual. People look you over,” Lavington says.
Ask for what you want
Jane Gordon, a senior executive in a major West Coast food service company, wanted to move up, but didn`t know how to do it.
Gordon, who requested that her real name not be used, decided that if the firm did not broaden her responsibilities, she would have to leave.
Lavington urged her to ask directly for the position she wanted and coached her on how to negotiate for it.
The strategy worked. ”You can`t expect your company to know what you want to do unless you tell them,” Gordon says now. ”They`re not clairvoyant. The problem is that people look to the company to manage their career for them. You have to manage your own career.”
Bureaucracy`s noose
While Sam Cunningham barely realized that there were corporate games to play, Betsy Royalton knew they existed but decided not to play.
It was, she says in retrospect, a big mistake. It was also, by the way, a transgression of Lavington Rule No. 4: ”Pinpoint where the power rests.”
At 33, a vice president in corporate finance at Bankers Trust in New York, Royalton became a corporate outplacement client of Lavington last January, when she refused to transfer with her entire division to Europe and took an outplacement package instead.
Among her reasons was a growing dissatisfaction with her job. She discovered why, she says, by taking a hard look at what her skills were (Rule No. 1).
”It made me realize how frustrated I had been, not just with finance, but with how the bureaucracy of banking really hindered me,” Royalton says.
”I needed to have my own projects and decide myself which clients to go after.”
”It should have been so obvious to me that only by making ties with the inner circle could I look forward to a long career at Bankers Trust,” she says, ”but when you come out of school, you think only your work matters.”
In any event, Royalton, who recently joined a major corporate public relations firm, was open to and ready for a career change. In that, she was ahead of the game.
Experts predict that, because of shrinking opportunities in several service fields, such as finance and real estate, many laid-off executives will have to market their skills in entirely new areas. Those with the imagination to apply their talents in new ways will be the ones who succeed.
The blind spot
Lavington calls this ”multidimensional thinking” and urges clients to
”look at every challenge from six angles.” She uses a crystal Rubik`s-type cube, a gift from a client, to illustrate the concept.
Turning her cube to catch the light, she shows that three of its sides are faceted but one is smooth. Tapping it, she says, ”That`s the blind spot.”
Almost everyone has one, and Steven Howell, chairman of Kingswell Oil and Gas Corp. in Houston, was no exception.
After 15 years as an executive in the $300 million energy firm headed by his father, he felt boxed in and quit to go into business for himself last year. Howell says he founded his new firm, Kingswell, with the idea of investment in traditional energy uses.
It was a brave move, but as time went on, Howell realized he had built a similar, albeit smaller, box of his own.
After a session with Lavington, he says, ”I found that the evaluation of a property and purchasing it are a lot more fun than simply owning it. To have a static investment is like counting beans. The challenge is to see what you want to go after and negotiating for it.”
Lavington is an unabashed believer in tactfully blowing your own horn, but she says most people feel guilty doing it. Her argument is an absolution: ”Your gifts don`t belong to you; you are just their steward. How dare you waste them.”
After assessing his skills and what he most likes to do, Howell says, he began to change his perception of himself. He recently accepted an assignment from the first client for whom he will act as a consultant in raising venture capital in the energy field. A year ago, he says, ”I might have thrown up my hands and said, `Gosh, I don`t know how to help you do that.` ”
Above all, says Sam Cunningham, don`t underestimate the power of Rule No. 2, a positive attitude.
”In a job market like this, where you know it`s very tight and where a lot of your friends and neighbors are out of work, it`s a very grim reality.
”But you can`t get overwhelmed by that. As tough as it is, you have to be positive-not unrealistic, but positive.”
10 Golden Rules for success
1. Know your talents.
2. Have a winner`s attitude.
3. Understand others` values and social status.
4. Pinpoint where the power rests.
5. Figure out how to inspire, lead and set the pace. Know when to give an opinion and when to keep your mouth shut.
6. Value others and charm them. An apple for the teacher is healthy; the boss is also worried about whether he`s done a good job.
7. Stage a performance. Don`t worry about being ”phony,” worry about looking the part you want to play.
8. Cover your bases. Develop allies in high places, find a mentor.
9. Be an unabashed self-promoter.
10. Negotiate so that everyone wins and no one loses face.
