The list of recently failed companies is long and includes some of the biggest players on the market.  As I listened to NPR driving back and forth to work, it made me reflect upon how these failures relate to my work and whether or not such oversights put me at risk.  Here’s what I gathered as the most important concepts to employ into your career strategy.

1. Seeking help a little too late.  Interestingly enough, organizations have a tendency to ask for help when it’s too late to recover from their often self-induced dilemma.  Apparently they fail to heed the warnings.  On the individual level, such oversight can put you out of work.  If you want to avoid major setbacks in your career, don’t wait until you’re out of the plane to look for your parachute.  Most of us check our parachute many times before we jump.  We don’t overanalyze things but we do check them enough to establish a good comfort level since the thought of hitting the ground like a dart provides some incentive.  Why don’t companies check their gear?  Simple, the top brass are guaranteed a parachute so they don’t suffer the consequences of poor decisions.  They are in a tandem jump with a few million dollars that will pull the cord in time for a safe landing.  Unfortunately, this is a luxury that few of us have. 

While we all have some hope that this will change one day, corporate history provides sufficient evidence to contrary.  Prior to the 1980’s, layoffs were considered a sign of struggling organizations.  As times got better, these employees were recalled.  Then, in the 1990’s, there was a break from these historical trends as highly profitable organizations continued mass layoffs which were usually initiated by reengineering and restructuring activities.  Today, primary causes of layoffs and downsizing initiatives incorporate just about everything.  Some examples include rapid technological change, increased international competition, changing customer demands, regulatory changes, regional economic downturns, and poor company leadership.

As an individual employee, you shouldn’t feel like your career is top secret, not to be shared with anyone else.  In fact, it should be just the opposite.  Just imagine watching TV with no commercials.  How strange would it be if companies weren’t shoving their products in your face all time?  In less than a minute, they are filling your mind up with their product’s functions, capabilities and advantages.  Now, consider what work would be like if you were creating situations where you could be communicating your skills, knowledge and abilities.  You could even capture a few celebrity endorsements to build more interest in yourself.  This is where you can use your friends and colleagues to help create a little hype about you.  They could verbally promote you to the company’s informal trust, advice and communication networks which permeate the entire company.  Then, as managers got themselves in certain situations and needed someone to solve the problem, the first person that would come to their mind would be you. 

So why wait until you pull the cord to verify your chute will work?  Use networking, friends and colleagues to help you build your career and develop a feasible strategy.  By using others to help you pack your chute, you reduce the risk of it failing when the cord is pulled. 

2. Failing to manage risk.  There’s no doubt that our actions have consequences.  As many companies have been learning lately, consequences may take some time to come to fruition but they will come.  So, what motivates organizational leaders to manage risk?  The driver for this behavior (hedge or speculate) is in how they assess the amount of personal career risk they must manage.   These are private actions, not visible to anyone else.  Organizations are full of managers with high and low career concerns.  Those with low career concern feel comfortable in their position and don’t feel pressure to speculate or hedge in the management of risk.  The only time they will hedge is after poor performance.  Managers with high career concerns, common early in their career, must work to produce really good results to convince shareholders and outsiders of their quality, they are likely to engage in speculation.  Now imagine companies are led by managers who are feeling considerable pressure to perform.  They worry about their job security (high career concern).  Naturally, these managers will begin to speculate more; that is, engage in riskier behavior.  Too much of this can result in disastrous results, as the most recent wave of failures have shown us. 

Maintaining a healthy balance between hedging and speculating is difficult, especially under the current circumstances where organizations are seeking to reduce cost of operations to keep the ship from sinking.  Companies are likely to begin to reduce the size of the workforce.  This will push you to focus heavily on managing your career risk.  To reduce your risk, focus on three areas:  primary investment (your main job), volunteer investment, and lifelong learning investment.  With regards to your primary investment, your reputation, or brand, has a major impact on your future.  If you have a good reputation, you don’t have to do very much.  However, if you feel your reputation indicates less than par performance, you may consider hedging to avoid further defamation.  For your volunteer investment, you can offset previous risky moves to improve your position by volunteering, especially if a “shake-up” is expected in the near future.  You should take a proactive role in the change and become part of it.  Try to get on the assessment team or even just support one of the members of the team.  Lastly, don’t forget your lifelong learning investment.  You should always invest time and energy in training, workshops, degrees, mentorship, etc.     

3.  Withdrawing too much from the trust account.  As many of the recently failed organizations have learned, taking too much risk can result in a loss of trust among those around them.  As they bought and sold securities, people began to lose trust in the stated value of those mortgaged-backed securities.  Eventually, the complete lack of trust left the securities with little to no value.  Your career works just the same.  Similar to the “Emotional Bank Accounts” Stephen Covey introduced in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we all have trust accounts that we make deposits and withdrawals.  Once company leadership takes a risk and their goals aren’t achieved, they make a withdrawal from the trust account.   Withdrawals and deposits aren’t equal.  It takes a lot more effort to build trust than it does to lose it.  In your career, taking a lot of risk can grow trust faster but failing to capitalize on the risk could result in losing it just as fast.  Keeping a high balance on your trust account is critical in today’s dynamic corporate world. 

Building trust isn’t easy and requires consistent behavior.  To improve your trust in relationship, you should:
• Focus on being responsive to others and following through on commitment
• Use facts and data rather than your reputation
• Admit mistakes, fix them and move on
• Gather feedback and act on it
• Be trustworthy….ensure confidentiality when others ask for it.

These three lessons are vital to surviving corporate dynamics.  Failing to heed these could land you, just like many of the recently failed company employees, in another organization.