photo credit: BlueRobot

Wisconsin has seen protests over a so-called budget repair bill from the Governor that have not happened since the Vietnam war. Tens of thousands of protesters have descended on the capital in Madison, WI (where I live) to protest the bill and to protest its signing after having passed the Republican Senate and Assembly. Others in Indiana, Ohio — even Idaho — have done the same against bills in their own states.

Now, no matter where you come down on the merits of the bill (where I come down is on the recall side…), one thing is perfectly clear: business, and now government, can totally change the circumstances of your employment almost on a whim.

In other words, you have little control over your job situation at any given time or with any given job. Corporations, of course, have relentlessly laid off people, changed benefits, and moved jobs off shore at their pleasure. Now government can unilaterally remove unions and change all the rules for work at a government agency.

Now, you can’t change this situation unless you belong to a movement and even then, movements take time.

What you can control is what you do with your career and your work to give yourself employment security.

You can control your job skills and job performance

If you consistently check your job skills, you will find what skills need honing. If you consistently check your job performance — the results you bring to the business — you continually build results that make your work attractive to other managers.

Most people don’t do this — they passively wait to find another job only to discover critical job skills needed in the marketplace are not there. Or they think they can skate by on the results they bring to the job and find their competition for the job showing results to a potential employer.

You can control your business network

Your business network provides you information about your profession, news on other companies, and possible positions that could open that fit your needs. You control how you build and use your business network — adding people you know to LinkedIn, researching other companies by talking to your friends that work there, joining professional organizations to expose you to others doing your type of work in other companies, and on and on. You control that.

Most people don’t even get the personal phone number of people they know leaving the company for another — so you can talk to that person about the other company.

You can control your job search skills

Job searches — building a resume, marketing yourself, having phone and face-to-face interviews — are the areas least used by most people. It makes sense — one searches for a job less often than writing a Word document. What most people don’t do, however, is orient their resumes to results, know how to market themselves during interviews, nor building and practicing their stories that show them the hero needed by the hiring manager.

Your competition gets the job. You don’t.

You can control your finances

Your financial savings give the backup you need to turn down a job because it isn’t right for you. To turn down a job where your entire being is screaming a bad fit instead of desperate to take the job because you are not employed. Your finances back stop you and help you prevent decision by desperation.

My newsletter talks about these subjects above and beyond what you read here. Plus, by signing up for my free newsletter, you also get The Cubicle Warrior Hierarchy for Employment Security. You see, these areas are a hierarchy. You build from job skills to controlling your finances. And you can control all of that — but ignore your job skills too long — and then get pushed right back to the bottom of the hierarchy.

Too many people pursue job security. It’s the wrong path. You need to pursue employment security. Because corporations — and now governments — can simply take away any job security you think you have. They won’t care. Will you?

No related posts.

When I took my first real job – you know the one you have to explain to people when you get out of college – I was pretty excited. Finally out of that school environment, past the theory, now on to the real world feeling.

My first manager asked me to act as if my area was my own business. So that’s what I did.

And that’s where the trouble started

When I acted on my own in what I thought were the best business interests, I got called into his office. It was explained to me that I couldn’t act on my own. I couldn’t make those decisions by myself; I also needed to consult with him and he needed to approve my decisions before I could implement them.

When I naively noted that he told me to act as if my area were my own business, he told me that I should act that way – only after consulting with him.

In other words, I had to have the “own your business” mindset, but “only follow my orders” implementation.

I never learned about managers

Growing up, my father owned a law firm. It was the largest law firm in the town I grew up in back in Wisconsin. Consequently, I never heard the after-work conversations about poor managers, lousy reviews, poor decisions, possible layoffs, great teams, big projects, new processes or multiple reorganizations.

Instead, I heard about working hard to bring in business, the need to work Saturdays to catch up on the billing hours for the week, problems of the associates and their work, signing over future income to the bank to make payroll at the firm, and how tough it was in August and January because people don’t pay attorneys those months – they go on vacation or recover from the holiday bills.

After I was told to “own my business” but “do what I say,” I realized I had never learned any lessons about working with managers. Because my father never had any.

Learning to stay employed

You might laugh, of course. But think about it: if you grew up with parents working for managers, you absorbed the problems managers cause and some tactics for how to work with them.

I never did. I had to learn how to stay employed – while I was employed.

It has resulted in life-long learning about surviving — and thriving — in a cubicle.

Career Management is about staying employed, not just finding a job

Too many people believe career management is about finding the next job. Most career sites will tout their expertise on resumes, interviews and learning new job skills. All of that is important, of course. But all of that is only a small part of career management.

The full picture of career management is staying employed. That means working with management. Working with teams. Understanding the politics of the situation. Working with people to get stuff done despite obstacles. Figuring out how long a position will last. Calculating the probability of layoffs. Putting one year’s take home pay in the bank to prevent stress from a layoff. Watching the company fortunes to decide if your employer will succeed in the marketplace. Watching other companies to discover new ways of doing work that will impact your career. Seeing layoffs your industry and determining when they might happen to you.

And a host of other skills too many to name.

It’s about staying employed

You’ll find some articles here on Cube Rules about resumes and finding jobs, of course. But most of the focus of the site is on all the rest of the stuff that goes into managing your career by staying employed.

It’s the next level of career management. The right level.

No related posts.

Then Sunday night, we rocked out at the Melissa Etheridge concert in Seattle. The lady plays a mean guitar. I had forgotten how much fun loud rock music with a five person band can be.

As a site note, I’ve been very pleased with the number of people listening to the Career Management Tips podcasts. Thanks for listening to them – I really like producing them.

Easing your way back into Monday, check out two articles:

Christine Kane, a pretty good guitar player in her own right, nails it with another success habit: The tweak. And what tweaks to use against those yammers. Seriously, what a great insight into how things work. Start tweaking your career.

If you are new to Twitter, or thinking about getting on the service, Shel Israel gives you 7 tips for new Twitter users. They are good ones.

Enjoy your week.

Scot

Related posts:

1. Career Management Monday, December 1, 2008
2. Career Management Monday, September 15, 2008
3. Career Management Monday, October 06, 2008
4. Career Management Monday, September 29, 2008
5. Career Management Monday, October 13, 2008

Most people who read this site know that I am a full-fledged Green Bay Packer fan. Moving from Wisconsin to Illinois (to have to put up with the Bears!), I specifically selected DirecTV because I could buy all NFL games during the season. Including the Packers. Moving to Seattle-land allowed me to join the 300-strong Northwest Packer Backers. Yeah, green and gold flow through my veins…

In March, Brett Favre, the distinguished Green Bay quarterback, retired. I recorded his entire retirement press conference and shed a few tears with him. I recorded and watched, through the magic of TiVo, his NFL Network highlights show and the Super Bowl that he won.

It was the only way I knew how to both celebrate, and, yes, grieve his retirement after 18 years in the NFL. Despite all the back and forth about his retirement in previous years, almost a ritual in Wisconsin, it was clear to me that this was a retirement. Not because he no longer had the skills, but because the grind and the mental discipline were taking too much of a toll to do the job.

There are many lessons for Cubicle Warriors in this tale.

I admired the way Brett left the game. He and his wife, Deanna, were going to take a year off from events. Money was not an issue (and shouldn’t be, given what quarterbacks make and how long he played). He was going to work his ranch in Mississippi and figure out what to do next in his life. Not many people get the chance to go out admired — or adored — by their work.

Brett did. And then he blew it.

This past weekend, he publicly announced that he wanted an unconditional release by the Packers because, to Brett, the Packers didn’t want him to return. This would allow Brett to negotiate with other teams, without compensation to the Packers, and play.

This, although he said he retired. Then, just weeks after the retirement press conference in March, Brett had second thoughts. The Packer management said fine and set up a chartered jet to bring him back. But before that happened, Brett said no again and stayed retired.

Packer management moved on. They needed to because they needed to plan and organize the team without the Hall of Fame quarterback. They drafted quarterbacks. They adapted the offense. They worked the leadership of Aaron Rogers, who has been the backup to Brett for three years.

The Packer management team is taking many hits the last few days by not unconditionally releasing Brett. They are taking heat because they said the team has moved on and if he came back he would not be the starting quarterback. They are being polite, but firm. You can only go through so many hoops with a person who has “the (retirement) decisiveness of a squirrel on a freeway.”

The lesson for Cubicle Warriors?

You build a reputation one play at a time. Judged by what you do with a team. You have ups and downs, but work with people enough times so they work with your strengths. You build integrity and then leadership. You build a following that makes people want to go where you go.

You then take people on an emotional roller coaster ride, blowing all that up by making those heart-wrenching emotions of March now feel cheap. Combine that with the betrayal of integrity and you’ll lose everything you built about your reputation.

Brett has now become a huge distraction on a group of people who have jobs to play on a football team that was one game away from the Super Bowl.

It is a sobering lesson on Personal Branding for Cubicle Warriors.

Scot

Related posts:

1. How Brett Favre can ruin your personal brand
2. How Brett Favre Could Save Business
3. Book Review: EPIC Change — How to Lead Change in the Global Age
4. Change your behaviors for real career change
5. Brett Favre Retires

Candidates running for political office are constantly seen with flags in the background.

Some presidents land on ships and declare “mission accomplished.”

All of these things are symbols and are meant to portray something more than the symbol itself. The red vest represented Wisconsin, the flags represent patriotism, and a sign saying “mission accomplished” has become the symbol of a failed mission.

Yet, in business, not a lot of symbols are used by individual contributors or management. Brands and logos (like the new Cube Rules logo) are symbols, of course, but they are abstract or something you sell.

But symbols are powerful tools to align people to a mission. They serve to remind people of the greater mission their work is tied to outside of our cube.

The Black Suit

I’ve only had one manager who used symbols and it wasn’t patriotic nor rising above our work. It was the “black suit.”

He never wore suits, so wearing one was going to be different in any case. But the black suit meant that he was coming to lay you off or fire you. You knew that if you walked into that door and he was wearing the black suit that it was all over for you.

That’s not a bad thing. Seeing the black suit already moved you past the “what’s going on” mode. There was no waiting to learn the answer; you knew the answer as soon as you saw the suit. The rest was details.

The Calendar Invite

Many companies have lay off processes that they follow and there is much symbolism in them as well. For me, it was getting the calendar appointment with a manager two levels above me that had the bland topic that I had never been told to prepare for. Once I got the appointment — the same one many others got as well — I knew it was all over. It was just going to be over in a couple of hours officially, but I already knew.

Unfortunately, in business, I only know symbols that represent the end of your employment!  Are there any positive symbols out there that can be pointed to as a way to keep doing focused work?

Scot

No related posts.

Many of you know that I was born and raised in Wisconsin and along with that comes the pride, joy, and tremendous stress from being a Green Bay Packer fan. Whether it was watching the “ice bowl” with Dallas in the 1960′s or the Super Bowl win in the 1996-1997 season, the Packers are my team, win or lose. And they have lost a lot.

But, for 16-years, the Packers have had a shot. The organization improved from the long drought of championships earned in the 1960′s. With the organization’s improvement came improvement in the talent of their players and an attitude that was more about winning the right way instead of just playing.

Nothing symbolizes winning the right way more than Brett Favre. In a career that is mostly full of superlatives with a few drawbacks — everyone has their weaknesses — Brett, for me, showed us that the game was meant to be fun, was about team instead of individual players or managers, and about helping each other as members of the team.

How that team jells, changes, rises to challenges, and performs on the field has been a long-time fascination with me. How can we take those change dynamics and provide them to the teams in our work? How can we instill the learning and discipline to our passions? What does management and individual contributors have to do to make things change?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I continue to watch the game looking for answers.

It will be a lot tougher to look at now because Brett — and his great wife and supporter, Deanna — will no longer be there on Sunday.

Photo credit: Morry Gash/AP from msnbc.com

My favorite pundit story about Brett: Peter King’s Sports Illustrated article on “A Penny’s True Value.”

Scot

Related posts:

1. How Brett Favre can ruin your personal brand
2. How Brett Favre Could Save Business

But when the NFL season starts, I’m all about the Green Bay Packers. I even subscribe to the premium NFL package on DirecTV just so I can watch their games every week even though I am in the Seattle Seahawk coverage area.

You see, I’ve been watching them my whole life because I was born and raised in Wisconsin. I’ve seen the Lombardi glory years, survived the 30-years of no championship, celebrated the third Super Bowl win (the twelfth championship), visited Lambeau Field, and touched the sacred grass on the field.

It is true: for better or worse, I think Brett Favre is a great quarterback.

And hope springs eternal.

Yes, I am a hopeless romantic. But the Pack is 3-0, their best start ever since their wins are all against last years playoff teams. And with the Chicago Bear loss of tonight against Dallas, the Packers have a two game lead in the NFC Central division.

Yes, it is early. But it does. Feel. Good!!!!

We will now return to our regularly scheduled blog posts. But, is this fun or what?

(Picture: Scot and wife Kate at Lambeau Field in 2006)

Scot

No related posts.

Both courtesy of Cheezhead (Hey! I’m naturally attracted to the name since I was born and raised in Wisconsin), a blog that watches the job market.

First, Jobster unilaterally changes their privacy policy giving you an opportunity to opt out:

And if unilateral changes in the policy aren’t enough for you, you can have your records stolen too:

According to Symantec security analyst Amado Hidalgo, a new Trojan horse called Infostealer.Monstres has stolen more than 1.6 million records belonging to several hundred thousand people from Monster Worldwide Inc.’s job search service.

How’s your front page?

Scot

No related posts.

This has been a whirlwind year with lots of (normal) changes in my life. But I think the sheer pace of change finally caught up with me at the end of last week. And starting Friday after work, the world became a place where I didn’t want to participate.

Eleven hours of sleep later brought me into a Saturday where I did nothing except cheer too loudly for my Green Bay Packers stomping the Seattle Seahawks in a pre-season game at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Pre-season or not, it was great to finally (be able to) cheer the (old) home team on.

And Sunday was, after another nine hours of sleep, a total bust in terms of getting anything done. When watching updates on Hurricane Dean on the Weather Channel becomes the highlight of the day, you know you’ve shut down pretty well.

So there are no great insights into being a Cubicle Warrior today. No tips on topping your performance at work. No mumbling about management’s mismanagement.

Just a day of rest. Sometimes, we all need just that.

Scot

Related posts:

1. 30 Days — 30 Career Management Tips

We’re in Door County, Wisconsin and staying at a house for the week. Very little cell phone access and even less Internet access — so this is a very old skool vacation. I’m writing this from the Sister Bay Library. All of the libraries here in Door County have wireless access; a great feature.

Enjoy your week. I’m getting in a ton of reflection time. It’s good to get away. Good to get recharged.

Scot

Related posts:

1. Vacation Policy affects Employee Engagement