The Find: If you’re one of the millions who are welcoming in the new year by fretting about job security, business guru Tom Peters is offering a self-examination tool to help you determine how safe your job is.- The Source: The blog of Tom Peters.
The Takeaway: The coming year promises plenty of uncertainty for managers, and perhaps the most pressing issue for many is the security of their job. If this is a worry that’s got you tossing and turning all night, than Tom Peters has a quiz for you.
The questions come from entrepreneur and author Raj Setty and are intended to help you think about how essential you are to your company and, by extension, ways to expand beyond your basic job description and make yourself impossible to lose.
Before he begins, Peters offers one caveat: not all questions are relevant for people at all levels:
- Is your job core to what the company stands for?
- What will the company/department lose by eliminating your job? Please note that the question is not, ‘What will the company gain by keeping you in that job?’ During a crisis, avoiding threats (rather than going after opportunities) will take center stage. If there is no significant threat, there is no big safety net for the job.
- Is your department proud of you because of your personal brand? OR
Are you proud of the brand of your department? The answer should ideally be: both. - What is the assessment of your ‘value’ in the eyes of the stakeholders? If the answer is vague, such as ‘a lot’ or ’significant,’ you have to re-visit the topic. Can you quantify your value in some measure, and is that value justifiable?
- Is your job ‘offshorable?’ If your job can be moved offshore, then chances are it will be—in some form or fashion.
- Do you care as if it’s your own?
- Can you handle office politics well?
- What is the cost of maintaining you? There is the cost that you can measure (money, overhead, etc.) and there is the cost that is ‘real’—which includes, but is not limited to, the emotional cost of dealing with you everyday.
- Are you likeable? In tough times (and probably all times) a combination of 7 out of 10 on skills and 9 out of 10 on attitude is preferred to the other way around.
Check out Peters’s website for a more complete analysis of each question.
The Question: How can worried managers increase their job security in the current economy?
