Management changes? Uncertain of your Future?

I drafted an article about this some weeks back but haven't published it yet. It was advice about the proactive and positive things you can do to keep your job. I imagine I'll post it one day because I like sharing information that I hope will help people, but the more pointed advice at the root of all of this is a little "faster to market", and evidence suggests that this is advice that needs to be broadcast sooner rather than later. So...

If your management changes, and you'd like to keep your job, then one very simple piece of advice is the best I can give you:

Any behaviors that are designed exclusively to protect your job, are going to be the ones that are likely to ensure that you lose it.

I see people exhibiting bad and ill-conceived behaviors like this all the time and it blows my mind. They mostly fall into these three categories:

• Poor Choice #1: Hold back key information- Keep it all to yourself and they can't fire you because you're too important. It's in your head. It's not on paper. How can they let you go? You're indispensable! The company will fail without you here! You're safe.
• Poor Choice #2: The P.R. Campaign- Spend time going around the office making sure everyone knows how important you are. Be sure to make it clear to everyone that if the new guy thinks he can replace you, he has another think coming. You have a strong support system of people who will protect you from this new threat.
• Poor Choice #3: Sabotage and Subterfuge - Undermine the new boss. Dig up dirt on the new guy and spread it around. Talk trash about them behind their back to key people in the organization. Heck, talk trash about them right to their face. Read their email. Browse their files. Read all of their bosses email.

So the positive way to assert my original point is essentially to reverse it:

Any behaviors designed exclusively to enable your new manager's success, are going to ensure your candidacy of becoming a beneficiary of it.

In other words, if you bend over backwards to make your manager successful, they're going to see you as a potential long-term asset and they may keep you on. They might even place you in a key role.

Let's be frank, though. May and might. This situation is all about chances and maximizing your odds. You have a chance to stay on and be a part of the team, but you also have a chance to wind up on the unemployment line. Both things can happen, and you largely have limited control over your destiny. My point is merely that within the limits of the controls that you have, that you're going to have far better chances if you're acting as a part of the solution, rather than turning into the problem's poster boy.

And, if nothing else, if you've done everything you can do and you still lose your job, everyone you work with is going to remember you as the great person and a good coworker, who just wanted to do the right thing for everyone involved. Some of those folks are the managers and leaders of tomorrow... and guess who they're going to think of when they have an opening.