Paul role-plays as Jim, a hapless and cranky young product/project manager at some company or other. Jim hankered for a promotion, oh how he hankered, but now there's a recession looming, and Jim—well, he's never experienced one before. So he's come to ask Rich for advice. How do you thrive in a recession? What do you need to do to get the big account, or the big promotion, when things are looking kind of dire? Rich, of course, has bullet points.

hey Rich.

let's imagine instead of being Paul, I'm Jim.

I am a mid-level person.

I'm a manager at an organization.

Okay?

And I have been reading the paper and the paper says that a recession is coming.

I've never seen one of these before.

What are they?

they?

You're 29, aren't you?

Yes, I am.

am.

Um,

essentially, the American economy, by default is supposed to grow

It's the best part about it.

and then sometimes it.

Stops growing or grows a lot less.

It recedes.

Ooh, yeah.

tide going out.

Yeah.

And what happens with recessions is if you're still kind of humming

along, assuming growth, you could fall through the cracks.

You could.

You could.

So what happens is businesses, the economy in general kind of hangs back.

Christmas budget, Christmas gift budget goes down, parties get smaller.

Companies spend less.

Companies hire less.

When companies hire less, that means, oh, companies give less raises.

That means you have less spending power.

So it's this vicious cycle of sort of a throttling down of the economy.

Um, and it's, it can be, it can be.

It can be rough.

So about two years ago I got promoted to associate product

director.

Congratulations, Thank you.

Thank you.

And I'm

Who's ass did you kiss to get that promotion?

Well, I,

I know you don't appreciate me even insinuating

such I advocated for myself.

I filled out my self review.

I was, I was,

Congrats Jim.

Congrats.

So, I would normally be up for a promotion again this year.

I want to make associate senior product director,

which I assume would mean a raise as

I'd love

a raise.

I, when I go on all the various websites that tell me how to be, yeah.

They seem to either be focused on getting me to start a union.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

getting me to, uh, accept that I'm going to get laid off and telling me what to do.

Or they tell me, just hold on, hold on, go to your job and keep your head really low.

And I'm suspicious of all that because deep down I work for

a pretty big organization.

I was pretty ambitious.

I get good reviews, I get, you know, three stars, four stars, you know, I get a.

usually get a bonus at the end of.

I usually get a small bonus at the end of the year.

you might be worried about that too, in these tough times.

I'm, yes, I wanna buy a house, and here we are and the US economy is

contracting and you're about 700 years older than I am so, is that right?

Should I just not buy a house?

Should I just kind of hide under the desk and hope that the grim

reaper doesn't come for me?

What am I supposed to do?

I'm not gonna get into whether you should buy a house or not.

Uh, that's a personal choice.

And you have to look at that in the context of the, of

your entire financial picture.

Do not hide under the desk.

That's a bad scene.

Okay.

So what, what you wanna do?

Look, let me speak from the perspective of.

of, you

know, a business, uh, entrepreneur who had hundreds of people work for me.

There's a calculation you do, which is, how critical is this person to the org?

Like, render yourself absolutely key, such that if they touch the bandaid, not even

rip it off, it is absolute pain for them.

Render yourself critical.

So hiding under the desk is probably not gonna succeed.

You're probably not gonna be able to do that.

Okay, fine.

So it

get out of get, get up, sit in your chair.

It sounds like what you're saying is I, whenever I do

anything, I should email my boss.

No, don't do that.

That's not good either.

So what do I do?

Um, If you take a look at what the mechanisms are for why a business

would be stable and thrive, right?

You are in the machine.

You are one of the gears in the machine.

Continuing to put yourself.

And render yourself key to stability and growth for that

company means that they need you.

Such that when they do have to sit down and that's a grim, I've been in

that meeting where you have to kind of sit down and like look at the list

and we gotta shave off X dollars.

It's actually very clinical.

Is it?

Oh, we cannot let Jim go.

That would just be devastating.

We're not gonna do it.

it.

Let me be Paul for a minute, Jim, and I'll talk to Jim.

Jim, can you hear me?

Yes, I can hear you.

Okay, Jim, what you need to do is be aware of the fact that when it gets tough,

you're a line on a spreadsheet because everything's aligned on a spreadsheet.

The CEO is aligned on a spreadsheet.

Yes, they're all there.

When they do these meetings, the CEO's there and his salary is there, like it's

Bosses have bosses, even CEOs,

and so somewhere down that list is you, Jim.

You are an fte, a full-time employee, and your salary is.

Yeah, And

your position is known and the value you bring to the organization is

calculated in some sort of hand wavy way.

You gotta figure out, you're a little cell on that spreadsheet and you gotta

figure out how to start waving a flag.

You gotta come out of that

Yeah.

But it's not about getting attention to you.

Don't draw attention to yourself as a line on a spreadsheet,

especially for senior people.

Senior people frown on that.

They, they read it pretty quickly and they're like, oh, you don't value my time.

Okay, so you're telling me I'll be Jim again.

You're telling me, rich, that if they are, my entire job is to make sure that

if they look at that spreadsheet and think, what if we get rid of the gym line?

They go, Ooh, hold on a minute.

Okay.

Yes.

Well, they, they will, they will do that, right?

Like they, they will do that down the list.

Usually it's layers below.

It's like, Hey, department head, you need to go shave off 800 grand off

your, off your next year's budget.

Give me the names.

But this is inhuman and I'm a valuable person, rich.

I know, but recessions test the existential will of companies,

Again, this is Paul Recessions are wonderful for spreadsheet

vendors and terrible for employees.

They're rough.

I mean, and, and you know what, what drives them?

What drives them is this sense that.

Under the status quo, the whole endeavor may be at risk, so we're gonna

have to, um, uh, shed some weight.

We're gonna have to throw some, some stuff off the boat, right?

Like, yeah, there's, because we don't want the whole thing to sink.

That's the driver, right?

All right, rich.

I accept that I'm aligned on a spreadsheet and I accept that you're gonna tell me

what to do and that I need to do it.

So I go to work, I log in.

I do my tasks in the, in the, the task management system.

I email my boss, I talk

Sounds like a pretty lousy job.

Well,

I do pretty well.

I work from home.

I have a good setup and I have a nice window I look out of

and a golden retriever, and I'm a mid-level project manager.

Do you go to work at all?

No.

Well, we don't really go to work that much anymore.

The office is there.

You should go to work

Why?

Everybody's remote now?

Well, I, I think part of rendering, rendering yourself

critical and elevating your visibility and connecting with others, frankly.

Um, uh, part I think, I think it's hard to get noticed when you're

home, uh, when they have to make these hard decisions to feel it, to

feel like you have to show your, you know, your productivity highlight

reel during that one meeting you.

have once a week for 30 minutes with your boss is not great.

See, you're saying I should go in and, and go to every office and talk

to everyone and show them that I'm there?

I think, I think connecting with others is a valuable part of

the tool set to rendering yourself important and essential to a place.

Yes, and I think it's good.

But hold Let me be Paul again.

Hey, Jim.

When you go into the office, your job is not to walk around and tell

everybody how great you are you are.

Here's your job.

What are you working on?

How's that going?

Is there anything I can do to

connect?

All right.

I'll be Jim again, rich.

I'm willing to go into the office at least three days a week

and I'll, I'll ask people what they're up to and I don't mind.

A little extra work.

Um, if you're a manager, you may be worried about your hitting your

numbers or you may be worried about, um.

The.

wait, rich, my manager's job is to advocate for his

people and build their careers.

That's part of his job.

It's part of his job, his job.

And again, we're gonna have to grossly generalize here, maybe to hit a certain

sales target or it maybe to make sure, um, the, um, the qa, uh, R uh,

failure rate is less than 1% for the widgets that come outta the factory.

Who knows what, how people's success gets measured differently

depending on what their job is.

Part of it is, of course, keeping their team happy, and that should be part of it.

The best thing you can do is to internalize goals of your manager.

It is an amazingly powerful thing to do because what you're essentially saying is,

I feel your pain and I'm here to help you.

but I don't wanna become a suck up brown-nosing piece of garbage.

Jim, you've got broader issues.

That's clear.

I don't know if it's a dad thing, but here we are.

Um, nobody, good manager.

Don't respond well to sucking up.

They never do.

They just never do.

In fact, they, they see right through it.

Um, and they're like, they feel swindled.

Okay, rich, I'm gonna go into the office and I'm gonna say hi to people.

I'll have a cup of coffee and then I'm gonna go to my boss's office.

What do you want me to say?

How are things?

Okay.

How are things?

You be the boss.

How are things?

Um, oh, you're asking me right

Sure.

Um, Good.

The Philly office, the numbers just came in.

Um, I don't know how to bring them up.

Uh, we expected better, um, better deals to come through.

They're not coming through.

Um, I, I'm wondering if we should throw an event or spend on Mark.

I don't know.

Um, but I gotta roll these up.

Boston looks good.

New York looks good.

Philly.

Um, Is falling short.

And I'm, I'm a little anxious about it cuz they're gonna look at Northeast.

They don't care that it's Philly.

Hey, boss.

Do

you

you can call me Rich Jim?

Oh, you've worked for me for seven years.

You still call me Boss.

Thanks, Mr.

Rich.

Can I have the Philly numbers for a minute?

I'll, I'm not gonna share 'em with anybody, but I do think with Boston,

we did a nice thing with that platform

Yeah,

marketing work, and so I was part of that and I, I

don't know, maybe this'll work.

I don't know.

I just wanna see.

Is that cool?

Yeah, go take, I mean, sure.

Just don't, you know, don't broadcast out.

Not a lot of people know yet.

Are you around?

Okay.

Let me just, I, I'll, I'll report back.

I'll send you an email or I'll come by.

Okay.

That okay.

End scene.

Okay.

so that you're telling me that in order to thrive in a recession, I

have to deliver value to the company more so than I might be doing now.

I, I mean, the company is, you know, I I, it always amazes me

how sunflowers bend towards the sun.

It's actually kinda wild companies are gonna bend towards the

actors within them that make it more successful and resilient.

That is a natural sort of weird, macro social outcome of companies.

That's just how the world works.

Um,

but I'm still crabby about this.

It seems to all be about money.

Yeah.

Well, no, not necessarily.

You could be in a nonprofit and a nonprofit may be trying to find a

new donor, or there's a big whatever.

Um, companies have most companies most, let's, let's zoom out.

Most organizations

have,

um, motivat.

in

a macro sense.

Right?

Uh, and and what are those motivations?

They are oftentimes to make money for their owners and to take care of

their employees, employees to provide a stable place to work for people.

But ultimately you don't start a comp, I be wary of the company

whose mission statement is to pri provide people with stable jobs.

It can't be that, that can't be the end.

That's the role of a union.

That's the role of a union.

That's the role of a government, that's a role of a commune,

Not of a government that hires people, but of a government policy.

a policy, a company, a, a company performing as a selfish

actor brings stability, and that is counterintuitive because it sounds greedy

and selfish, but that's not what it

is

We're back to the spreadsheet, and this is hard.

This part is very hard because, you know, it, it essentially is one

of those narratives where people go, you know, God, they just treat

people like lines on a spreadsheet.

And the actual honest answer is yes, you do.

When you work at in management at a company a.

A big part of your week is you look at a list of humans and resources

on a spreadsheet and you sum them up and you go, how's that going?

And once a month somebody comes and shows you the spreadsheet again and says,

looks like we're going this direction.

And you go, boy, we're gonna have to change that spreadsheet.

That is tough.

Like,

That is

tough.

But, but I, I really do feel like when we, when, as

you're giving these points, right,

The

recession makes that spreadsheet more important every day to your bosses.

And you need to know that you're on it and it doesn't mean

you're good or bad or whatever.

I remember processing really hard when I was in my twenties trying to figure out

like the fact that I could be laid off.

Was really upsetting to me.

It didn't feel fair or right.

Like I would do my job.

And then there were times where I did a terrible job and I kept expecting

to get laid off and nobody cared.

So it goes in all sorts of different

Of course,

Being on the spreadsheet sucks, but I don't, there is

no, it is above the pay grade of and Ford advisors to fix that.

Like that's, you know.

So Rich, okay.

I'm gonna do these things.

It still feels like I'm sucking up to my boss, but I'm gonna believe

that by being helpful, that's okay.

Yeah.

Anything else?

That's gonna turn me into a suck up in office.

Brown Nosing Weasel employee.

Uh, I, no, uh, but I will give you some bad news and then hopefully

a way to navigate outta the bad news.

You may do all of this and you may do real well, and you may still not get,

you may still not get what you deserve.

Um, humans, uh, defend their territory.

They defend their status.

Um, if a manager, if your sees you as an absolute rockstar.

Uh, the good ones advocate for you.

I wanna see you get promoted, the bad ones, um, view you as a threat and

will actually either a, take credit for your work and not recognize,

not, not help you, um, project.

Your abilities in, in a way that'll, that'll benefit you because

they see it as a threat to them.

Right.

fair, let them take credit for your work as long as

they also do advocate for you.

Yes, yes.

Don't, don't get upset if they take credit for your work, get upset

if they take credit for your work and then suppress your success.

and here is the number one anti-political, the

most, no, let me do it again.

Here is the most powerful political tool you can use.

Your work, it is going to get out.

Word will get out.

Talk to your peers.

Talk about how.

Solve the thing openly, and it is a brutally neutralizing thing, and I'm

saying this as, as someone who ran an agency and helped our clients navigate

really rough political waters, the number one thing we would say to them is, get

this workout and everyone will line.

And will get on your side because they will want to be near your success work.

Your work output is the most powerful political tool.

here is.

This is a very abstract lesson, but it's completely real.

Social reality is nowhere near as pot.

As reality,

reality,

reality.

But people forget that because they can't see or touch reality.

Reality, especially we were building digital things.

But the true, it's, it's true of opening the new store or going

into the new market or dealing with the problem in front of you.

The, what people immediately react to is, well, you know, Mike is

gonna get really upset about this.

Yeah, we need to work around that.

And now everybody's orienting around, Mike getting upset.

If you can just go do your work, and maybe you do need to go home and not

be at the office for a minute, but more likely you just need to go in the office.

You can get some work done.

You'll be amazed at how much more stable you are.

If you find yourself constantly working around what humans expect

as opposed to getting something done, then start looking.

Because you will be the first on the block and you may not

have the ability to change that.

Yeah.

Your work output, your work product is much more powerful than oral arguments.

It's real . It's

It's just the reality of

But not in the local, not this week,

this but over a six month period.

And that's the hardest thing to process.

And in fact, what it does is it gets everybody motivated to be political.

Yes, that's right.

That's right.

All right,

rich.

hang in there, everyone, um, uh,

I don't know if there will be a recession regardless.

I don't know if we need to,

David Solomon says there will be, and he's a dj.

Well, David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman

Sachs, and he's a

said there's a possibility there will be a

Do you think he has a little DJ booth in his office at Goldman Sachs

and when he brings you in to yell at you, he's just like, hold on a minute.

And then he like puts up his hand cuz the drop is coming and then it's like you're.

Ah, that's a rough, that's a drop.

I don't think that you can DJ a reduction in force at Goldman Sachs.

I think that's not cool.

cool.

So I doubt he

doesn't, I don't think he

the board would have a strong

Um, we, uh, we hope you find this useful.

Poor Jim.

Jim's a little crabby.

He needs to get in the office and just like perk up and put on a bow.

Um, hit us up, we.

At Ziade Ford on Twitter, we are everywhere.

Podcasts go and hello at Ziade ford.com.

If you've got topic ideas or you need advice on anything, we are

here in the spirit of generosity.

Paul,

hang in there folks.

Recessions happen.

We will get through it and uh, we'll keep talking.

We'll keep figuring it all out rich.

That's what we do.

Kitty cat hanging off a tree, a tree

Hang in there

in

there.