How not to get retrenched / 2











WORKING is essentially show business. You cannot just work hard behind the scene. You must be visible, come up front to show your hard work.

To be brutally honest, as long as people around you and above you do not see you working (because you're behind the scene all the time), you are in trouble. When the next round of cuts comes, between two people whose jobs are expendable, the invisible one will be the one sacked.

It's unfair, but life is unfair and working life is even more unfair. Your job -- besides working hard and ensuring you get paid -- is to make working life a bit fairer to you. You can't bet with certainty that your job is always safe, but at least visibility gives you better odds.

So you have to show everyone you are working hard, that your job is seen to be important to the bosses (i.e. your boss and your boss's boss), although it may not be important to the company.

There -- you have the dirty little corporate secret. A job that is essential to the bosses is not always the same as one that is essential to the company. Sometimes there is a happy coincidence when what you are doing is essential to both the company AND also essential to the bosses. Usually it is not the case.

Between the two situations, it's a safe bet that those whose work is seen as important to the bosses will keep their job, the rest will have to go, regardless of their true worth to the company.

Why is this so?

Because your bosses' jobs are not safe either. Your job is only important to them if they think that you can help them keep theirs.

Be realistic, working for "the company" is an abstract notion. The company doesn't function except through people. Everyone works for some real, concrete human being -- their boss, who in turn works for his boss, and so on.

Read on... Make you boss grateful to you

Careers | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 |

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