How To Thrive In Your Career Despite Corporate Churn

The following is an edited excerpt from the book, A Guide to Positive Disruption: How to Thrive and Make an Impact in the Churn of Today’s Corporate World by Joanna Martinez.

I came face-to-face with churn in a New Jersey machine shop. In a new position as a manufacturing manager, I was feeling pretty good about myself. One day, a machinist took me aside to show me what he had hidden in his tool cart.

The older man pulled opened a drawer and pointed to a yellowed, dog-eared piece of paper he had taped to the bottom. It named every manufacturing manager he had worked for during his twenty-seven years with the company. The list was long — more than twenty-seven names — and next to each one was written the person’s start and end date.

First and last name, start date, dash, end date.

At the bottom of the list was a name with a start date, a dash, and no end date. Joanna Martinez, it said. I felt like I was looking at my own tombstone.

The man smiled as if to say, “You may think you’re important now, but don’t get too comfortable. I’ve outlasted all these manufacturing managers who were here before you.” Indeed, according to his list, they were turning over a new manager about every ten months.

Recognizing some of the names, I called the people to see if the machinist was just making it up. No, it was real; those people all said they had worked there, but there had been a change of some sort, and they left for another assignment.

Holy Hannah, I thought to myself, we’re not going through a disruptive period here — this is how things are and have been for years. That was my rude awakening, but it was also my moment of enlightenment.

After that day, I kept track of every time I lost a position due to something beyond my control that happened at a company. It didn’t take long to realize that disruption wasn’t the exception — it was the nature of the beast that had become corporate America.

It’s Not Your Fault

“Chaos is the new normal.”

I heard that from Chris Sawchuk of The Hackett Group. It’s truer today than ever before, and you need to accept and even embrace it, because it’s not going to go away.

The fact that much of this is beyond your control is worth noting, because oftentimes, you can do everything right and still lose your job. As an example, in another assignment, I ran a small factory making dermatological products.

One of them, an acne medicine, was being tested for effectiveness when a study showed some fascinating results. The medicine didn’t just treat acne; it also made wrinkles disappear. Almost overnight, we had this blockbuster product on our hands. Sales skyrocketed.

Now, you would think that my career would have skyrocketed, too, but our facility was too small to handle the demand for the product. The facility was shut down, and manufacturing was moved to a bigger site. That was the right decision for the company to make, because we never would have been able to add the space, machinery, and people we needed quickly enough to capitalize on the sudden demand.

But now, here I was again — a manager with nothing to manage. I had to prove to the company that I was worth keeping, and I found myself jockeying for a position at the bigger facility, starting all over with people who didn’t know me.

It wasn’t just bad luck. This sort of churn happens every day. It’s happening right now to somebody in some shop somewhere, probably even somewhere in the company you’re currently working for. Or to you.

It’s not only manufacturing that’s affected, either. There’s churn in every industry to a certain degree. Even in the medical field, you could be a well-respected physician with a good practice when your local hospital expands its mission and decides that it wants to buy your practice. Or a new technology makes the techniques you’ve been successfully mastering for years obsolete.

What Drove The Churn, and What’s Continuing To Drive It?

Are you wondering how we got to this place? Think about the dramatic productivity increases we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

Massive storage and computing power can retrieve, slice, and dice data and deliver information at lightning speed, and that enables rapid business decision-making. Thirty years ago, a company hired a team of accountants to keep the books, whereas today, technology can tell a company how much cash is on hand, what the sales numbers are, and anything else management needs to know about the facts of the business — in seconds. Think about how fast a machine using artificial intelligence can learn. Much faster than any of us.

Globalization and low-cost labor centers allow businesses to move human tasks to places where real estate, taxes, and human resources are much cheaper. Invention, innovation, and entrepreneurialism have exploded, too, with new ways of doing things and new companies to do them springing up, which affects anyone who’s still doing things the “old” way. These changes benefit companies that can now operate better, faster, cheaper, and with fewer people, freeing up financial resources, which they can then use to buy up other companies or expand into new markets.

Hence, the churn.

My first big layoff was a major cut with a lot of positions being terminated. It was agonizing for the people losing their jobs and also for the management, the people who had to deliver the news. No one in the factory had done anything wrong; the reality was that competitors used better processes and had lower costs, and the end customers didn’t see enough difference in products to justify the higher prices our company charged.

One senior manager cried as he addressed the team, telling us that this would never happen again. He was wrong. As the competition became more relentless and cost pressures grew, the whole site was eventually shut down and is now a shopping mall. He didn’t see it then, but it was the first of many adjustments that ended with the products being made in Brazil.

Once again, this isn’t unique to manufacturing. Some young people I know work in digital advertising, a field that didn’t exist twenty years ago. They help ensure that their clients’ websites or products pop up on the first page of an online search. There’s a tried and true process based on the keywords that people enter into search engines. But what if you’re speaking into a device that’s sitting on your night stand? The algorithms are different when you’re using a chatbot, and the results are different. So even these new experts in a new field need to constantly learn more to stay even with the technology changes.

Job churn has a massive effect on your personal life. You may want to get married, buy a house, and start a family. You may want to get a nicer apartment, save for retirement, or enjoy some traveling. If your thoughts are occupied with worry about your job going away, how can you entertain the idea of investing a bunch of money in anything that requires monthly payments?

How can you enjoy any new acquisition if you’re always worried about your job?

It’s Not All Bad News

As the final edits are made on this book, the US is at nearly full employment. Jobs go away, and new ones are popping up.

For example, one could have predicted that with the rise of mobile banking options, career opportunities in banking would be limited. And it’s true that cash transactions are increasingly being handled with a technology solution. Yet banking employment is up, as more people are being employed to sell services instead of focusing on transactions. Lower-skilled jobs are diminishing, while higher-skilled positions are on the rise.

Insurance companies and businesses that process millions of forms use software robots to get the right information in the right place and to the right people, but someone needs to create and manage the robots. Companies need smart people who stay current with technology and embrace the possibilities of what new technologies bring to the workplace — people who are transformers.

There are choices with disruption. You can embrace it and thrive, fight it and probably fail, or flee and buy yourself some time.

Fighting it means you’ll live in misery, slugging it out with forces that are beyond your control. Fleeing the churn means delaying the inevitable. If you decide it’s not for you, you can move to another industry or job with more stability and fewer disruptions. Some industries move more slowly than others, and fleeing the churn of your current workplace may make sense for a while if you find a safe place to land that fits your pace. But it’s only a delay.

First, Accept It

What’s the takeaway? There is churn. It exists, and now is the time for you to look around and recognize it. It won’t go away. You can let it scare you into career paralysis, but that won’t prepare you for the next hostile takeover. There’s always going to be competition. But there’s also always room for someone who stands out and can adapt good practices from the industry they’re working in and bring them to another.

Your choice — the best choice — is to be proactive. Adaptable. Transformative. Inertia and denial are not your friends. Action and forward thinking are what you need.

That doesn’t mean you drop everything and work on the suggestions in this book until your head is ready to explode. Start small. Start with a few modest steps.

Is the world being disruptive to you? Be disruptive back.

Key Points

• Churn exists, and it’s not going away.
• No industry or position is immune to this churn, so throughout your working career, you’ll have to adapt and adjust many times.
• Fear causes inertia. Remove the fear by having a backup plan.

Questions For The Reader

1. What are you worried about right now in your chosen career?
2. What changes are taking place in your company that might affect your specific position?

For more on how to become an effective agent of constructive change, pick up A Guide to Positive Disruption: How to Thrive and Make an Impact in the Churn of Today’s Corporate World by Joanna Martinez.