Fear Fatigue

Given that the core of this book is based on a person’s fear of job loss, let’s now tackle this question head-on. After all, for all of us who are not independently wealthy, our daily transaction – trading skills and experience for money – is what keeps us alive. But what seems like our key strength can also be our single point of failure.

This chapter is not just for employees. It speaks to the same fear business owners and department managers would feel about their own careers, businesses, or simply maintaining a status quo.

So, what if you were to start each day with the question, “Is this the day I get fired?” you might reply, “How depressing! Why would I ever want to start my day like that?” I would respond that it’s only depressing if you know you don’t have the right answer.

If you answer this question with, “I don’t know. My life would be over,” or something similar, then you will be living with a particularly powerful brand of fear that will plague you every day of your life. By contrast, when you can answer the question, “Is this the day I get fired?” with the answer, “so what if it is?” you will have created a pathway away from many of the fears that dominate us. From a digital transformation perspective, this is a concept that applies not only to every employee, but to their managers as well. It’s about knowing where people stand, especially when it comes to facing change.

The fear of job loss starts to grow the moment a person lands a job. It gets even stronger when we take on a significant career-type position, and grows with every increased financial and family burden that is taken on. It becomes a millstone around everyone’s neck. Most of us have no choice but to work for a living, but that does not mean we must give up all choice in the bargain. To illustrate this, let’s step into the shoes of an entrepreneur for a moment.

The 80/20 Rule and Firing Your Weakest Customer

Entrepreneurs, which means anyone who runs a business, rather than being salaried employees of a larger company, must hunt down their livelihood one customer at a time. One of the greatest feelings in the world for an entrepreneur, then, is that of being able to walk away from the table in a negotiation. I learned this long ago when negotiating my prices with potential customers.

As I mentioned in Chapter 13, the curse of being an artisan is that you fear how much your work will cost your client, rather than how much it will make for them. That fear, which is based on whether you think they will pay, heavily influences your attitude to winning the contract and keeping the contract, and immediately gives the client the upper hand. The client can insist on adding more to the project or they may threaten to refuse to pay, in which case you are left powerless. This is the entrepreneurs’ equivalent to the just-over-broke millstone that salaried employees face.

Being able to walk away from the table when negotiating a price gives the entrepreneur far greater leverage over the entire job, and will also raise the client’s perception of the entrepreneur as a valued supplier.

Compare this to the “third ring” principle that many employers continue to apply. A company president might say, “we will always answer your call before the third ring,” referring to a time when all business was done over phone. They maintain that same mindset today by insisting that employees respond to all emails immediately, and that they remain available 24/7 to answer texts and messages. This, they believe, represents excellent customer service.

I don’t agree. As I have already described in this book, excellent customer service comes from engaged employees managing expectations in a way that allows customers to feel cared for, while allowing employees to do good work. Old-school entrepreneurs fear losing every customer, regardless of how much they actually cost to keep and care for. It’s often called “being penny-wise and pound foolish,” an old English term that refers to being overly obsessed with small details and not seeing the big picture.

A counterbalance to this mindset is to apply the 80/20 rule in terms of regularly firing your weakest, most costly customers. These are the high-maintenance customers that not only eat up a disproportionate amount of your time, but also take that time away from serving the low-maintenance, high reward customers. Costly customers can destroy a business. But a business owner’s fear of losing any customer, paired with the fear that they might not find another to replace them, becomes insurmountable. It’s the equivalent of an employee being scared by the question, “is this the day I get fired?”

A better approach, which sometimes takes an entire career for some to learn, is that of being able to walk away from the negotiating table, and of being able to prune the deadwood from the business by firing the weakest 20 percent of customers – these are actions that further the business, not threaten it. It opens up time and resources to better serve the high-return, low maintenance customers and to attract more like them.

Fear does not have to dominate anyone’s work, whether as an entrepreneur or an employee. But so long as either person does not feel that they have a solid response to the idea of losing a customer or losing a job, they will remain in powerless darkness.

You As-A-Service

The same approach, then, should be applied to every person’s career. It’s always great to land a great job that matches your personality and aspirations, but it’s still a serving that can be laced with fear of loss. Counteracting this fear with a dose of career mobility awareness not only makes your days better, it helps you sleep better, too, which helps boost your immune system and keeps things in balance. It may not be necessary to leave your current job, but it is really nice to have options. Options give you leverage and a genuine sense of personal empowerment.

Anyone already involved in digital transformation will be familiar with the as-a-service model. This is one in which companies deliver more of their value as-a-service, rather than just being a manufacturer of product.

By way of illustration, in the past, a manufacturer of photocopiers might have sold or leased a copy machine to a customer, leaving follow-up activities such as buying paper and toner refills and even performing maintenance to third parties. This meant the copier company missed out on a great deal of after-sale revenue. What is more likely today is that the same copier company will make the machine available, possibly even at a lower price, and will take care of all the other service requirements, including diagnostics, and pro-active service, which is to say performing service before something breaks.

Above and beyond the support service is the approach to quality and continuous improvement. This is the true hallmark of an as-a-service organization: it’s about keeping up with new trends, technologies, opportunities, and threats, and making sure their customers immediately benefit from this awareness.

This is why, for example, so many organizations contract with managed cloud and cybersecurity specialists and factor them into their network of trusted suppliers. These as-a-service companies make it their stock-in-trade to know what needs to be known, to provide sage advice, and to deliver tailored services to match. One of the reasons this is so valuable to a company is that internal IT staff have enough to deal with and do not have the time to learn everything they need to know about the ever-changing threat landscape or about innovations in the industry. The same could be said about every other department, too. There has never been enough time for people to look up from their keyboards and see what’s developing in their world. An as-a-service provider delivers this type of knowledge and wisdom alongside their more practical services.

How can individual people do this? And how does it affect career independence? Whether as a freelancer or a salaried employee, it means embracing the as-a-service philosophy of staying connected, up to date, and aware of the market. This means investing a small amount of each day in networking and microlearning.

Networking: The Little Black Book

In the pre-Internet era, well-connected people had a little black book , which was usually a well-worn collection of names and phone numbers. Part of its value was its size. It was small. There was not a lot of space inside a little black book, so the contacts in there had to be valuable in order to qualify.

At the same time, business cards were stored on Rolodexes, which were just a collection of small pages attached to a central spindle, each one holding a single business card. People in sales used to pride themselves on having huge Rolodexes full of cards, but they often still wondered why they had to spend so much time cold-calling or begging for appointments, when the person with their little black book simply made a single call and made things happen. The difference, of course, is one of quality over quantity.

A digital address book like Google Contacts, iCloud, Outlook, or even an Excel spreadsheet will hold thousands of names and contact details. But there is no way that any of us can truly know and trust thousands of people, no matter how much storage space we have.

A well-maintained personal network remains every person’s safety net and the predominant antidote against fear. Opportunities for careers, jobs, and sales have a much better chance of materializing through word of mouth referral than from cold calling or advertising. The people that you know and trust will help you find opportunities, and the fact that you know and trust them will also allow you to help them.

The best place for maintaining a network of quality people in my opinion is LinkedIn. Many people have only a lukewarm opinion of LinkedIn, saying it has done nothing for them. But like any great tool or device or even a human relationship, it depends on how much effort you put into it. LinkedIn comes with a lot of extra features that are not really needed, but it still has features that make it work as a highly versatile little black book.

When deployed properly, your network will get you connected to mentors, experts, colleagues, and sources of referral. Active networking seems like a waste of time to people whose schedules are already packed with emails and meetings, but that’s where the root of career fear truly thrives. Staying trapped inside an unmanageable workload that offers no space for growth is like trying to beat back the advancing tide rather than building a boat.

LinkedIn is not an address book. You might have a separate list of contacts elsewhere that includes everyone at your company, your suppliers, your car mechanic, and your doctor. These are people in your functioning day-to-day world, but few of them are really worthy of being in your little black book.

Your LinkedIn contacts should be your special people. These are people that you know, trust, and respect, and who feel the same about you. Your reputation is at stake with every person you connect with, so it is important to ask yourself, “would I confidently recommend this person’s services to a friend?” If yes, that’s someone with whom you should connect. This is very different from politely saying yes to every connection request that comes your way.

Networking on Twitter

Another often-overlooked networking opportunity is Twitter . Twitter has been much maligned over the years for being an open and unfiltered forum for all types of opinions, and there’s no question, there’s a lot of angry and offensive material there. But there’s also a good deal of good people – people with intelligent ideas and conversations.

Often these people will meet up for real time events, ranging from scheduled webinars to live group conversations, held together simply with a hashtag. Participating in these groups exposes you to quality contacts, and also allows you to participate in conversations. These are excellent opportunities to make the valuable connections that can become part of your network of quality contacts.

Lifelong Learning

Another career-security opportunity that is often given up due to the pressure of meetings and emails is lifelong learning. Many employees are already used to taking scheduled professional development courses at work, but these are seldom as effective as they could be, since they are often scheduled far apart, and because too much information is delivered in too short a period of time.

A better alternative is to take a few minutes a day to learn something new about your current industry, or maybe your next one. Social media sources like LinkedIn, Twitter, and reddit provide knowledge in small amounts, from good people with smart things to say. Yes, you have to find them, but they exist.

Much of the value of being an in-demand professional is simply knowing a little more about a topic than your client or employer does. There is no better place to obtain up-to-date knowledge than your social media circles. This, once again, is what as-a-service organizations do. They make it their mission to know what needs to be known, and they deliver that as part of the service. So can you.

Career Fear As the Ultimate Trap

The fear of losing a job is real and legitimate. As I have already mentioned, your job is directly connected to your lifestyle and your overall personal safety. For most of us, that has always been the case.

But sadly, we live in a system that not only reinforces career fear, but banks on it. Few people are taught about financial literacy in schools. They are taught instead about getting a “good job.” A good job ensures that people slide into a position where taxes are deducted at source and guarantees that banks and insurance companies all have a steady stream of income from employees who suddenly find themselves terrified to leave.

Fear has become the ultimate trap, and being artisans of our own lives, we feel powerless to do anything about it. The solution to career fear – the fear of getting fired, lies in everyone’s hands, and it all comes down to balancing and then exceeding that fear with facts and knowledge about career-independence. There has never been a time in history where career self-determination has been as strong and as realistic as it is now. This has remained hidden from view due to the overload of emails and meetings that dominate the day but the fact is, other jobs are out there, and increasingly, your location is becoming less of a barrier. Bottom line: if you fear losing your current job, then start learning how to find your next one. Even if you don’t take that next job just knowing you can, simply by curating your network and keeping up to date on your as-a-service abilities, substantially levels the playing field and also feels great.

Don’t Forget Your Humanness

I used to run a 5:30 p.m. in-person networking group for working professionals who recognized the value of meeting people and learning something new. This was in the days before video chats and virtual anything. No matter. The same lesson would apply equally in an online get-together.

Every attendee was given 30 seconds to deliver their elevator speech – their encapsulated self-description. After all the attendees were done – there were usually about 50 of them, so this took about half an hour – a vote was held on which elevator speech was the most memorable.

Here’s an example of a winning presentation:

“Hello, I am a chartered accountant, but I also own a couple of ponies. On weekends, I’m part of a group that brings kids with disabilities up to meet and feed the ponies and to just have a great time.”

This type of self-introduction made this chartered accountant the star of the event, not because of any accountancy skills, but because the story touched people emotionally. It let them remember that there was life outside of their work bubble and it created a deep emotional memory that survived the onslaught of purely factual information from the other 49 participants.

This technique can be used in digital environments too. Whether attending a meeting on video chat or in virtual spaces, or when meeting people in person or even by email, think about how to establish a connection with each person on an emotional level – a shared interest that goes beyond work.

The technologies that we have at our disposal allow us to connect, but the messages we deliver are what will allow us to truly reach each other.