St.Louis Business Journal
RECESSION IS ADVANCEMENT ROADBLOCK FOR POST-BOOMER GENERATION

By Anna Navarro

March 2009  

Examples in this column are fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.



Denise is a consumer products brand manager. She's been waiting patiently for her boss to retire so she can take over his job. He’s the senior vice-president of consumer products and had been strongly hinting his target date for retirement was 2009. But with the economic downturn, the signals have changed. It now seems he’ll postpone his retirement indefinitely. His stock options are underwater, his net worth has gone down dramatically and he talks about not being able to count on a predictable income from his investments. That creates a dilemma for Denise. She is a person mightily driven to seek new challenges all the time. Her boss has slowed down, but his health is good and he’s still performing well. It's likely he can stay as long as he does a reasonable job. She’s been in her current position for five years. She is an excellent performer and was promoted to running the company’s biggest brand after managing several smaller product lines. Her boss started grooming her for his job 18 months ago. But how long can she wait for her boss to retire? Is there any chance she can find a better opportunity, given the downturn? And does she have a moral obligation to stay because her boss and the company have been good to her? Those were the questions that lead her to my office. I shared my perception that even in the worst of times, vacancies occur because of illness, deaths, poor performance, etc. but there is no way short of job hunting to know whether she could find an opportunity that would meet her needs.

As we discussed the moral question, she realized her situation paralleled her boss’s. He didn’t want to set a retirement date because he wasn’t sure when his investments would recover enough to retire comfortably. But he wanted her to continue doing what she was doing in the meantime because it met his needs, even if it didn’t meet hers.

Similarly, she wanted to keep her position while exploring other options, even though it might not be the best thing for the company if she left.

After talking it over, she decided it was reasonable for both her and her boss to keep some things close to the vest until the appropriate time. If she got another offer, she would give the company enough time to evaluate whether they wanted to sweeten retirement for her boss or lose her.

Because she had such good future prospects with her existing company, we thoroughly checked out possibilities for new challenges in her current situation.

Denise didn’t want to run other divisions in the company because they were business-to-business not consumer products. She also wasn’t interested in a corporate staff position.

I asked if she found challenge in managing through the economic downturn. She explained challenge for her meant dealing with new people and situations. The current economic environment required major modifications in strategy, but didn’t provide challenges of the kind she was hungry for.

We explored whether there might be opportunities for her to get the challenge she needed in a volunteer leadership role. I learned that she had a child who was developmentally disabled, and required all of her time outside work.

The more I talked with Denise, the more I could appreciate why she needed a new work challenge now. It was her lifeblood, what kept her going.

These discussions cleared the way for Denise to decide to job hunt. She knew the kind of position she wanted and what she had to offer an employer, so writing a resume and getting her ready to job hunt came easily.

We rehearsed networking and hiring interviews. We worked through the tricky issue of references, and identified several people who had left the company and could speak to her performance, including former bosses. We mapped out a list of people she needed to meet. I taught her some simple but effective techniques to keep word of her job search from filtering back.

Denise’s job hunt may well uncover a perfect opportunity before her boss decides to retire. She’s already had two offers, but they didn't meet her needs. In the meantime, however, she is meeting interesting people and learning about new markets and industries.

Her decision to job hunt means she is no longer letting her life slip by. She is once again actively shaping her own destiny.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that works with clients on an individual basis to help them find more satisfaction and fulfillment in their work-lives. She can be reached by phone at (314) 367-0008 and her e-mail address is email@worktransitions.com. For more information visit the worktransitions.com website.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.