Managing During Hard Times: A First-Timer’s Perspective

What’s a new manager to do during their first real big downturn? There’s a lot of conflicting feelings, obligations and advice about how to manage during a recession. I’ve been sorting through it in my own mind, and have developed my own mental checklist.

Know Yourself

I went through the “dot-bomb” back in 2001, but I was fairly fresh in the industry. I was the typical copywriter: lacking confidence in my own abilities (“everyone speaks English,” as we joke frequently), but pretty sure that I knew better than everyone else. I was also driven by my friendships and my personal loyalties.

In many respects, I haven’t changed much. As a new manager, layered onto this is my obligation to the health of the company. At many points, those two things seem to be in conflict. I’ve struggled a lot with that perceived conflict.

Recently, I’ve been able to reconcile (or rationalize, I suppose) my loyalties to my co-workers and people on my team by emphasizing that our company can only survive with motivated employees. Loyalty to the people is loyalty to the company.

Remember What Drives the Business: People

Knowing my own motivations let me exploit or temper them when needed. I also must understand the motivations of other employees. Why do individuals work here? What will keep them working when things get rough?

I believe that there are motivations unique to each industry and mindsets unique to different regions. For one, Portland tech and creative people tend to be fairly anti-establishment, and that culture can often spill over to “the man” who signs their paychecks. So threats and fear have the opposite effect intended: Employees will quit rather than ever feel threatened or disrespected.

But we don’t have a mono-culture here. There’s more layered motivations: Not everyone wants to be the best in their field, some just want a paycheck. Some people are only motivated by money, so relying on their “better angels” for the well-being of everyone would be a mistake. Knowing your team will go a long way to keeping them moving when things get tough.

Never Too High, Never Too Low. Unless You Need to Be.

It’s easy to get depressed when you see agencies losing clients, hear of friends getting laid off, and hearing a lot of “thanks, but no thanks” endings to pitches. (I should point out that Pop Art is doing fine, thank you very much.) It’s also easy to think of every new business pitch as the turning point, for good or ill. Overreaction is commonplace. Swings in emotion are exhausting.

Never getting too high or too low is a simple thing to say, but a harder motto to live by. I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, and it’s gotten me in trouble repeatedly. It’s important, though, because as a manager, people look to you as a bellwether.

As a manager, if I get upset or harried, or if I withdraw into myself, or if I start “pressing,” then employees react. Those reactions could be to mirror or amplify my reactions. Or worse, to see my reaction as an indicator that the business is in the tank, game over, kaput. And they’ll give up. Manager FAIL. I remember a lot of this from the dot-bomb era.

My own father lives this way, and everyone respects him for that. He is never too high or too low. Never any panic or over-indulgence. But a well-timed rebuke or hard glare will let you know you were way, way over the line. Better, though, is that a few words of praise and amazement from him deliver a lot of inspiration.

Stay Classy

When the worst happens, but there’s some hope that the company won’t go completely out of business, it’s important in a small, well-networked town like Portland to keep things friendly.

A struggling company may be unable to offer much in the way of severance. But the company has other assets it can share for the sake of reputation.

A very good friend of mine was recently laid off without much severance. However, she had a stellar exit interview in which they said repeatedly that they hope to re-grow the company. They hoped she’d consider coming back sometime.

And rather than turning off her email, collecting her keys and frog-marching her out the door, they invited her back to the office to make print-outs, use their software, and collect files for her portfolio off their network for as long as she needed. They instructed people on staff to be as helpful as time allows. And they wrote her an outstanding letter of reference.

Today, she told me it felt like they were saying, “We trusted you yesterday, and we trust you today.”

That, to me, is the hallmark of a company who is in it for the long haul. Even if my friend doesn’t go back to work there, you can bet she will tell many, many of her friends about how well she was treated. When that company starts growing again, talent will flock to them.

Looking Toward 2009

I wrote in the Portland Ad Federation newsletter that I believe 2009 will be a great year for our industry. If not in terms of dollars spent, than certainly in developing new techniques to stretch our clients dollars. We’ll have to get creative. We’ll have to get inventive.

Leonardo da Vinci said “Large rooms distract; small rooms focus.” The same could be said about small budgets. We are lucky: a guerilla spirit seems to motivate the team here at Pop Art. That’s a part of the culture we’re trying to promote right now.

A weak economy might mean a lot of battlefield promotions, and a recession is a hell of a time to earn your stripes. But be true to yourself and take care of the people who take care of you. Use what you’ve learned over your career — the good and the bad — and try to live it as best you can.

And if you’ve got any good advice, please feel free to share it in the comments.