Crisis Week: "all employees are vulnerable"

FastCompany.com has posted an article on how the current crisis might affect you career (seen on Yahoo! Finance). It’s a mostly useless article except for the Mitchell Feldman’s comment in the third paragraph: “the real answer is that all employees are vulnerable right now.”

Which is about like saying that they have no idea.

Of course, it also says that these changing times can also be opportunities. “With attrition, there will be an opportunity for those remaining standing to pick up more responsibility, accountability and possibly senior projects,” the article quotes Mickey Matthews as saying.

You certainly do have to be in the right place at the right time.

Of course, it’s impossible to become a risk management professional or get a CPA in the next couple of weeks. You will have to be creative.

I will continue to say this, but in times of crisis there are not enough people with long-enough time horizons to help us get out. Here is where the things that Warren Kinston talks about come into play, because we need the higher work domains and not those who succeed within the normal organizational hierarchies. We need the higher work languages. We always need them but when times are good and we are borrowing from the future to pay for our present over-reaching lifestyles, we prefer to cast them out.

Look around and see what opportunities for leadership exist within your spheres. People are going to be much more interested in someone who can do something rather than the usual qualifications.

Image Credit: Employees at Mid-Continent Refinery [ca. 1943 Tulsa, Oklahoma.By John Vachon. Library of Congress.