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How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: Watch for These 2 Signals Before Investing in Your Employer, with Neil Irwin, Senior Economics Correspondent, The New York Times, and Author, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World
1. Honesty
I think the first thing that makes a good employee-employer relationship is honesty. A sense that there’s a straightforward understanding of, this is what this company does. This is our vision. This is what we’re trying to do. This is how you, as the employee, fit in it. And I think where things can go wrong sometimes is when there’s this kind of misplaced sense of, we’re a family, we’re with each other forever. That’s really not how it is.
A career is not like a marriage, it’s like a series of hookups. And I think if you have misplaced expectations on either side, on either the employer or the employee side, that’s where a lot of friction and unhappiness can really result.
2. Reciprocity
It’s true that employers can get frustrated that people are restless and want to move on and move around. But I think they really have only themselves to blame, if you look at what’s happened in corporate America in the last generation or so.
It used to be, if you started at a big, profitable, successful company and kept your nose clean, kept your head down, you could work there for an entire career and be in good shape. Even if there was a recession or a slump in business, they would really try hard not to do layoffs, not to cut people back. But I think what we see now is a much more ruthless form of capitalism. Where, if you’re not needed anymore, if your skills are no longer what the company needs, if your business unit has a slump, if there’s a recession, you will be laid off. And I think when employees and workers are saying, “Well, I’m not going to have a lifelong commitment to this employer,” It’s because they know the employer will not have a lifelong commitment to them.
And I think this idea of a reciprocity is tremendously important in an employment relationship. If your employer is the kind that really takes care of you, and gives you lots of leave if you have a kid, and lots of educational benefits if you want to go back to school, things like that, that’s one thing. If they’re the kind who are going to cut you loose the minute things are going rough, that’s not the kind of place you want to be, or at least not the kind of place you want to have any loyalty to in the opposite direction.
Economists talk of this concept of pareto optimality. And they usually mean it in regards to an entire economy. So an economy is pareto optimal if you can’t make one person better off without making somebody else worse off. Meaning, it’s the, of all possible worlds. Even if there’s inequality, it doesn’t mean, necessarily, that everybody’s equally well off. It just means if you’re going to make somebody else better off, somebody else’s worse off.