How YOU Can Be the Winner in the New AI Economy (As Millions of US Jobs Disappear)

RYAN: I think AI is coming after all of us. The question is, how can AI make work not suck? Because it's very easy to believe that AI is going to make work suck for everyone.

DANIEL: I'm worried that some percentage of people will embrace AI, and they'll get better paying jobs because they're able to do the work of two people in the time of less than one. And those people are going to have more and more opportunities. And the people who fight this, the people who run, the people who dig their heels in and try to resist, are going to not only lose their job, they're going to begin this downward spiral of becoming less and less valuable, because the next job is going to expect you to be able to use that tool. And now you can't get that job because you don't know how to use it.

RYAN: You can't have success without failure. We have to have an environment where people can fail in a successful manner that still drives the business forward. That's where you start loosening up the reins. That's where your SOPs and your job descriptions and your boundaries can be a little looser. You want your boundaries to be rigid, so everybody knows what's in bounds and out of bounds. Think of a soccer pitch. Everybody knows the goal lines, the markings on the field. But nobody's telling the striker exactly every step to take. He knows his position. He knows what he's got to do. Nobody's telling the goalie exactly when to dive for the ball and when not to. He knows his position: defend the goal, don't let the ball go in. Oversimplified, but you don't have to overcomplicate the journey side of it if the vision side of it is clear.

DANIEL: I think if you go straight from being fired to trying to get your next job, without a break, without a pause, you're not going to make it. If you've been let go, pause, take a deep breath, figure out what you really want, find your mojo, and then go after it. But don't chase the next job out of desperation, or you and your next employer will be disappointed.

DANIEL: I think that's where humans are really going to be able to always be differentiated from AI and robots: our ability to create and form connections. That's where the value is going to go. People who know how to use AI to automate the repetitive, so they focus more on the creative and the connection. Those are going to be the winners in the new economy.

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast.

AI IS COMING AFTER ALL OF US

RYAN: So basically you're asking, is AI coming after my job? I think AI is coming after all of us. The question is, how can AI make work not suck? Because it's very easy to believe that AI is going to make work suck for everyone. Or is AI going to create better, higher value jobs? So let's take the vision of AI in work. Business versus employee perspectives. Which one do you want to take?

RYAN: I'll take the business perspective. You take the employee perspective.

THE CHICK-FIL-A OPERATOR WHO'D PAY MORE FOR A ROBOT

RYAN: I've worked with a lot of Chick-fil-A operators. They cannot wait for the robot army to be here. They tend to hire a lot of teens and early twenties. Those would be considered Gen Zs, maybe some Gen Alphas.

This one guy that I've worked with for several years, he was like, being a Chick-fil-A operator is great. People love the food. I'm respected in the community. I make good money. I was like, okay, so then what's the problem? He's like, being a Chick-fil-A operator sucks. All I do is deal with teenager drama all day long. He's like, man, if I could just have a robot, I would gladly pay significantly more, because I know they're going to show up. I'm not going to have to deal with the nonsense. I'm not going to have to deal with the BS that comes with just dealing with people. And look, this is a hard job. I just need somebody to bread chicken. It isn't sexy, but somebody's got to do it. And the moment I could hire a robot to do it and replace that eighteen-year-old in the back, I will do it.

DANIEL: So that's interesting. We started out with AI and you went to robot. But the robot's probably going to be powered by AI, because they've got to make some decisions. I mean, I guess you could probably have an arm that just drops chicken in, drops chicken here, but you probably still need a human or another robot to do another component. Another robot, another robot, and then your technology bill gets expensive.

RYAN: Maybe today you will, but pretty soon, I don't think you're going to need that many robots. I'm pretty sure you can just buy one robot that makes chicken sandwiches, and it can bread the chicken and fry the chicken and prepare the sandwich.

DANIEL: Well, there's going to be four robots. There's a series of restaurants around me that actually have a robot that delivers the food. Somebody still cooks it, but they put it on a little robot and the robot walks it over to the table. There's a couple of burger joints. The concept, I don't know how it survived, but it was called Flippy, and it was a burger-flipping robot. So they put the robot in the back to cook the food, but you could actually watch it cook the food, because there weren't people back there.

Whole side note: you don't have to worry about workers comp. It's far more sanitary to have a robot in the kitchen than a bunch of teenage boys, let's be honest. So there's more than just the economics here as an argument for outsourcing at least some of those kinds of jobs to our AI robot overlords.

RYAN: Yeah, well, then the other side of that is it's more sanitary until it springs an oil leak and then it sprays oil everywhere. Or a thunderstorm rolls through and lightning zaps it. And then your hundred-thousand-dollar employee that is perfect is no better than a teenager that doesn't show up. Maybe worse, because he weighs three thousand pounds and you can't move him.

DANIEL: But I think those are the anomalies, right? So from the business standpoint, you could probably bake that into the equation and just go, I can have a spare robot.

THE $60K JOB AI IS ALREADY QUIETLY DOING

RYAN: But let's talk AI. With AI today, people are able to outsource tasks, particularly low-level things like calendar organization or meeting scheduling or content creation. There are so many little micro tasks that you would normally pay somebody to do. Maybe on the low end you'd pay somebody fifteen, twenty dollars an hour to do it, or it'd be a full-time job that's sixty, seventy, eighty thousand a year. But right now, if you can use AI somewhat efficiently, you can almost replace an entire person just by making the current people more efficient.

And the real question is how much more of the workforce is going to get slimmed down. Because there's the old adage of everybody working harder. But if you give people tools that allow them to work faster, more efficiently, or you're just literally offloading work, then you need less people.

So the real question is, where do you sit on that continuum? Because if you're a person that gets cut, you're looking at this as AI is coming after my job. If you're the person who knows how to utilize the AI, and you are now as powerful as three to five humans at once, you're probably loving this.

THE AI HAVES AND THE HAVE-NOTS

DANIEL: Yeah, but I think that's a really big, important distinction. I might call them the haves and the have-nots. The people who know how to use AI will radically improve their value in the market. The people who don't know how to use AI will end up getting a job where the robots tell them what to do. And I think that divide is here, and it is accelerating at us.

RYAN: Well, at the end of the day, the more robots that get into the marketplace, or the more AI... You've seen it in the shares, right? Skyrocketing, because they're the processor to have for AI right now. Somebody's still got to make those chips. Somebody's still got to service the servers. There's still infrastructure that has to be maintained to support that. And so I think there's a level of, does it really shrink the job pool, or does it just reshuffle the job pool?

DOES AI SHRINK THE JOB POOL OR JUST RESHUFFLE IT?

RYAN: Let's talk about AI in a more practical sense at a restaurant. Right now there are call center systems where you can actually talk to an AI agent that can do a level of tasking without the human. Check my schedule, check my bank balance, check this, check that, give me this input. You could theoretically roll that out, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody's either already done this, or doing it, or about to do it. You could roll that out in the drive-through for order taking.

DANIEL: Sure.

RYAN: There are so many factors, between the attitude that you might get from an employee, to there's one person working the register and the front counter and this, that, and the other, and you're creating a line, versus that AI agent at the speaker box having that more natural conversation, taking your order. That just streamlines it.

But somebody's got to maintain that when it breaks. Somebody's got to maintain that when you change the menu. There are things around it. So you may have taken the order taker from the fast food restaurant out of the mix, but you still have a problem to be solved. Now, what you might have to do is, let's say you take a hundred cashier-slash-window workers for a restaurant. You may take a hundred of them out, but did you create maybe twenty tech jobs from that?

DANIEL: I think it's a hundred to one.

RYAN: Okay. Well, there is a scale. I don't know what the scale is.

DANIEL: But if I was having to solve that, I would say, look, I don't want to build the AI. Apple's already built it with Siri. So funny, my phone starts lighting up when I say it. I would just use the AI that's already built there and tie it to my menu, and that way people can just walk up and order.

RYAN: Right. But somebody still has to... that's the downfall of AI at the moment.

DANIEL: Sure.

RYAN: AI still has to be very micromanaged. AI is very good at programming a particular task. But the second it's outside of that, it either flounders or it gives you bad results. And so the problem is, you still need someone to orchestrate all of this.

DANIEL: But I need one guy to upload that menu and keep it working, and I can replace every cashier in two thousand restaurants.

RYAN: Well, let's take it a step further. You could build an AI worker that takes the menu and does the formatting and does it over. My point is, you still need somebody to maintain the infrastructure to make sure that AI system is working.

DANIEL: Yeah.

RYAN: Make sure the servers are online. You need a disaster recovery solution in case something goes wrong, so it doesn't kill your entire business.

DANIEL: So, yes. But I think a vast majority of these non-complex, order-taking, simple, follow-instructions jobs, I think they're gone in the next ten years.

RYAN: Well, exactly. I think those particular jobs are gone. The question is, where does the labor force shift to? Because every time we have a generational step forward, the workforce just evolves.

Now we have another problem. To a degree, the workforce evolved so much that we ran out of people to do skilled labor. We didn't have enough welders and craftsmen and plumbers. So there's a level of technology forcing a whole bunch of tech jobs, and then we ran out of the jobs that still have to be done.

THE AI RACE TO THE BOTTOM VS. THE RACE TO THE TOP

DANIEL: Right. I'm worried that some percentage of people will embrace AI and they will get better paying jobs, because they're able to do the work of two people in the time of less than one. And those people are going to have more and more opportunities. And the people who fight this, the people who run, the people who dig their heels in and try to resist, are going to not only lose their job, they're going to begin this downward spiral of becoming less and less valuable, because the next job is going to expect you to be able to use that tool. And now you can't get that job because you don't know how to use it. And I'm worried for those people.

And that's the culture side of this. If we're just going for results, there's no vision, bad process, bad journey decisions. It's going to wreck the culture, and you're going to screw those people for the foreseeable future. As opposed to vision-centric AI strategy, partnering on the journey with your people to say, hey, let's all find a way to use AI to be twenty percent better a year from now than we are today. It builds trust. It builds effectiveness. It builds their capability, so that even if something terrible happens and they're not with you a year from now, they're still more valuable to their next employer.

RYAN: Oh, a thousand percent. And you said something in there that I didn't think about when I was talking through this earlier. It falls into using it in the wrong manner. I think people are going to use AI to create more tasks for the employee. It's going to mine the data and it's going to give them all the work they need to do. And all you're going to do is pile on more work for the human, because you just automated the to-do list.

DANIEL: I think that's a very surface-level solution. And though that may be a first step, building a to-do list, I think you've got to go full journey on this stuff. It's not how do you stack a to-do list for a human. It's how do you actually get the work done without it? You have to elevate the human in this equation, not just try to wring more out of the human by having AI drive more onto the plate.

RYAN: Yes. And that's the difference between the red line and the green line. Red line, you're just going to squeeze your people more by having AI throw more at them, as opposed to actually taking work off their plate.

DANIEL: Going full journey on this. I think there's an AI race to the bottom and an AI race to the top. The race to the bottom is that red line: how do I use AI to micromanage my people, to give them more work, to make them do more. And there are going to be people who do that, and it's going to end poorly for them and for their employees.

There is another option, which is, how does AI elevate? How do I get rid of the crappy work that nobody wants to do that is in every job? Your best job, just as a side note, your best job is eighty percent what you want and twenty percent suck. Every job has some part of it that sucks. How can we make that as small as possible, so you spend the majority of your time doing the thing that's truly valuable, doing the thing that you love to do, that you actually get excited to get out of bed for? I want that to go from ten hours a week to thirty hours a week. And I've got to get all these other things off of your plate. That's where the AI gets focused.

That's what we're trying to do. I want to get rid of the low-value-add repetitive work to free you up to do more of the high-value-add, which would be creative work, which would be relationship building. So high touch, service, sales, creativity, product, engineering, building things. Not building version ten thousand of the same thing, but building new things.

I think that's where humans are really going to be able to always be differentiated from AI and robots: our ability to create and form connections. And so that's where the value is going to go. People who know how to use AI to automate the repetitive, so they focus more on the creative and the connection. I think those are going to be the winners in the new economy.

WHY DOES WORK SUCK? GALLUP ASKED 52 COUNTRIES

DANIEL: Ryan, why does work suck? If you were to boil it down, is it the hours? Is it too many ineffective meetings? Is it just crappy coworkers?

RYAN: There are a lot of different reasons. But according to a massive study done recently by Gallup across fifty-two countries, what really makes work suck or not suck is leadership. And a lot of leaders are getting it completely wrong.

What Gallup found in that study is most people don't just want a paycheck and great benefits. What they really want is hope, trust, compassion, and stability. The biggest one, I think, is hope, because they want to have something to believe in the future. If they don't have hope that there's a future in their job and their role, then it's going to make work suck, and it makes it feel pointless.

DANIEL: Yeah. So let's break down those four: hope, trust, compassion, and stability. Let's talk about what they mean. Let's talk about why most leaders suck at it, and how anybody, whether you're a leader, a manager, or just starting your first job, what you can do to make work not suck by leading better.

RYAN: Awesome. And I think in today's episode, we're not only going to praise great leaders, I think we're going to roast a few that aren't getting it right. So we're going to go for the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.

DANIEL: We'll say this: if you feel roasted, it's not us doing the roasting. But if it gets hot when you're listening to this, it might mean that your subconscious is telling you you need to listen and maybe change a few things.

HOPE 56, TRUST 33, COMPASSION 7, STABILITY 4

DANIEL: So let's start with the data. Gallup asked people across fifty-two countries what they needed most from their leaders. Fascinating article. I'm not sure if you got the chance to read the whole thing, but Gallup's a very famous organization for doing these kinds of studies. Fifty-two countries is a really broad dataset. It's not just a US thing. And I think that's perhaps one of the risks: the overwhelming majority of the work that I do is in the US, and so I can have a biased view slanted towards the US workforce. But I love the fact that this is across all these different countries.

And what they found was that there are four things that people want from their leaders. And this is in order: hope, trust, compassion, and stability. Hope was actually the biggest one, at fifty-six percent. Next was trust, at thirty-three percent. Still a big number. Compassion was at seven percent, and stability at four.

RYAN: So I'm going to couple a couple of things there, and I'm going to reference back to one of our previous episodes. Hope at fifty-six percent, I get that. That is huge. Trust at thirty-three percent, that's still a big chunk. But compassion and stability at seven and four percent respectively, that seems pretty low.

And I'm going to guess, based on some of our previous episodes, we talked about pay. There were several comments that were like, just pay people more, pay people more, people just want more money. So I think what we have to talk about here is, let's assume the money is not the issue. I'm assuming in the study, it was talking about the difference between what makes you thrive at your job versus you just punch in, punch out. So if I understood the study correctly, this was like, what keeps you engaged, what makes you drive, what keeps you motivated beyond just the paycheck.

DANIEL: Yeah. And I think it's interesting. As I look at the numbers, I don't think this is only four percent of people said they need stability. The numbers here add up to a hundred. So I think it's the percentage of the whole that this comprises. So over half of what employees need from their manager is hope.

That surprises me. Hope's an interesting word there. What was your first reaction when you saw that?

FALSE HOPE WILL DESTROY YOUR COMPANY

RYAN: So, not shocking at all, to be honest.

DANIEL: Okay.

RYAN: I've often said over the years, and this was the difference between failure and success in the past for me, in the companies that I've run and in the companies I've worked with, I've always said any company I work with, the most dangerous thing we can do is provide hope of a positive future and not deliver on it. I said it will destroy your company if you do not follow through on that, because the most powerful thing and the most dangerous thing is hope.

How many organizations have you walked into and they're like, yeah, we want to do this grand thing, and we want to have the mission, and we want to do this. And they get everybody rallied behind it. And then the CEO pulls you off to the side, because I just need to squeeze more profit out of that. I don't care about this mission crap and all this BS. How do we squeeze more profits out of it? That's what makes them happy.

That is a false hope. And that is very deadly and dangerous. So the reason why it's fifty-six percent is because it is the most powerful thing in an organization that can make it go from a raving success, building raving fans, building a raving culture, versus a company that squeezes its people.

DANIEL: Do you think that this is more true now than it used to be? There's a part of me that thinks this is growing in its importance, and that if you'd asked twenty years ago, hope would have been on the list, but it might not have been as big of a contribution.

But my sense is that there are so many people that are so hopeless in so many parts of their life, that if there's at least hope at work, that I'm doing well at my job, I could get a promotion, the company's going to do well, there's a bonus for me at the end of the year, there's something that I can look forward to and be hopeful for. I just think people are struggling to find that in any part of their life. And if work can bring that and your boss can bring that, that is a huge motivator for your employees.

RYAN: A thousand percent. Hope is what kept a lot of companies afloat, especially small businesses, during COVID. Nobody knew what was going to happen when all that went down. Nobody could predict it. Nobody could have known how it was going to go, what the government would have done, what other countries would have done. But the companies that banded together and had that hope to persevere together are the ones that are stronger today. The ones that did not have that are the companies that fell apart and went under during COVID.

If that's not a message right there. Now take it forward. That was in a time of crisis and uncertainty as a global economy. Now let's just talk about the normal business that's just running day in, day out.

DANIEL: Yeah. It's funny, I was on a sales call earlier today with a guy, and I was talking to him about leadership development, and I used this term VUCA, V-U-C-A. And he was like, I don't know that word, can you tell me? I was like, oh, VUCA is an acronym from the military. It stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

And the point I was trying to make with him was, there's a whole field of study around how do you lead in contexts that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And he goes, oh, that's just like every day at my company. And I'm like, yeah, I think we all feel that. I think the world feels like that.

And if your boss can inspire hope and give some meaning to your work in a world that feels more and more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, I think it not only attracts employees, it engages them and brings the best out of them, because so many other places are just chaotic. It maybe makes the difference between your boss being some sort of a slave driver or a manager of despair, versus somebody who can actually give you hope that the world can be a better place and that you can play a role in it.

WORK RECEIPT: FROM MINUS 19% TO PLUS 20% IN ONE YEAR

RYAN: So there is a company I'm working with right now. When I started working with them in March of last year, everybody got twenty percent pay cuts. They had to cut staff. They were burning cash and they were going to be out of cash in, I think, three or four months.

By getting the vision clear and getting alignment on it, not only did we stabilize the business... we still had to cut a few people and we had to do the pay cuts, but we were able to stabilize the business so that we didn't have to do further cuts and didn't have to potentially shut the business down. I don't think it would have shut down, but it would have had to dramatically scale back, and that would take years of life away.

But the founder doubled down on it and has focused on the vision and given the clarity, and now everybody has more hope in the business. There's more trust in what we're doing. There's more compassion in it. We built a level of stability.

Year over year growth is up dramatically. I think they had negative nineteen percent growth overall last year. January this year was positive twenty percent. That's a forty percent swing between last year and this year. It's a big swing. It maintained in February and it looks like it's going to maintain in March.

They're more efficient as a business. Their meetings are more productive. Their people are happier. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of work to be done. But it is a completely different business, because the founder doubled down on the vision, got clarity, and provided the hope, transparency, and compassion behind it that has built a positive future. It's built some stability.

YOUR VISION ISN'T BROKEN. YOUR JOURNEY IS.

DANIEL: All right. So if you're a leader and you're listening to this, and you hear those four in order, hope, trust, compassion, and stability, and you get uncomfortable with one of those words, you're like, three of those are great, one of them either I don't believe or I don't want to believe because I know I'm bad at it. What would you recommend to them? What are some real practical ways to help people get better at this? How do leaders create hope, trust, compassion, and stability in their organizations?

RYAN: I think I'm going to piggyback right off that story I just shared. If the worst one you have is hope, which was the higher percentage, the best thing you can do is try to articulate a clear vision of what you're trying to achieve, what the goal is.

And I do think there's a lot of confusion between vision and journey. I think a lot of people say the vision is not clear enough. In reality, it's the journey that's not clear enough.

DANIEL: But let's start with the vision. What's the difference in the vision is not clear versus the journey is not clear?

RYAN: When people are looking for the step by step, like I have to know how to do every aspect of my job, or the vision is not clear enough. It goes back to the job description. It's like, here's your responsibilities, this, this, this, this, and everything else that is not listed here. What people want is, well, just put everything not listed here, please just put it on the list, and then therefore I have my description.

There's always a nuance. There's always an anomaly or an exception to the rule. And so people go, the vision isn't clear enough, because I don't have all of the processes and procedures and SOPs and expectations outlined.

DANIEL: Yeah. Journey problem.

RYAN: It does start with a clear vision, though. Because where the vision comes in is, if the "and everything else" is, you're the janitor, you're the marketeer, you're the sales guy, you're the phone operator, you're the finance person, then there's no vision in what you're trying to do. You're just all over the place.

DANIEL: It's funny you'd say that, because I'm working with a client right now that is having some of these challenges. People are like, I don't understand the vision, the vision is not clear, the vision is not clear. And I think the vision is clear. I think it's a journey problem, to your point. The vision's clear, the journey is not.

If the journey is so crystal clear that you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing, exactly how to get there, and you've got visibility into the next five or ten steps, you will not have a job much longer. There will be a robot that will come do your job very soon. Your boss is paying you to help them figure out that journey. And the moment there's no more thinking required, that's the moment we're going to hire the robots.

So you can look at that one of two ways and say, well, the vision is not clear, I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing. That's the job. You have to help them figure that out. And if you don't want to do that job, AI will.

You're never going to have perfect clarity. And if you do, you should be very nervous, because that's the moment I can outsource your job to some other place that'll do it for a fraction of the cost. Being comfortable with that uncertainty is a big part of what our jobs require.

And it is funny, I think especially technical people, detail-oriented people, it's not clear to them if they don't have every letter spelled out for them. But that's not actually a good thing for you. Because if I'm having to come up with every one of those steps, we're not really going to get to a good place. I need you to help me in that journey and define it with me.

Look, I get there are some things where we need things spelled out like that. If you're manufacturing a medication and measurements matter, there are situations where it does need to be spelled out. But that's the exception. That's not really the rule.

RIGID BOUNDARIES, LOOSE JOURNEY: THE SOCCER PITCH RULE

RYAN: And it goes back into, if you build the environment where people can be successful... Actually, let me rephrase that. If you build an environment where people are afraid, there's that lack of trust, lack of compassion, lack of stability, then people are afraid of making mistakes. When people cannot make a mistake, then they want everything spelled out for them, so that they don't get punished for making a mistake. Because if they have every little i dotted and t crossed, and they follow it, then you can't yell at them.

But what happens is, we think we want that. We want every i dotted and t crossed. Then what we get is an SOP that's so overwhelming that we can't possibly do it. And it doesn't incorporate everything. And then we fail it. And then we get yelled at. And it's like, well, you're both wrong.

The other thing I'm going to call out is there's a difference between a mistake and a repeating mistake, or what I often call mistake versus sin. In the sense of, you cognitively chose to make that decision knowing the consequence was negative. The mistake is when you unknowingly make it, and you learn from it, you improve it, you don't repeat it. There's no such thing as a repeat mistake, because the second time you cognitively chose to do it wrong.

So we need to make sure our systems don't allow repeat mistakes. It needs to be flexible enough to allow mistakes. In order to be successful, you can't have success without failure. We have to have an environment where people can fail in a successful manner that still drives the business forward.

That's where you start loosening up the reins. That's where your SOPs and your job descriptions and your boundaries can be a little looser. You want your boundaries to be rigid, so everybody knows what's in bounds and out of bounds. Think of a soccer match. Everybody knows the goal lines, the markings on the field.

DANIEL: Yep.

RYAN: But nobody's telling the striker exactly every step to take. He knows his position. He knows what he's got to do. Nobody's telling the goalie exactly when to dive for the ball and when not to. He knows his position: defend the goal, don't let the ball go in.

DANIEL: Right.

RYAN: Oversimplified, but everybody else, don't use your hands, only your feet. You don't have to overcomplicate the journey side of it if the vision side of it is clear in the direction and the definitions.

LAYOFFS, DOGE, AND LEADERSHIP MALPRACTICE

DANIEL: So over a hundred thousand government employees have been affected by recent mass layoffs, driven by DOGE. Many of them had mere minutes to clear out their desk, while others, like Health and Human Services and the USDA, faced confusing reversals where their termination status was reversed after being laid off. It's just created chaos.

So let's talk about the sucky part of how layoffs can just be chaotic. And then there's also the part of leaders driving these chaotic layoffs.

DANIEL: I think there are probably different kinds of layoffs. A spectrum here that maybe we need to clarify. On one end of the continuum is probably people who've been let go for a reason. You've done something unethical. You've done something that is not okay. HR is probably walking you out the door. That's probably not what we're talking about so much.

I would say in the middle are probably those layoffs for performance. You weren't a good fit for the job. The job outgrew you, for whatever reason. Those ones are hard, but that's maybe another category.

And then there's just this chaos, maybe on the other end of the continuum, where there are broad sweeping decisions being made that don't really have any sort of fine tuning for who's being impacted. It is just massive, broad sweeping decisions. And you can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get caught up in that, and it has nothing to do with how good you were at your job.

But hearing about what's happening with those right now, I think the ambiguity would be the worst, to not know what's really going to happen. If you get caught up in something that sucks, usually the industry knows, usually it's not too hard to bounce back. But when this huge massive amount of people are kind of being let go, but maybe not, what the heck do you do with that?

RYAN: Layoffs just suck in general. And you're taking off the downsizing or the "you deserve to be fired" reasons.

In some of these big corporate enterprises, they announce these layoffs. Hey, we're going to lay off ten thousand people over the next year. And people don't know what's going on, but at least they have a little bit of, it's coming.

I'm looking at one of these cases right here. A twenty-four-year-old from Health and Human Services got a cold email over the weekend. Literally just, your job is terminated, goodbye. Now, I guess you could kind of say, well, we knew DOGE was coming. But you've got to think about it: each government department is like a different company. That's like just saying, hey, Fortune 500, we're going to lay people off somewhere.

DANIEL: Yeah, that's not helpful. The ambiguity is definitely a big problem in layoffs.

And here's a spicy take for you. Ambiguity in layoffs isn't just unethical. It's leadership malpractice.

RYAN: Oh, I like that. And I agree. If your people are shocked that they're being laid off, you've not really done your job well as a leader. People should not be blindsided by a layoff. Now, massive market shifts, okay, maybe, because everybody's surprised. But if the leadership team's known for a long time and the employees get blindsided, that means the leaders are not doing their job right.

DANIEL: Let's go through eight ways to make sure that layoffs don't suck, or at least don't suck as much, and how you can get your career back on track. The eight ways to bounce back from a layoff.

THE MONDAY MORNING FIX: PAUSE BEFORE YOU CHASE

DANIEL: Absolutely. I'll go first. Number one, I would say it is important, if you've experienced a layoff, to rewrite your story from victim to hero.

It is very easy, when you've ended up on the wrong side of that conversation, to view yourself as the victim, to feel like a victim, and then to build a story that frames you as the victim. Somebody once said, it's not so much what happens to you, it's the way you explain what happens to you. And if you frame yourself as a victim, it's much harder to get somebody else to hire you than it is if you frame yourself as a hero.

And hero doesn't necessarily mean that you're the guy who saved the day. It could be just as simple as, here's what I tried, here's what didn't work, here's what I learned from it. Even that kind of a spin can help people understand that, look, bad things happen to all of us. But do they have a good attitude? Do they learn from it? And are they better now than they were before they had that experience?

That's really what most hiring managers are looking for, because most hiring managers know that people can get stuck in bad situations or be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if you're going to blame everybody else, that's not somebody I want on my team.

RYAN: And keep in mind, if you make yourself the victim and you go into a new job, and you're, I'm the victim, they terminated me, yada yada yada, if they call your previous employer for your rehireability, you're going to get exposed pretty quick. Reference checks and reviews, that's part of HR recruitment. So you're better off telling the story straight than trying to make yourself the victim of it.

DANIEL: In the sense of a mass layoff, it is what it is. So I'm bettering myself and looking for a better career.

That happened to me. I was working for a Fortune 500 company. I was on a huge strategic project. Harvard Business School was writing a case study on this project, and it just got out of control, and earnings came up, and the CEO was under a lot of pressure. And so they just cut the whole program and laid off a lot of people. And I was one of them. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But the good thing for me was that that was in the news. And so when I told people, oh, I was on that project, they're like, oh, I know what you've been working on. You wouldn't be on that project if you were a scrub. I think I've got an opportunity for you. So I didn't really have to hide that one or spin that one, because it was public knowledge, and it didn't really ding my reputation at all that I had gotten laid off.

I think if you go straight from being fired to trying to get your next job, without a break, without a pause, you're not going to make it. If you've been let go, pause, take a deep breath, figure out what you really want, find your mojo, and then go after it. But don't chase the next job out of desperation, or you and your next employer will be disappointed.

RYAN: That's solid advice. Just say it one more time. Just let it sink in. Say it one more time so it sinks in.

DANIEL: If you go straight from being let go to interviewing for your next job, you will not succeed. If you have been let go, pause, reflect, learn from the situation, find your mojo, and come back better than you were before.

RYAN: I love it. I love it. And now I'm going to rabbit trail. You know what that sounded like? Jocko Willink. Good. Didn't get the job you wanted? Good. Now you've got time to rebuild. Got laid off? Good. Now you can upskill. You can decide to start that business. Get on the attack.

I mean, it's easy to poke fun at that. But I can't think of a time when I have lost a job or a client that I wasn't able to go find something better in the next round.

It's abundance versus scarcity mindset. If you go at this with a scarcity mindset, it's not going to end in a positive. It'll be okay. It's not going to be horrible. But it's only going to be okay at best. Versus if you go at this with an abundant mindset: got laid off, good, now I have the opportunity to find something better, to better myself, to have a better career.

And the thing is, if you take that abundance mindset, and you do some of the things we've talked about, you will have a better career. There is opportunity out there. I know there are adversities in the economy and what's going on with the government jobs, but we actually added jobs this past month. It's like a hundred and twenty or a hundred and fifty thousand new jobs were added in the United States this past month, even with all the chaos going on. There's plenty of opportunity out there.

THE LAYOFF WHEEL

RYAN: All right, let's move on. We have this next segment, the Layoff Wheel. What is the Layoff Wheel, Daniel?

DANIEL: So the wheel, we've talked about this in a lot of episodes. This idea that every organization, and really every individual, has these four dimensions. And you draw them in a wheel. Vision's at the top. You always start with vision. You go clockwise from vision to journey to culture to results. And just as a reminder, it's important to always start with vision and always go clockwise through that sequence. But it's an interesting idea to apply that framework to layoffs. How do those two intersect?

RYAN: I think the key thing is, anytime you're faced with some uncertainty or change, you've got to go through a process. And this is why we start with vision. Take a step back and figure out, what's the sense of direction? Where are you going? Where do you want to go? This really clarifies your goals and helps you get dialed in. What's the belief of what you can do? What do you believe you want?

And if you can write that down, then now you've got a clear next step to get you to the journey, the path that you need to get there. You may not know the path while you're writing the vision. That's the goal. If you know what your vision is, then you can start to write a journey. If you go straight to journey, or you go straight into results without really having a clear goal, that's the definition of insanity. You're never going to get there.

DANIEL: So I'll tell you a personal story. I was a director of product at a Fortune 500 company. Director of product management, technical product management. And I had the most fun in my career for about two years. I was functionally leading a startup within a Fortune 500 organization. Had a blast. Small team, moving fast, breaking stuff. It was awesome.

I got promoted and put over a fifty-million-dollar P&L. And in my head, my dream job was VP at this company. And through a very odd set of circumstances, I ended up no longer employed at that company.

And this vision question became really important to me, because I started going back and looking for director and VP of product roles at Fortune 500 companies. And it wasn't until somebody pointed out to me, they're like, is that really what you want to do? Because you seemed a lot happier when you were leading a small team of two engineers and a project manager and a support guy. You seemed a lot happier there than you were with a team of a hundred people and a fifty-million-dollar P&L. And you do whatever you want, but it just seemed like you liked that one more. And why are you going to go take a job that you don't like when you could maybe go take a job that you do like?

And it wasn't until somebody pointed that out to me that I began to realize, okay, you know what, I could do the big company thing, and I was decent at it, but I had a lot more fun when it was the three of us just sitting around a card table writing requirements on sticky notes. That's more fun for me.

So just because you've been on a particular path, and your vision has always been this role or this company or this industry, being let go kind of forces you to reevaluate some of those things and say, what is my vision for my career? What do I want? Do I want to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company? I used to say yes to that. I would say no to that today, because I do not want that job. But it wasn't until I had to ask these kind of vision questions that I got that clarity.

RYAN: I like that. If you're chasing the result without a clear vision, you'll never really be happy.

DANIEL: And for me, it was the result of the title and the paycheck. Those were the two things I wanted, and I was willing to be miserable for them. But once you're presented with the option, it's like, well, what if I could get those and not be miserable? Wouldn't that be better?

RYAN: Precisely. So that's where the vision is key. And then the next step of that is journey. Once you've got that, you can map out the path to get there. You'll know, okay, if I go down this path, if I go too far left, I'm straying away from my vision, or too far right. So it really helps you map out the path.

And then, of course, the next step is to actually make a plan. Don't just get an idea and then go straight to, I expect the result. You still have to map out, how am I going to get there? What are my steps to get there? How am I going to measure progress in that direction?

And then I found this one interesting. The third part of the wheel is culture, the social-emotional connection part. I love what it says right here: layoffs reveal the real values of your organization.

DANIEL: Yeah, it does. If they're laying off recklessly, is that even a place you wanted to stay?

RYAN: Yep. So when you're looking at this, it's, what do you value? There's the vision, the belief, what you want to be. There's the journey, the steps of how you need to get there. The next step is, who do you want to work with and be alongside?

And I think it's interesting. If you take this from a business perspective, there's a company I've worked with that's done some restructuring layoffs and totally butchered the culture side of it. For just a couple of individuals, for two to three individuals, it was handled horribly. And the culture of the company has had a negative ripple effect, and more and more people are resigning because of this exact thing. It revealed the true colors of the organization. And it was pretty clear that the core values that were on the wall were not what the company actually believed.

So on a personal note, if you can define the behaviors that you want to live by, the principles you live by, and you can find that in a company you're searching for, you're going to be much more likely to be successful in the job, excel in the role, love the company you work with, love the people you work with.

ANNOUNCER: Make work not suck. Our podcast talks about exactly that. Our process: vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real-world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck. Hosted by Ryan Hodges, co-host Daniel Steer. Join us each episode, and make work not suck.