How to avoid being ‘managed out’ of your job

There I was. One minute I was enjoying the finale of The Book of Mormon, and the next all of a sudden, somehow, I found myself in the noise and heat of West 49th Street on Broadway.

I had not had to patiently queue behind elderly patrons slowly making their exit up innumerable stairs, only to then have to navigate another staircase descending, as I would in Australia.

Nope, it was as though someone had taken a can opener to the side of the Eugene O’Neill Theatre and bulldozed the lot of us through the gap. And there we all were on the street. In short, we had been managed out.

Managing people out is a very common strategy in most organisations. It avoids the risks and costs associated with sacking a person or making them redundant. It can be a more palatable alternative to actually addressing an issue or confronting an employee.

It can also prove very useful in reducing costs, removing adversaries, getting rid of people who are out of favour, or clearing the path for a favoured colleague to advance.

In other words, managing people out, more often than not, is a tool deployed by the incompetent and weak, when they know they can’t nobble a person any other way. You can see why it is so popular.

Recognising the signs that you are being managed out early enough may buy you time to win around your supervisor.

How then, can one avoid being managed out? Unfortunately, many people wait until it is too late to answer this question. Clearly, the best thing to do is to avoid becoming a contender for being managed out.

The options here are: make yourself unsackable by smashing your KPIs or sucking up. The trouble is, if they’ve decided your KPIs don’t matter or any number of other people can do just as well, it may not save you.

However, never underestimate the impact of being friendly and trying to develop rapport consistently with your colleagues. Cynics might call this sucking up, but it is just human nature; when push comes to shove, it will be the less liked who get the shove. If you can foster a guardian angel higher up in the organisation who has your back – so much the better.

The second-best option is to learn to spot the signs that the fix is in to get you. You need an early warning system, which means upping your networking game to get the gossip from trusted lieutenants further up the water trough.

Making yourself as physically close as possible to the action can assist. If you have a desk close to the senior management team, or the meeting room, it gives you more opportunities for water cooler chats, and to see who is going into meetings and how often.

Try to understand the bigger picture regarding the projects you are working on. Your team may have achieved great success in winning new clients for the widget service, but that will count for nought if widgets are seen as so last year.

Fairly or not, you are likely to become negatively associated with an out-of-favour project, so the challenge is to communicate clearly to the decision-makers that you are on the lookout for new challenges within the firm.

Too often, people are managed out simply because someone has taken against them. Are you finding your contributions in meetings overlooked? Are you being left out-of-the-loop in discussions, meetings and other communications?

Are others repeatedly given the projects where they can shine, and you are left to deal with the unglamorous and uncelebrated work?

Being excluded from future planning meetings is a potent sign that you or your role (or both) are not part of the future. Maybe you find the work you were employed to do is bit by bit given to others, automated or ceased.

What follows can be the provocative tactic of deliberately giving you inappropriate assignments. These are work tasks that could be way below your experience and skill level – the apprentice’s work, or work that is clearly outside your skill-set where you are being set up either for failure or being goaded into quitting.

Don’t give them the satisfaction of quitting unless it is truly unbearable and making you ill, or unless it is truly on your terms and you have plans for the next steps.

Recognising the signs that you are being managed out early enough may buy you time to win around your supervisor, or to organise support from a union or employment lawyer. That way, you increase the chances of your rights being respected or compensated.

Don’t take your eye off the ball, and keep up the environmental scanning and networks. Otherwise, you risk loving the show so much that you don’t see the theatre exit doors opening.

Dr Jim Bright, FAPS, is a director at IWCA Pty Ltd and director of Evidence & Impact at BECOME Education. opinion@jimbright.com or follow him on Blue Sky @DrJimBright.bsky.social

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