NELLA BARKLEY : Limiting Corporate Casualties : There’s Help for Those Buffeted by Merger, Career Crises

The waning years of the 1980s have left an indelible mark on management in America. Stability is gone, replaced with quick-changing corporate culture, one rife with insecurity and largely lacking in loyalty.

Mergers, takeovers and corporate cutbacks have forced growing numbers of employees and executives into the search for new jobs. And these job seekers are striking back with a kind of institutionalized detachment to the corporations to which they used to pledge entire careers.

This means that business is good for Nella Barkley, president of Crystal-Barkley Corp., a tony, New York-based, career-counseling firm that recently opened an office in Newport Beach. Barkley makes her living coaching upper-crust corporate castoffs and deserters through the difficult transitions that characterize job and life change.

In 1979, Barkley and the late John Crystal pooled their experiences and opened Crystal-Barkley Corp. Crystal had found fame as the subject of the 1969 best-seller “What Color is Your Parachute?” Barkley, now 52, had nearly 2 decades of management and consulting experience.

Today, the company has grown to two offices with a staff of 12 counselors. The firm consults corporations and presents nearly a score of weeklong workshops each year for individuals. The workshops are followed by 1 to 6 months of private counseling. Individual packages run from $1,430 to $3,600. “It’s a bargain at the price,” Barkley insists.

Barkley recently flew in from New York to attend one of her firm’s Newport Beach workshops. She discussed corporate survival skills and current management trends with Times staff writer Maria L. La Ganga.

Q. What sort of corporate climate do your clients reflect?

A Well, I think that now fewer and fewer people are getting to the top in the corporate world. The pyramid is narrower than it ever has been. So people have to find their growth through varying their tasks. And lateral moves are often exactly what’s required to give people new learning and professional development.

Q. Merger mania, the Wall Street crash, are these having an effect on bringing you new clients?

A. We of course have seen a lot more people from the financial services industry recently. And we have also seen a lot because of takeovers. When people don’t know what their leadership is going to be, they are very off balance, and they don’t produce very well. And the smart ones will seek change. They’ll either quickly move to assess the political situation within, who the new owner’s going to be, what the motivations are and decide whether that’s in concert with what they want to do or not and whether they’re going to seek a way out.

Q. What are signs to look for if you fear for your job?

A The obvious things are the things anyone would read about in the newspapers, like a move to be taken over. I’m constantly struck when talking with people about what they may not know is in the popular press about their own company. So stay well read in your field. Your boss will start to exhibit behavior that is not consistent with the past pattern. It’s one of the first ways to pick it up. And you’ll sense it. In appraisal situations, you will start to see reactions that aren’t consistent with your past appraisal situations. If you have been assigned projects that suddenly seem to be going nowhere or people are stopping you midstream, watch out. It’s usually a sign that the mandate is changing, or people don’t understand the mandate, so they’re scared to stick their neck out. When people don’t understand what kind of activity will be rewarded by their boss, for a promotion or whatever, they start doing nothing. They pull in, they won’t venture new projects, creative ideas are squashed, subconsciously people draw in and become as invisible as possible. It’s the circle-the-wagon mentality. And so when you’re observing those things, you can know pretty much that you’re in a highly dangerous situation.

Q. What do you do when you realize this, when you’ve taken stock and realize something’s afoot?

A. You start to research both within and without. And your research really needs to be very intensive. What is likely to happen to this company, where your division fits in terms of the overall company goals and pursuits, if there’s to be new foreign ownership, what their pattern of behavior is with their other corporations, if it’s a pure takeover situation planned simply to break up the company and sell it off.

Whether or not you stay with the firm, I think, should be a function of how critical you feel you are to the firm, what your tolerance is for ambiguity, which is low in most instances. And I think you should quietly make your plans to move. Of course, the sane way to do that is to put that in place before you’ve left. That’s what we do teach a lot of people to do. Because on the side, you can be researching and positioning yourself very well. There’s no point in being a number on the casualty list.

Q. Another big part of the job-change equation seems to be the big bulge of baby boomers. What about these younger workers who find that there are thousands of people in the same place they are, wanting the same things, and stagnating?

A. Well, I think it is that population that is accounting for our increase in clients at the lower end of the age range. And actually, they’re in an excellent situation. They’ve got youth on their side, they’ve recognized an issue early enough, what they need is a method, and the principal thing they need to know is what they want to do.

For some reason, when we want to make a change, we tend to think we have to go see what’s available out there in terms of other jobs. That’s not what’s important. The important thing is to know what you want to do, because positions are actually created every day around what someone wants to do, once you find other people who need your skills. Even if you knew what was available out there, it might not correspond to what you wanted. But even knowing what’s available is almost impossible. Because what’s published, job postings, want ads, over 80% of those positions have been filled before the ads have ever been around.

Q. And there’s always a preferred candidate?

A Yes. Always. So, what you want to do is get yourself in a position where you can be a preferred candidate around something you want to do. And that’s the way the real world works. So, I guess to sum it all up, we’re teaching people to understand the reality and think differently about it, both the reality of themselves and the reality of the world in which they’d like to work.

Q. Wholesale layoffs have hit industries from Wall Street to manufacturing. Considering there’s a good chance it will happen to an awful lot of workers, what is the best age to be fired?

A. I think probably the younger the better, because the psychological blow is much more deeply felt with age. There are more expectations built up around you the older you are, not to mention the fact that you have mortgages and children and school and that kind of thing. That adds that terrific financial burden on top of the psychological burden. So, if I had to pick an age, I would probably pick in the early 30s, when you’ve had the advantage of a good training program somewhere or you’ve got some base of experience around you, but you’re not a costly employee to take on.

Q. What about the worst time?

A. I think the worst time is in the late 50s. I’ve worked with many, many men in particular who found themselves without their jobs in the late 50s, and it’s a poignant situation.

Q. Don’t statistics show that there is an enormous percentage of people older than 50 who get fired and never get back in the work force?

A. You’re right, they don’t. And the average survival age (mortality) for people after full retirement is 3 years. We are so accustomed in this country to being valued as a person because of our job title. So one of the things we teach people to do is realize that they have an intrinsic value, which is unrelated to their job title.

Q. We have talked a little bit about the changes in corporate structure that we’ve seen the past 30 years or so. What do you see in store for the 1990s and later?

A. Well, the trends are certainly to corporations . . . highly multinational in their leadership--which as Americans means we need to have a kind of an understanding for which we have no tradition. I’m having increasing numbers of clients come to us who don’t know how to behave in a Japanese company, even in a British company. And so that’s going to take a lot of learning.

I think the other trends are that people are not going to move as fast, they’re not going to be paid as much as we were accustomed to being paid in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, even into the early ‘80s, and that’s really a tough one. We’ve got a generation here in the work force that in reality probably is going to be able to buy a lot less than their parents bought for them. I think that’s really why we’re seeing our work in corporations grow: As that whole trend begins to take hold, I think the concept of corporate loyalty will be pretty much dead.

Q. What does that mean for someone in management?

A It means that there’s going to be a different kind of a contract with your employee. It’s not going to be one that’s based on the corporation being daddy; it’s going to be based on a transaction that is much more mutual between parties. You have someone bring a set of skills to you, of which you’re in dire need, perhaps, and you view that person more as an equal than you used to view them. And you’ll make a transaction in order to get the job done, and as long as it’s done to everyone’s mutual satisfaction, the transaction will hold. When it no longer works for one or the other party, we’re going to see people quickly moving on.

Q. You tout Crystal-Barkley Corp. as a nationally recognized career counseling firm with an array of seminars and services. What exactly do you do? Do you deal with so-called “out-placement” corporations?

A. We do not do out-placement; we provide an alternative to out-placement. Out-placement is usually designed to get someone very much the same sort of position as they had before as quickly as possible. If someone finds himself out of work for some reason, it may be just the opportunity to decide to do something different or to reorient. When someone wants to do that, we will work with them. We work for both individuals and corporations.

Q. Who comes to you?

A. With individuals, it could be anyone from someone who is saying, “Hey, you know, this job isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” to someone who is out of work or fears they will be out of work, to someone who is enormously successful but knows they don’t want to keep doing the same thing the rest of their lives.

Q. You started the company in 1979 in New York. Why did you move out here? And what kind of an operation do you have in Newport Beach?

A. We have one associate here on site. We fly people out from New York regularly to work with that associate, and we will add as time goes on. The reason we opened up in California is because it’s the farthest point away from New York but still on the U.S. mainland. Orange County’s the fastest-growing county in the U.S. It also has a very fortunate kind of environment for workshops. When we begin our work with people, we begin by putting them in a 5-day workshop. And then we start our consultations following that, and that fine-tunes the strategy to the individual person. Now our associate out here does consulting, and we also do consulting through New York.

Q. Why do people come to you?

A. People come to us because they want to get control over their future. The classic situation is that someone took a first position out of college, that led to something else, that led to something else, and so they’re on a track that almost became predetermined by that first decision. And sometimes people want to do something entrepreneurial, they think. Sometimes people are absolutely convinced they want to change careers. On later examination, sometimes the problem turns out to be the conditions of their present working situation, and not the career.

Q. What kind of counseling do you do for corporations? How much of it do you do?

A We’re about two-thirds individuals and about a third corporate consulting. In our corporate consulting, we predominantly work with a program we call management matching, which teaches the employing manager how to recognize the indicators of success in individuals. That way, the managers can have enough information about the individuals so that, before they’re moved into positions in their corporations where it becomes very expensive to maintain them, they have a lot of insurance that these people are going to be able to perform productively and are going to be likely to stay with the organization.

Q. So you teach the manager how to evaluate his or her own employees or prospective employees?

A. Precisely. And that evaluation leads to hirings, promotions. . . . There’s nothing that makes a manager’s head swing quite as fast as making repeated bad decisions. So what we have put together in management matching is a model that takes advantage of all the information they have learned over all the years about how people work, and we literally assemble it in a very simple form for them. It’s almost like a checklist. We will go through usually the first two or three hirings and promotions with them, until they become confident in using it, and then they use it on their own.

Q. What is the major concern that individuals bring to your career counseling firm?

A They want to be happy. They want to be able to earn money doing what they like doing. And a lot of them have almost given up the thought that that might happen. They want to live in areas of the country that are pleasing to them, or areas of the world, as the case may be. And they want time for their personal lives.

Q. How many people come to you for a job change, having been fired, or having a premonition that something’s going to happen in their company that they should be prepared for?

A. By far, most of the people come to us before an event happens. They have a sense of being uneasy with where they are. So the majority are simply feeling some dissonance in their life and work situation that they’re smart enough to want to do something about. A proportion has lost a job or knows that they’re going to lose their jobs, less than a quarter. Less than a quarter come from the professions, (including lawyers and doctors), but that’s a growing segment. Most people are in their late 30s. We’ve noticed the age has dropped significantly over the life of the firm: It used to be mid to high 40s, and now it’s down into the 30s.

Q. Why are younger people coming to you? Are they more dissatisfied with their work lives?

A I think that one reason is people are giving themselves permission to question earlier in life than we used to. You know we all inherited from our parents the model that you go to work and you stay there, and you do a good job. And the wave of mergers and acquisitions has certainly broken up that feeling of patrimony in most companies. And so there’s permission to question. Also, I think a lot of people are finding that the jobs simply aren’t that satisfying. When they come out of management training programs into those first years, they’re finding quickly that in large corporations, it’s a highly politicized situation. And they’re not comfortable.

Q. Do you see differences in the problems faced by men and women in the workplace?

A Half of our clients are women; that did not used to be the case. With women, there’s a bigger range in motivation. There are all the life questions with respect to family. And there are also the very real frustrations, which are felt in far too many situations when women are looking at their male counterparts getting promoted faster than they are. They get angry and frustrated about it. And that still happens in a lot of situations. Sometimes it’s their fault that it happens, because the patterns for women are often the ‘I don’t ask for something; I wait for someone to ask me.’ Often their male counterpart has gone and asked for it first.