Career Insurance For Your Directs - Part 1

Summary

Manager Tools Podcast Summary

Episode: Career Insurance for Your Directs - Part 1

Date: September 15, 2025
Hosts: Sarah and Mark

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Overview: Main Theme & Purpose

This episode of Manager Tools introduces the concept of "career insurance" for your directs—practical strategies managers can teach their team members to safeguard their careers against economic downturns, layoffs, and organizational changes. Mark and Sarah emphasize the importance of managers proactively guiding their directs on building resilient, successful careers, not just for the directs' benefit but also for organizational effectiveness and the manager’s own success.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Need for Career Insurance (00:24–03:53)

• The current economic climate is a “terrible job market,” and professionals will inevitably face tough markets multiple times throughout their careers.

• Anxiety during downturns is common, but much of it is preventable. Preparation and career management offer protection.

• While older generations managed their careers passively—trusting the company to take care of them—today’s professionals are their own “free agents.”

• The best managers don’t just focus on outputs but also on developing their directs as professionals.

  “If your directs have career insurance, when the next recession comes for them, they’ll sail right through it. And they will thank you for teaching them these lessons.” (A, 01:46)

2. Why Managers Should Teach Career Insurance (03:54–08:11)

• It’s no longer the company’s job to manage an employee’s career; the responsibility falls to the individual.

• Most new professionals lack a realistic understanding of career management and have not been coached in this area.

• Helping your directs develop their careers reduces avoidable mistakes and demonstrates genuine care for them as people.

  “You’re also responsible as a human being for helping young people, the people who come to work for you not go through the stupid lessons you went through by stubbing your toe... as opposed to your boss back then telling you…” (B, 06:04)

• Encouraging career development can mean your best people outgrow you, but that’s a sign of managerial success, not failure.

3. Organizational & Personal Benefits (08:12–09:01)

• Directs who feel supported in their career development will not only perform better but also be more engaged and loyal.

• Caring about directs isn’t just “selfless leadership”—it benefits managers in tangible ways.

  “Directs who know their boss cares about them... will produce better results and be better team members.” (A, 08:24)

4. How to Deliver Career Insurance Guidance (09:02–11:57)

• The four pillars of career insurance (to be elaborated across episodes):
  1. Results
  2. Relationships
  3. Save a year’s worth of salary in cash
  4. Live small
• Deliver guidance during 1-on-1s or as a special agenda item in a staff meeting. Individual 1-on-1s are recommended for tailored impact, but ensure all directs receive the same message to avoid confusion.
• Advise managers not to cram all topics into one meeting for effectiveness.

5. Start with Results: The Most Important Insurance (12:37–14:51)

• The number one career insurance is producing notable, high-quality results.

• Top performers are the last to go in layoffs and are more likely to be forgiven for minor mistakes.

• However, “results do not confer blanket immunity”—significant behavioral missteps can still derail a career.

  “Top performers are always the last people to go.” (A, 13:49)

• At higher career levels, expectations (and consequences) intensify—a single public mistake can have outsized effects, even for high performers.

6. Scripted Guidance for Directs (17:59–24:16)

• Mark provides a sample script that managers can adapt for delivering this message. Key points include:

  • Commitment to sharing tips on career insurance.
  • Clear communication about goals and performance standards.
  • Reassuring directs that producing results is foundational—not promotion pressure, but security and flexibility.
  • Ensuring directs know you will clarify goals and navigate changes with them.
  • Emphasizing mutual responsibility and support for career aspirations.

  “If you make a big visible mistake, and you haven’t done well against your goals and results, I won’t have as much ability to defend you. And if you have great results, others above me will learn about it—partially because they’ll find out, and others because I’ll tell them.” (B, 21:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On why managers should invest in directs:

  “Showing them that you care enough about them as a person—even if in some small percentage of cases it actually works against you... why wouldn’t you, if you have been professing to care about them?” (B, 06:36)

• On the value of results as insurance:

  “Results will give you all kinds of insurance in terms of your future earning potential.” (B, 20:24)

• On communicating standards:

  “If you’re unclear about what your goals or results are, come talk to me and we’ll get it clear between you and me.” (B, 21:16)

• On embracing changes:

  “The one thing that won’t change is that things will always change.” (B, 22:13)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:24 — Laying out the need for career insurance in a tough job market
• 02:29 — Four elements of career insurance outlined
• 03:54 — The manager’s role and perspective on career management
• 08:12 — Addressing “What’s in it for me?” for managers
• 09:02 — Strategies for delivering the career insurance message
• 12:37 — Pivot to topic #1: “Results” as career insurance
• 14:51 — Examples, pitfalls, and the importance of maintaining professionalism
• 17:59 — Introduction of sample script language for directs
• 21:16 — Handling goal clarity and job changes with directs
• 24:16 — Episode wrap-up and preview of part 2

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Structure and Tone

The conversation is practical, candid, and supportive, mirroring the reality-based, action-oriented approach Manager Tools is known for. Mark and Sarah balance empathy with honesty, urging managers to both care for and improve their teams by teaching hard-won lessons that go beyond immediate work output.

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Summary Takeaways

• Managers should proactively teach career insurance principles to their directs.
• Outstanding results are foundational to career stability and growth—even (and especially) in tough times.
• Supporting directs’ long-term success is both the right thing to do and a smart management practice.
• Clear, empathetic communication (including scripting if needed) makes these conversations more effective and less intimidating for all involved.
• More elements (relationships, financial security, “living small”) will be covered in part two.

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For managers:
Use these ideas to deepen your support for your team, empower their career resilience, and strengthen their performance and loyalty. Adapt the script, practice, and focus on clarity and personalization.

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Key action:
Begin integrating career insurance discussions into your regular coaching and 1-on-1 meetings—starting with the importance of results.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Manager Tools.

[B]

This is Sarah and I'm Mark.

[A]

Today's podcast, Career Insurance for your Part 1 of 2.

[B]

This cast answers these questions. What can I do to help my directs have great careers? What common career mistakes can I steer my team away from? How can I teach my directs how to manage their careers?

[A]

If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. In life, relationships matter. And the same is true in your professional experience, especially between managers and their directs. Everything hinges on trust. As a manager, you need to understand what matters most to your directs and then communicate, communicate, communicate. Contact Maggie to learn more about our effective manager guidance for your organization. Because it matters. This organizational training, either on site or virtually delivered, comes with the Manage youe Tools annual license. Free for additional support while your team rolls out the trinity. Email us today to learn [e-mail] okay, so Mark, we are recording this podcast in the fall September of 2025. And if you're currently listening to this podcast and living in these days, we are in a terrible job market. And if you are listening to this during a terrible job market, you surely know that another terrible job market is going to be coming in our future. So if you're early in your career, there are going to be several of these down job markets in your future, unfortunately. And too many professionals worry when layoffs are happening or their employer has a diploma, and rightly so. Why wouldn't they? I mean, it's, it's terrifying, especially if you've never gone through it before. But the solution is that we oughtn't have to create a situation where we have worry and fear in the moment because we can prepare for it now. And the folks listening to today's podcast are managers. I would guess. We're in the Manager Tools thread today, and I would guess that many of them have learned these lessons. But if your directs have career insurance, when the next recession comes for them, they'll sail right through it. And they will. Thank you for teaching them these lessons.

[B]

Good. Okay, so here's our outline. Number one, teacher directs about career insurance. The first insurance is results. The second one is Relationships Insurance. Three is save a year's worth of salary in cash. And finally, insurance for live small always.

[A]

Yeah, and before we go into our our insurance rules, I guess you'd call them, let's just talk a little bit about us teaching our directs about the existence, if you will, of career insurance. And we want to make sure that, that we are very clear on the purpose of today's guidance we're not trying to teach you, the manager, these things.

[B]

Even though if you don't know them, you should.

[A]

You should. We, we assume you do.

[B]

You can learn while we're talking through you to your directs.

[A]

Right? Yeah, exactly. That's absolutely it. Yeah. We, we assume you know these rules, but today what we're recommending is that you teach these principles to your directs as part of your management responsibilities. And we'll talk about each of them and we'll even provide you a script that you can use as a basis for teaching your directs how they can ensure their own careers.

[B]

Yeah. Now some of you are thinking, wait, I manage my career, they manage their careers. You know, how much should I be involved in career management? Especially since companies don't manage careers anymore. For those of you who may not know, that's true. I mean, 50 years ago, companies did manage careers, and that was bad because you really couldn't be a free agent very much. You couldn't move around nearly as easy. But then when companies started laying people off, employees realized, wait a minute, I've really always been a free agent. I need to take charge of it myself. And they did. And employees, individuals, managers, executives, individual contributors have been managing their careers. Whether your company implies that they're managing your career or not, the fact is you're managing your own career. Okay? But what happens is new people to the organization come in with an understanding of their careers that's probably not accurate. They haven't spent any time in an organization, or if they have, they were an individual contributor or they were a minimum wage person learning the basics of professionalism and so on. And what you'll discover is the better your directs careers are managed by themselves, the, the better they'll be for you. And you're not just a manager who is responsible for outputs. You're also a results and retention. You're also responsible as a human being for helping young people, the people who come to work for you not go through the stupid lessons you went through by stubbing your toe on stuff, as opposed to your boss back then telling you, by the way, watch out, you're about to stub your toe or I've been there. I did it. The whole reason manager tools and executive tools and career tools exist is because Mike and I were frankly sick of the fact that we would go to executives, bosses, other people we respected to have help on a management problem. Hey, what do I do in this situation? And we didn't. They didn't have good answers at all. They knew nothing. At least as far as what they could teach about how to manage people based on the answers I heard is terrible. And so we set out to find it and we're giving it away for free. And we think you ought to be doing the same thing and it will certainly help you. Look, if you teacher directs this, it shows your care about your direct beyond just the work they do for you and for your organization. If you're a manager managing younger individual contributors, as I mentioned, no one has taught them about this stuff, showing them that you care enough about them as a person, even if in some small percentage of cases it actually works against you because they have a nice step outwards and upwards. If they leave your organization, why wouldn't you, if you have been professing to care about them and we encourage you to do so through one on ones, why wouldn't the first thing you say to them when they get a better job somewhere else, well done. Or are you going to say, oh, I can't believe you're leaving me after all I did for you. Well, by that token then if that applies from you to them, then it applies from them to you that you can never lay me off after all I've done for you. And so if you're saying that they're just round pegs and round holes and the moment they leave your organization they're nobody to you, well that's not a real relationship, it's almost an abomination, that kind of thing. So if you show them that you care enough to help them have a good career, even if, and they'll figure it out very quickly that it's not exactly perfectly aligned with what you have them doing, they will start to realize that you don't see them as just cogs in your machine. You know, we had recent guidance about Google's Project Oxygen. It actually says one of their top eight things is managers who care about their directs careers. And let's be clear, we would never have come up with one on ones which by the way, we didn't truly understand and had to test to figure out what worked and what didn't. We would never have done that had we not first known the fundamental principle of know your people was the single most important behavior for managers.

[A]

Yeah, and Mark, I can imagine there are people listening to this cast right now that are thinking, yeah, that's great. I'm doing all of this to show them how important they are. But what about me over here?

[B]

What's in it for me?

[A]

What's in it for me? Exactly. So folks if you need a selfish reason, and some of you do legit, I get it. It's been our experience and, and folks, our data support this that directs who know their boss cares about them. Even if you're not naturally a caring person, those directs will produce better results and be better team members. So engaging in these activities isn't just, isn't just purely for their benefit. You will also reap results of this effort, this energy invested in this relationship as well.

[B]

Yeah, it's not just selfless leadership.

[A]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

There's a benefit for you. Now look folks, you could easily spread these lessons. Again, there are four of them. We could spread these lessons out over a series of your one on ones with each member of your team. That works well if you have a wide range of performance on your team and or a wide range of relationship with your directs. And so you expect different questions and you don't want to pollute your top performers discussion with one of your people who's just a colossal pain in the rear. And what we mean by that is you will be the one to know whether one of your folks needs more time spent on results, for instance, than on relationships or more on building a network than on living small. Okay. One downside of the approach of doing them in one on ones is that you'll be taking up more of your time because you'll have to cover each of the four topics with each of the directs. Please don't try to cram all four topics into one one on one. It won't have the impact. Tell your folks you're going to start doing this and do the first one and then do the other one, the next one, one or two weeks later. That will send a very powerful message to your directs that this is important enough. It's an important enough topic that you've thought about it, you've organized it, and you're sharing it over a series of four weeks or even eight weeks or six weeks or something like that.

[A]

And folks, we are not encouraging you to be efficient at the expense of effectiveness. Not at all. Please don't take that away from this. But if you are doing these individual briefings, you're going to receive similar questions because you're delivering it individually. Whereas if you shared it in a staff meeting, perhaps as a special agenda item, everyone is going to hear all of your answers. You're not going to have to repeat yourself because they all have similar answers or sorry, sorry, similar questions. And you could do this. To Mark's point, you could do this instead of individually in a group, in your staff meeting, we recommend your one on ones. But staff meetings work as well. And keep in mind if you don't do it in a staff meeting and you are delivering these messages individually, you must make sure everyone knows that you're doing this. You're having these conversations with every other individual in the team during their one on ones. You don't want them to feel targeted or like they are somehow the only person receiving this as some form of remedial guidance that you think only they need specifically, no one else requires this kind of input. It's a bad look. So you do need to if you're doing it individually, which again we recommend you make sure you let them know everyone is receiving this conversation before we.

[B]

Get into the four major insurances. If you're a licensee, you can share these show notes with your team, with everyone on your team. Right? You can grab a PDF, talk about efficiency to them. And yeah, we don't recommend that as the your only form of communication. That's a pretty measly way to show people that you care about them. But. But it still is a good reinforcer of the lesson if you share it verbally. And look, no question, we encourage you to have them start listening to career tools. It's all free. Okay, we go into even more detail over multiple cast about these topics and of course plenty more about results, about relationships, about navigating the professional world.

[A]

Is your team stuck Firefighting while Strategic Goals Slip away this week on September 18th, join our executive speaker series with Ruth Butlin Managing the tension between strategy and operations. Discover a practical framework to keep daily demands under control while still driving long term priorities forward. Don't miss this chance to learn how to balance both with confidence. All executive tools licensees are invited gain access today by visiting manager-tools.com licenses all right, so let's start to go into our our bits of insurance, if you will. Starting with the most important results folks, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most important career insurance that anybody can have is to produce notable results in their job. The more results you produce and the more results you produce that are qualitatively better than other people's results. The more likely you are to have job security when it comes to layoffs, when it comes to downturns, when it comes to we need to cut back on some costs. Top performers are always the last people to go.

[B]

Yeah. And yes, it's also true that if you have distinctive results, you can make a few mistakes that are much more likely to be forgiven or overlooked. A poor performer who doesn't treat others well or makes political mistakes will not be forgiven.

[A]

Yeah, and listen, I think we talked about this in our recording of how to Build a Network that we recently released in Career Tools. Mark, we talked a little bit about this idea that you're not perfect. The imperfect things will happen. You'll make mistakes. And this is a great set of insurance because you are making sure that the number one is taken care of. But to be clear, folks, top performance does not confer blanket immunity. Like, if you are an excellent performer, but you get super drunk at a company meeting and you embarrass yourself, it is going to hurt your career, at least for a time.

[B]

And.

[A]

And it will hurt your career, even if it's just one time. If you repeat those type of incidents, it could entirely derail your career, results or no, because of other activities that you're engaging in. But again, what we're suggesting here is results prevent you from suffering the smaller things that you may do imperfectly.

[B]

Again, it's a little bit of a. A blanket. Yeah, right. It's a security blanket. I'm beginning to write a series of casts for Executive Tools right now, and I know some of you in the manager tools community are listening, and you're. If you're listening currently in, let's say, September or October of 2025, some of you had a manager tools license that included executive tools, but now you've just lost it. And we've just started. I didn't start it after you lost your license, I promise. But we just started a series of Executive Tools cast called welcome to the Straitjacket about the rules that tighten up on executives and how you don't even get one chance of being really drunk at a company party or doing something untoward unless your results are bizarrely great. And even then, there will probably be some question about taking you off the promotion track, because the next promotion at your level, if you're an executive, might include press visibility or, you know, being an ambassador for the company and doing two or three parties a week or something like that. And they just can't have that kind of risk hanging over the company's reputation. Yeah. So here's how talking about results as career insurance might sound. Now, if you're new to manager tools, this is one of the first casts you've heard. You should know that years ago, 20 years ago, when we started this, every once in a while we would put something like this in a podcast. Normally, obviously, our job is to describe what we recommend you do and we do so specifically. But every once in a while I would say, since this is a recommendation about what to do, I'm going to go ahead and tell you just sort of on the side, it wasn't even in the show notes. Here's how I would say it. And there were probably three or four themes of everyone who wrote in in the first five or ten years. And that was one of the themes. I love it when you tell me exactly what to say because then even if I'm not going to say it the way you said it, or Sarah or Mike or Katie or whatever, even I don't say it exactly that way. I now have a script that I can edit and I can practice. So folks, we don't mean to be talking down to you at all. This is in response to massive requests from our community. Please, whenever you're telling us, hey, these are the kind of things you'd be talking to your directs about. They say, please spoon feed me and tell me exactly how to say it.

[A]

To add to that, if you're a licensee, you can print this script out and you've got that in front of.

[B]

You, redline it and change the words and so on.

[A]

You don't have to listen to us on 50% speed and try and type feverishly while Mark is talking.

[B]

I get one or two notes a year asking people that when I write these scripts out and I do think of them as scripts and I've written speeches for presidents and CEOs and senators and all kinds of people. I do think of them bit as scripts, but I understand that people will extemporize with them. They'll go off, off script. And that's great. People write and say, would you please not use words in the script that no one knows but you like extemporize or. I mentioned one. This has been 10 years ago, but I mentioned one. I used the word pejorative and I was astounded first that two people wrote in and said what does that word mean? And I took them at their word and I said, hey, first of all, you could look it up. Just type pejorative at Google and it will. The first listing is always if it's just one word, it gives you the definition. But basically the feedback was, I don't like it when you use words I don't use. The problem with that is the only way I can write a speech for you is if I know you exceptionally well and I can't write a speech for half a million people and keep Everybody happy. So I write a speech for me and I encourage you to change it subtly so that it's good for you. So here's how it would start again. I'm going to assume I'm in a one on one. You could also do this in a. In a staff meeting. You could also schedule a separate meeting, although everyone tells me they don't have any time for any separate meetings anymore. So anyway, I want to start talking to you on a periodic basis about what I call career insurance. A lot of the stuff I'm going to be sharing in the coming weeks and months weren't explicitly taught to me. I kind of always thought that was dumb. And I don't think you should learn this stuff only when you make mistakes in these areas. I've made some of these mistakes and if I were you and I knew that my boss knew this stuff, I'd want her to tell me about it. So, Sarah, do you want me to just keep going?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, do the whole thing.

[B]

I'm just going to tell you now, dude. The first and most important career career insurance you can buy or have is to deliver great results. The better you perform, the more likely you are to get promoted, which can be a form of career insurance itself, especially if you learn to live small. And you'll certainly get additional income out of a promotion. But even if you don't want to be promoted, and that's a call you have to make, and choosing not to be promoted is a totally legit career path, you're not going to get pressure from me to get promoted. I might tell you I think you're good and you should, but if that's not what you want to do, that's okay. But results will give you all kinds of insurance in terms of your future earning potential. Perhaps the most valuable part of the career insurance of results is that if you produce great results, you'll be forgiven more often when you make mistakes. Now look, we all make mistakes. I'm happy to compare mine to yours. And my list will be longer. There's no question, and I have some doozies. But I don't think anyone would argue that if you make a lot of mistakes, your reviews aren't going to be as good and your raises aren't going to be as big. If you're a top performer in terms of results, it'll be much easier for me to defend you to my bosses when you do make mistakes by talking about how valuable you are in terms of our team's results. If you make a big visible mistake. And you haven't done well against your goals and results, I won't have as much ability to defend you. And if you have great results, others above me will learn about it, partially because they'll find out, and others because I'll tell them. That's part of my job, is to politically support you. The more good you work you do, the more my boss will know, the more my boss will be able to tamp down people getting mad at you because you disagreed or you did something wrong. Because again, you have so many other good results. Now, to be clear, dude, I have responsibility for part of this. I'm responsible for giving you goals. One thing that means is if you aren't clear about what your goals are or how you're measured, that's not fair to you. You may not agree, but you should understand. I've been in situations where I found after the fact that I was being measured on something that I didn't know about. And I'm going to tell you now, that frustrated me. But that's actually not the words I used when I found this out, because I knew at that time, if my boss had told me I could achieve that additional thing that was part of this larger work package I had. So if you're unclear about what your goals or results are, come talk to me and we'll get it clear between you and me. Also, though, to be clear, we're not going to argue about what the standards are. We're talking about clarity, about the standards that exist now. Look, I know there are going to be times when our goals or what results we're responsible for are going to change. I encourage you to have a good attitude about change because it's coming whether you or I want to or not. The one thing that won't change is that things will always change. And it's my job to keep you informed about it, to recognize when that change might put you between two different goals. We'll talk about it, and you have my word, we'll figure it out. Look, results come first here, but we're also always thinking about people. So I want to know what you want to do in your career and how I can help you achieve that. I just figure if my boss is aligned with what I want to do, I'm going to do a better job for my boss. So therefore, that's the boss I want to be. And the best way for you to allow me to do that is to meet your objectives and be a good, communicative teammate. Okay? That's the results one.

[A]

Exactly. And again we we recommend that you do it in a one on one. You could do it in a group, but again, write it down, make it your own, rehearse it a few times so that you know where you're going. And yeah, there you go. Thanks so much for joining us folks. Join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast Cast and remember, five stars only. Please.