Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's topic? Bench development in a downturn.

You know, maybe we can't hire anybody when the economy is soft.

There are lots of people looking.

And maybe we can offer to help, and thereby create or strengthen a relationship that might be

a value later. Here we go. It's unfortunate but when the economy softens, a lot of managers tend to turn inward,

right? We focus on our budgets, our forecasts, our bosses, and of course hopefully, our teams, it's

normal that we understand, but normal is average and averages what everybody else is doing and we don't want to be average particularly

in a down market why would we want to copy everyone else if they're not winning

right yeah a way to think about it is is when things are going well or even very well,

there are all kinds of growth projects, all kinds of work, which serves to develop new revenue streams for the firm, new products, new services, new customers.

When things are going up, there's extra money.

And executive leadership generally believes

that in an expanding economy it's time to expand market share so there's more to do.

But in a downturn there's less to do. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

A lot of cases, the new products and services,

they're not being created, you know, sometimes,

but usually not.

Right.

And that means the time we would all have been spending on those projects is no longer being

asked for and then rather than simply allowing Parkinson's law to swallow up our

windfall we ought to use that free time effectively.

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