Navigating life's changes

Gregory Shea was in his early 20s, supervising lifeguards at a recreation facility, when he got his first management lesson from a 16-year-old part-time locker-room attendant.

She told Shea, essentially, to lighten up and go with the flow, to stop micromanaging, but to pay more attention when it mattered the most.

Now Shea, 56, teaches management in executive-coaching classes at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. And the way he sees it, the most important thing to manage - whether one is an executive or an individual on the job - is one's response to change.

In fact, change figures in the subtitle of his book, Your Job Survival Guide: A Manual for Thriving in Change. His book, cowritten with Phoenixville freelance writer Robert Gunther, came out this year.

"She helped me do my job better," recalled Shea, who couples a corporate-consulting practice with his role as an adjunct faculty member at Wharton.

Given Shea's early work experience around water and his coauthor's proclivity for kayaking, it is not surprising that the book makes extensive use of water as a metaphor. Shea argues that many of us have been relying on a washed-up corporate image - the company as ocean liner. Climb aboard a big company like General Motors Corp. and cruise along on a relatively placid sea.

But these days, those big ocean liners are looking a lot more like the Titanic, so Shea and Gunther suggest a different boat - a kayak - to better navigate the turbulent waters of the workplace, and the economy. An expert kayaker can read the water and adjust as conditions change.

Question: Tell me about this white-water world you see.

Answer: Change, that's one thing you can count on - particularly in the second half of the 20th century, driven primarily by the forces of technological advances, globalization. The pressure is relentless and ongoing.

People [need to] deal with permanent white water - where change is not something that simply happens and goes away, it's an ongoing phenomenon. Get the mind-set that you're in a permanent white-water world. It helps because it's actually more accurate, and it leads to some implications about how you adapt to that world.

What kind of craft do you use in a permanent white-water river? You use a kayak. Nobody would take an ocean liner into that.

Q: An ocean liner represents a steady, considered course. Ocean liners also rely on a crew. But the kayaker only sees a short stretch of river and operates an individual boat. Will this metaphor negate the value of long-term planning and relationships?

A: Absolutely there's long-term thinking. Long-term, you should continue to look for work that you particularly like to do because to sustain yourself in such a crazy environment you need to be centered in things that are of real value to you. Otherwise, the craziness outside becomes the craziness inside. And there are some skills about projects and teaming and continuing to develop your own value proposition. That's all important.

Q: What about relationships? Isn't the kayak point of view essentially selfish?

A: Actually, investing in relationships, both professionally and personally, is more important than ever. What you don't want to do is end up on the river alone. You're in an individual boat. But you're in a continually reorganizing collective. Human beings who are dealing with challenging times do far better when they're in relationships, both at work and outside of work.

Q: So suppose you buy the kayak-white-water metaphor - what's your next step?

A: It's how one thinks about investing in one's self, the importance of thinking about the fact that you're a temp, we're all temps. So, how am I going to work the network and continue to develop my skills? I'm consciously looking out into what kind of things I can learn and how I might expand my network, all that stuff.

Q: How do you start?

A: The first thing would be to be proactive. Get out of the reactive mode and work on trying to get out of the dominant anxiety which is all around us. For some people, that'll mean, "I need quiet time." For other folks, you say, "I've got to go find my best friend and talk to him or her." But get yourself centered about what it is that's most important. You can't work in a turbulent field if you're not clear about what's of premier importance to you.

Q: You talk a lot about pacing.

A: If you work a white-water river, the first thing that people want to do is go as fast as they can down the river to get through it. But people who are experienced kayakers know that's not the way to go down a white-water river. [Instead], you work yourself from eddy to eddy [where you can rest].

Q: Give me an example of a workplace eddy.

A: One action plan could be concrete - like, "I'm in an industry that's dying, but I don't know anything about any other industry." Well, OK, then sit down at a terminal. Begin that process of mapping rather than somehow thinking that you're going to be safe waiting.

Q: The key is to do something so that you feel in control.

A: Well, at least you're influencing events. If you're in this world of change, you're not going to control it, but you can influence it.

Q: By developing skills?

A: One of the key skills is this notion of Eskimo roll, which is a basic roll in kayaking.

Anybody who's kayaking assumes they're going to roll over. So, they spend time practicing and practicing flipping back up. If you can take in this permanent white-water imagery, you understand that you are going to flip. You don't treat that emotionally as a big failure.

Q: Of course, there are life jackets.

A: Yes. Developing a capacity to team, a capacity to work projects. So, how are you at moving in and out of teams? Well, this is skill development. It's relationship development. It's also developing your personal flotation device so it's more likely that you are able to survive this white-water world that you are in.

Age: 56.

Residence: Newtown Square.

Family: Wife, Iris, a marriage therapist and student; and daughters Emelyn, 21, and Meredith, 18.

Business: Business consultant and adjunct professor at the Wharton School.

Hobbies: Exercise, fantasy baseball.

Claim to fame: Author, with Robert Gunther, 48, of Phoenixville, of "Your Job Survival Guide: A Manual for Thriving in Change."

Division of labor: Shea brought the business expertise to their book; writer Gunther, an avid kayaker, provided the key white-water metaphor.

Everyone should (also) read: "Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life," by fellow Penn professor Martin Seligman.

Why: Learning how to manage your emotional state is especially valuable in hard times.

Education: Harvard, London School of Economics, Yale.

Evil snack: Mint chocolate-chip ice cream eaten over the sink.

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