Employee Survival Guide®

Top 10 Job Survival Skills

• Mark Carey • Season 6 • Episode 53

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Ever feel like everyone else got the manual for office politics and you’re improvising in a storm? We unpack a practical survival playbook to protect your job, build leverage, and navigate messy power dynamics without losing your edge or your voice. The theme is simple: awareness plus preparation beats fear.

We start by sharpening situational awareness—how to watch your back, read tells, and set boundaries so you spot risks early. Then we break down the real rules of engagement: what discrimination and retaliation look like, how non‑competes and wage issues show up, and why vocabulary matters when you talk to HR. From there, we go deep on negotiation as a career engine, not a last resort. You’ll learn how to prepare your asks, map counterpart incentives, and negotiate even in at‑will roles by trading clarity, scope, and protection for performance and accountability.

Documentation becomes your quiet superpower. We show you how to turn emails and journals into a timeline that anchors your narrative when stakes rise. You’ll also learn to play the room—holding composure, asking pointed questions, and avoiding traps that push you into reactive mode. We draw a hard line between self‑advocacy and whining, and we explain why service to others quietly compounds your influence over time. Finally, we demystify severance negotiations: ERISA plans, contractual rights, and leverage built from a fact‑based story that employers can’t ignore. We close by reframing your mindset: think like a boss, manage risk like an owner, and carry yourself like the next leader.

If you’re ready to trade fear for skills—spot issues faster, document smarter, negotiate stronger, and lead yourself with calm—this one is your toolkit. Subscribe, share with a colleague who needs a backbone boost, and leave a review with the one skill you’ll practice this week.

If you enjoyed this episode of the Employee Survival Guide please like us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We would really appreciate if you could leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player such as Apple Podcasts. Leaving a review will inform other listeners you found the content on this podcast is important in the area of employment law in the United States.

For more information, please contact our employment attorneys at Carey & Associates, P.C. at 203-255-4150, www.capclaw.com.

Disclaimer: For educational use only, not intended to be legal advice.

SPEAKER_00:

Do you have survival skills? I've never really done this episode, but it's been obviously on my mind for quite some time. So I'll just start it off with number one. These are not in any importance of order, just things that I thought about. Number one was watch your back at all times. How do I come up with this one? I'm in federal court a lot. I'm around a lot of U.S. Marshals. I've seen Secret Service and how they act. And if you didn't know it, they're always looking for the things you're just taking for granted. They're looking at exits, they're looking at possibilities, and they're calculating. And it's, you know, probably a pretty good thing to understand how to do. And are you watching your back at all times at work? You know, let's, for example, a close colleague, friend. Maybe they're uh angling for your position in the future. Maybe they're trying to get a promotion, whatever it is. You know, can you trust people at work? And these days, I don't think you can. I think you can have a reasonable degree of trust, but with a lot of boundaries and a lot of protection about yourself, about how you go about what you're doing. And what I ask you to do is why don't you look at the the connections you have with people at work? How strong are they? Are they are these reliable people you can rely on in a pinch when something hits the fan? Maybe you've seen things in the past, circumstances that took place. How do people react? All this stuff should be in your calculus when you're going about your everyday activities, watching yourself. Watch how you act towards people. That's really important. A lot of people just take that for granted. I'll get that into in a second. But watch your back when you when you're in the office or you're engaging with people. Look and listen for the signs, the tells, like poker game that people have. And people have a lot of tells. If you look at them long enough, you get to know them, they can tell you whether they're lying, whether they can be relied upon, whether they'll be trusted. So watch your back. That's number one. Number two, learn the rules of engagement. I can't express this enough. People do not think about the rules of engagement. What do I mean? Well, when you go to your job, it's the most important thing you have besides maybe your mortgage. It produces income for you. It allows you to go to do the fun things you like to do in life. But how do you protect it? You know, what are you doing to protect your job? I mean, these skills I'm giving you right now are going to help you protect your job, but you know, what are the rules of engagement? What is discrimination? What does it look like? If you're a woman and you're about to be deciding upon having a family, why don't you read up on what pregnancy discrimination is? It happens all the time. It's actually the second highest EEOC charge, I believe, that's filed. So it's my favorite because it's so easy to spot and figure out. So look at the rules of engagement of you know, what is discrimination? What is wage violations, what is a non-compete. Look at these things before you just jump in, drop in, it's a phrase I learned this morning, to some circumstance you have that you're contemplating, but you drop in with blindfolds. You don't do that. You do this with everything in your life. You do this with relationships, you try to, you know, learn as much as you possibly can. But people, I can tell you, do not learn about the rules of engagement, about their jobs. How do I know that? Because I can see in the fact patterns when people write them for us in their cases, when they decide to hire us to go after their employers, you can say you can tell whether they at what errors they have committed along the way. Now, in large part, people are good advocates for their cause, but they do make mistakes. So learn the rules of engagement, what is a discrimination claim, how to perfect it, how to go about it, how to build it. I'm not asking you to be a lawyer, just you know, keep coming back to this podcast and learning the things that I'm I'm advocating here on the episodes, and you'll begin to change your learning curve will change uh very quickly to spot the issues, and that's really what you want you to do is spot issues and then figure out how do you navigate around those issues. So learning the rules of engagement are critical to navigating around the office and around people who can be, you know, assholes. Bosses can be assholes. People and bosses, by the way, aren't trained to be bosses. They're just people. They learn by experience. And it's unfortunate, but you know, people have uh they have all their dark secrets. You don't want to find out or be on the back end of somebody's, you know, bad situation because they're having a bad day. So learn the rules of engagement. That's critical. So learn about employment discrimination and what it means. Learn about contracts and how to negotiate them. But the third job survival skill is negotiation is king. If you can't negotiate for yourself in a meaningful way to get what you want, you're missing something here. You can negotiate even for outwill jobs, you can negotiate a lot of things. It really depends upon you taking stock of what you bring to the table to your employer and you know, understanding what value you bring. Get the fear out of the picture, okay? A lot of people operate with fear like because they don't want to negotiate. It's like, you know, it's like speaking in public. Well, get over it, okay? Because, you know, I did. I everyone has a sphere of speaking in public. How about walking into a federal courtroom, you know, really palatial place like the Southern District of New York, wood paneling, it's just austere, it's beautiful, or even the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the uh the grand uh courtroom. It's an amazing place to be. And you gotta speak on the stupid microphone. Well, get over it, because you got a job to do. And your job is to negotiate something. In this case, when I'm in court, I'm obviously arguing for something, but negotiation is an argument. You're preparing yourself in advance, you're walking in, you have your notes, but you you've got this thing down cold. And you've done negotiation is about knowing who your opponent is, knowing what the opponent wants, and knowing what you want. And figuring that out is critical to a job successful job career. And if you don't understand that, start looking at uh all books of things that you can get your hands on about, you know, getting to yes or which is kind of old, but negotiation is critical. I've done it on a negotiation podcast episode in this podcast. I'm not done with it yet because there's a lot to talk about. So negotiation is king. Number three. Number four, document the shit out of your job. I mean, let me repeat that. Document the shit out of your job. What I mean, you are on email all day long. That email belongs to your employer. Where does the email go? Well, it has a timestamp to it. Well, that's critical. You get to create a diary of email timestamped that's there and actually, if you don't know this, email's backed up. So you have a conversation with your boss about a performance or a personal one-on-one check-in, document the email saying, here's what we talked about during the meeting, here's what I advocated for, here's what I understand you said, you know, effective listening. Document everything that's happening. If you feel that you're in the throes of a downward spiral of your employer doing this to you because you've not done it, because you know the survival skills, that somebody's doing something to you and setting you up. You want to document the shit out of what's happening. And you can't document enough. Now, you can save that thing, that email you send by making a journal entry in your private journal, okay, and writing down I sent I sent an email on this date, and this is what I said, and maybe this person responded back and you put it in quotes. That's yours. You get to keep that on your person. It's not your employer. They don't own that piece of journal entry you put. So document the crap out of your job. When something's happening to you, you can have a reason why you do this is you want to give your lawyer the full narrative according to what you thought happened in real time about what happened, and you can create the storyline narrative that favors your point of view because your employer, by the time you hit the lawyering part of things, they're trying to angle to uh set you up for your loss because they don't want you to win, and you're trying to win. So documenting things over the entire time period uh will help you essentially perfect your case. It'll help me understand, you know, do you have a case or not? So if you learn the rules of engagement, what you know is discrimination, you'll start to understand what to put in that narrative. The issues will pop in your face saying, well, that's important. I remember reading about that. So document the crap out of your job. Now, number five, learn how to play the room. People don't understand this one. I guess skillful negotiators, public speakers, politicians, you know, they know how to play the room. What I mean by this is that when you walk into a room, for example, in a new meeting, and you know the characters there, and you know what the meeting's about in content, listen to what people are saying and try to figure out, you know, what is the move you know the momentum of the meeting? What are people not coming up with? Are they not coming up with the idea that you thought of? Do your research in advance of the meeting, of course, but know the the the the play the room and try to play so that it things are are advocating in your direction or for a particular cause you have, but learn to play the room. What you should not do, and I I strongly say this to you, is that people make mistakes, and and I how I know this all, because people write narratives for us and we can read them. People say a lot of stupid shit during meetings or let their they let their guard down and they get baited into arguments by people who are trying to set them up. So learn how to play the room to your advantage. If you are in the crosshairs of performance improvement plan, you're already on the bad list trying to set you up for failure. You know that. And even at that juncture, you can still play the room with understanding about, okay, you know, I don't have to be reactive here. I can actually, yeah, I'll take that under advisement. Thank you for saying that. I'll take that under advisement too. And you can ask pertinent questions about certain things, but play the room. Don't be fearful and scared about what's happening to you because your employer and your bosses will feed off it like sharks, and it's it's ugly. So play the know how to play the room, how to compose yourself in that situation. Number six, become your own self-advocate. I mean, it's all the things I just talked about in the last five skill sets. You know how to play the game, you know how to play the room, you know how to negotiate, you're watching your back because you don't want to get your ass kicked, and you want to become your own self-advocate. How do you do that? Am I asking to be a lawyer? No, I'm asking you to really understand what's taking place and don't do this. Don't, and I mean don't, and I just underline this extensively, don't cry the victim. Because when you cry the victim to yourself, you're letting yourself down. You're not you're you're not putting your best foot forward, you're not trying 110%, you're just blaming others for something that happened. I mean, I know men who are in their 60s who do do the shit. And it's really actually embarrassing once you spot it. And it's kind of comical because they don't want to accept the fact they're the cause of what happened. So don't be the cause of something. Be the self-advocate for somebody else doing something to you, but advocate your position. Understand rules, what's happening to you, what the play is like. You know, if you need to have your playbook in your head, get one and figure out how to be your own self-advocate by, let's say you need to, I don't know, set your boss up. You ever think about this? Setting your boss up because they've done something, and you can entrap them in conversations because they're not smart enough to figure it out. You can do that. You can actually set people up and make have them make and say things either by in writing or otherwise that they otherwise would not say. And it's really about artful advocacy, asking a ton of questions, and really being on the money in terms of what the mission is. The mission is to save your job, or the mission is to get a better severance package. And you do that by being in control, in composure. Don't let them see your other side, your emotional side, don't let them see the victim. But be the best advocate you can without not asking you to be a whistleblower, I'm just asking you to be self-advocate, taking a strong position, but knowing why you're doing it. And then also, if you need to complain, you know, the word know the rules of engagement that you can complain at HR. And once you do that, using no magic words, I was treated differently because of, they laws of protections of retaliation favor you. And the employer is aware of that. And if they're not, they're stupid, uh, and you begin to set them up. And it builds a case for severance negotiation, which I'll talk about in a second. So be your own self-advocate. Don't be the victim. Please, don't be the victim. Learn how to play this game because it is a game. I know it's emotional for you, but step outside of that. And if you can't, get a colleague to help you or get a lawyer. But be your self-advocate in the office space because a lawyer can't be there with you. You know, most people don't understand that. Well, I got an email yesterday from a person who says, I wasn't denied, I was denied a counselor in the meeting. I'm like, did you know it? Uh you know, I didn't speak to this person, but most people think that they can bring their lawyers into meetings. That's not true. Private self-governments and public employers obviously are government employers. But companies like Oracle or Microsoft or Bridgewater or you name it, these are private governments onto themselves, and they operate with their own rules. So no, lawyers can't be uh present there. Number seven, kind of similar here in the vein of what I'm talking about, but there's an old Saturday Night Live skit. I don't know how far back, but it's about no whiners, and it's just the funniest thing you ever saw. But in the workspace, no one likes, not even from my childhood playground, no one liked the whiner. Okay, the wanker. The wanker, you're gonna get you're it's basically putting that sticker on the back saying, kick me. Why are you going to do this? People do this all the time. I we get a lot of correspondence from people who potential clients want to be potential clients with our artists. And it's surprising how victimized they are. They're they're they're not realizing that's not the way, the the path to take. And they and they get really self-righteous about their victimization and like, you know, wrong done to them, and like, well, you need to hire an attorney. Well, I can't afford one. Well, that is that my problem? No, it's the people are uh they just don't be a whiner. A whiner is it's kind of a cop out, like, you know, you deserve something, you're entitled to something. Everybody doesn't like a whiner, okay? There's something you there's something better you can be, you can be a self-advocate. You can learn the rules of engagement, you can learn how to negotiate, stand up for yourself, get a strong back in this process. It remove the fear of what uh the unknown here. It's critically important because this is your job. It pays your income. You know, don't make a stupid mistake about being a whiner. It's I know it sounds, you know, incredible to say that to you, but people they operate in a cesspool at work, a cesspool of psychology, and it's it's not really regulated, and people cast judgments all the time. The easiest people to pick off is the whiner, okay? Or the victim. Just it's not the role you want to play. You wanna if you want to s protect your job, you wanna basically create a sevens package. If you if you can't stay in your job, you don't want to be the whiner, okay? Please just remove that cap and that the that character, whatever it is. Number eight, be of service to others even if you don't want to. I put this on the list. You know, team play, all that good stuff they throw at you, you know, maybe the poster on the wall, you know, the you know what I'm talking about. It's like, you know, team play or whatever they say. But everyone really likes when somebody does something nice to them and they remember it, and they remember you in an act of kindness. Maybe you had a bad day, but you still give me an act of kindness. So try to figure out in your head about your daily workday how you can be selfless, meaning you can do things for other people that may not necessarily get things for you, but you can be helpful to others. People skip this thing all the time, but it goes a long way. A selfless person who's acting in the interest of other people and interested in their careers, you're paying a dividend in the future that's going to return back to you. You just don't know it. If it's in the religious context, you're tithing you know money to the church or something, and it you know, brings something back to you. But be of service to people, even when you don't want to, even the person you really don't like at the office, it might make you feel better about you know doing maybe just helping them out instead of you know holding a grudge and removing that negative thought from your head. And maybe it makes your job go a little easier. So it's just a little thought there. People actually recognize it, and at least I do. I recognize it all the time. So it's a good thing to do. It's just try it out. Uh, number nine, know how to negotiate severance. I've devoted a lot of time about severance negotiations, either in in writing or podcast episodes. It is a straightforward approach. I'm gonna nail it down real quickly. It's a skill set you need to know about. And if you don't know, come back to this podcast or and and find out or read about it. It's simply two takes two forms. The first is the kind of the goodwill performan uh performance aspect, where you're negotiating upon the things you've done that made the company money, and you are trying to leverage that goodwill with the employer. It doesn't go that far. It's you can try it. Most people laud their accomplishments like the like like we all know them. And then listen, everybody has accomplishments, okay? We all do. Don't don't stick it out there in our faces like we should admire you about it. I mean, everybody has accomplishments. But here's the trick employers don't reward that in severance for your accomplishments. I mean, some do, but in majority of my experience over the years, going on 30, which is kind of ridiculous, it's a it's a fail. Well, what's your plan B? Plan B is, you know, either you have a number one, an ERISA plan that governs, you know, pays for years of service for your signing or release of waiver claims in order to get the money. Uh so that's like a two-week or four-week four-year service type of thing, depending upon the plan. A plan means an ERISA plan. Ooh, it's a funky acronym. Employee Retirement Income Security Act, ERISA. It's pretty easy law to understand regarding severance. You just got to sign your rights away in exchange for money. You obviously have to be a participant in a plan. And you would know that by looking at your HR portal and saying, you know, are you part of that plan? You can also go to a site called freearissa.com and you can find a free membership to look up your company whether they have an ERISA plan. I think it's the item I on the you'll you'll find it, but you have to do some research to find it or the HR portal. The other way you can get severance is through a contract. Most people don't have these negotiated in advance of their employment, but some people do. We negotiate them for them, and it's basically a year severance for typically an executive level, and they get paid severance in exchange for a release of claims. Now, if they're fired for cause, they don't get severance. No one gets severance when you're fired for cause, unless you've got some leverage against your employer. Now, the majority of the severance negotiations uh that occur in the in the United States go like this. It's you whipping up a claim because you documented the shit out of the case. You know the rules of engagement, so your narrative is pretty tight, and you got it, you know, you got the goods on the employer by your own writing. Now you're like, well, I don't have any you know recorded evidence of anything and whatever. I'm like, you know that I'm that's fine, that's like smoking evidence, but that smoking gun evidence is really kind of, you know, 5% or less of the time. That's direct evidence. Majority of these cases we deal with are circumstantial, meaning your narrative, the power of your narrative is king here. And you're negotiating here through severance negotiations. You're essentially policing the employer saying, I got this affidavit that says, for example, you discriminated against me because I'm a woman and because of my race, because I'm black, and you said or did things that treated me differently because of both of those things or one of those things. And by the way, I also found that you were, I don't know, stealing secrets from another company or something. It could be anything. It's just whatever you can write in your narrative that is factually supported that the employer can also check. We would then take it to the employer. We obviously would notarize the document for you and present it to the employer along with a demand and saying, we're going to negotiate X amount of dollars here as a starting point, and the employer says, okay, you got us, you know, we'll we'll start to negotiate, but they also hem and haw, they want to pay as little as possible. But that's a negotiation. But you're bringing to the table leverage, leverage in the form of potential legal claims. And remember something that people don't understand. The best cases are always settled, always settled, okay? The cases that go to litigation are the ones that are 50-50 on the on the border, or the employers are stupid enough, just downright stupid enough to try to defend itself because maybe defense counsel said you need to defend itself because defense counsel need to make money. I mean, it's part of the litigation machinery here. It's like, you know, the law firms make money. Severage negotiations about bringing leverage to the table. We help people do that. And at the end of the day, you would sign a release of claims, just like you would under a RISTA plan, and you would get paid a sum of money. Typically, it's W-2 income. Um, it's never not W-2 income. It's sometimes it's$10.99, depending upon how we split it up. Uh the next one, the last one is is number 10, be the boss. Be the boss, I borrowed this from Chevy Chase in an old movie, so be the ball. You want to be the ball. You want to be the boss because you want to think like the boss thinks about you and how the boss thinks about I run a company and how I think about running the company, how I treat employees, how do I, you know, what a and maybe if you don't have that experience about being the boss or being an entrepreneur about running companies, figure it out. Begin to research what it's like to run companies so you can get information about what motivates an employer. Typically it's profit, making a profit, providing payroll, providing benefits, that have an advantage in the market space, law firm or not, or it's Amazon or anything else. It's about running a company, being successful at it. So if you think and act like a boss would act or like a CEO would act, you're on your way to essentially being promoted in the future because they have to find the new leaders in the company, and that's really the importance of it. But it's also to promote yourself to people saying, this person has what I think it takes to be, you know, the next manager or whatever it is. But just people make this mistake all the time. They go to work, they bring their shit from the outside into work, and they just let it fly like it's whatever. You gotta control yourself. You really have to think like the boss thinks about the job. It really has it goes a long way about improving your appearance before your colleagues, before your managers, before the the owners of the company. People see it. I don't know if you know this, but people are watching you, and you better start to understand that. They're they see what you're doing, and they can see what your potential is if you show signs of that. So, you know, bosses do watch. They watch a lot because they're trying to also, at their level, bring the company to its next level of success, and that's through their employees. So, you know, I could say a lot of different survival skills, but these are the things I thought about that would be very helpful for you. They're common sense items. There are also some uh items here that will help you in your legal engagement if you had to do it. I hope you enjoyed this. Remember, fear is just what's the unknown. Get over it, learn about what the unknown is, and you won't have any more fear. Keep coming back to the uh podcast. I'll keep putting out more. But other than that, have a great week.