By Hal Lancaster and found on CareerJournal.com, this article discusses the uncomfortable subject of the economy. After all, what goes up must come down, right?! Mr. Lancaster presents some reflections on this time in your career. Although written as a guide for managers, the ideas are applicable to everyone at every level - and just may give you an idea what your manager is considering.

If you’re like many managers on the front lines of the corporate wars, you’ve had it pretty easy for some time, economically speaking. But the economy has slowed, and as corporate earnings continue to tumble and layoff announcements proliferate, uncertainty and fear may be dominating your workplace. What do you do?

Most of the verbiage dished out lately by career advisers seems to center on job loss and job search. And it indeed may be time to spruce up your resume and prepare for the worst. But equally important to your career at this critical juncture is how you lead during hard times. Your ability to deal with adversity can make or break your career.

To keep the group you manage and your career on track, consider these 10 rules for the bumpy road ahead:

1. Downturns are occasions to lengthen time horizons, not shorten them.
   “People get a crisis mentality and say, ‘I have to think about the next quarter, forget a year from now,’” says Darrell Rigby, a director in Boston at the management-consulting firm of Bain & Co., who conducts an annual survey of the most popular management tools and techniques. This attitude “creates more problems than it solves,” he says.

2. Prepare contingency plans before they’re necessary.
   “You have to identify potential problems before stress makes the process more political and challenging than it already is,” Mr. Rigby says. “There’s a lot of research that says, under stress, people don’t make good decisions.”

   NOTABLE QUOTABLE Most successful men have not achieved their distinction by having some new talent or opportunity presented to them. They have developed the opportunity that was at hand. -Bruce Marton

3. Look for opportunities to buy low and sell high.
   “Downturns can be a time to pick up assets at attractive prices,” Mr. Rigby says. “It could be whole companies, facilities or people. Maybe some of those star managers that you couldn’t attract in the past are now available.”

4. Don’t get an itchy trigger finger on layoffs.
   Certainly, cost cuts have to be made and that may include layoffs. But beware that you don’t damage your ability to recover by eliminating key fonts of knowledge in the organization. Also, layoffs are more expensive than one might think, when you consider exiting staffers’ severance costs and wasted training and knowledge, as well as the additional expense of training people who will assume their duties.

   Ill-advised mass firings can also backfire. When George Bennett launched Braxton Associates, his first company, in the mid-1970s, the consulting firm was doubling its revenues annually. Then one year, it grew only 60% and the young executive started chopping. “If you go to Harvard Business School and recruit from the top 5% of the class, bring in a slew of them and then fire 80% of them in some embarrassingly short period of time, you’ve got a problem,” he says. Recruiting top-flight M.B.A.s became much harder after that. “I had to pay for committing that sin,” he says.

5. Take care of your key people.
   “You reap what you sow,” says Gregory Slayton, president and chief executive officer of ClickAction, an email marketing adviser in Palo Alto, Calif. As the economy slowed, Mr. Slayton made it a point to reassure key personnel about their future — and the company’s. As a result, he says, none of ClickAction’s officers left in the past year, even as the company’s stock price plummeted, wiping out the value of their stock options. Overall, he says, turnover at the company has been about 2% the past year.

6. Be honest with your employees.
   “Organizations are very alert organisms,” says Mr. Bennett, now CEO of Fairview Medical Services, a medical-information service in Boston. “They know when things are going bad and there might need to be layoffs. Trying to smooth it over too much, as opposed to being honest, won’t work. People appreciate being told the reality.”

   Mr. Slayton makes sure he includes his top officers in major decisions. “Some people react to tough times by shutting the door and making unilateral decisions,” he says. “That causes an implosion. Rumors get started, nobody knows what’s going on.”

   Mr. Slayton pens a monthly “state of the company” report for employees and holds one or two company meetings a month. In hard times, he says, you have to communicate just as much as in good times, if not more. “Every single day here in Silicon Valley, 10 or 20 companies are going out of business or laying off staff,” he says. “The fear level is palpable.”

   And when company layoffs and extinctions are the prime sources of conversation and gossip, it’s hard to keep workers focused and productive.

7. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
   It’s tempting to promise employees that there won’t be layoffs, but if that isn’t the reality, it will destroy your credibility with them and their loyalty to you. “Managers think employees expect them to be omniscient,” Mr. Rigby says. “I just think they expect them to be trustworthy.”

8. If cuts do become necessary, be swift and fair.
   They must be fair both in reality and perception, Mr. Slayton says. If they aren’t, he warns, employees start obsessing about layoffs and spend much of their time looking for their next job. That starts a downward spiral that must be avoided at all costs, he says.

   But Mr. Bennett says you can’t hesitate if cuts are needed. Delays just cause discontent and uncertainty to eat away at the organization. Besides, some cuts need to be made. “Downturns can be very helpful times for tightening the organization and moving out people who haven’t been too productive,” he says.

9. Send significant, symbolic signals of sacrifice. Maybe it’s eliminating certain events or parties or selling unnecessary equipment. Perhaps it’s senior management taking the first salary cuts, sending the message that the pain will be shared by all. “You’re trying to create a culture that works in both good times and bad and that says, ‘we have to spend every dollar the way our customers would want us to,’” Mr. Rigby says.

10. Finally, don’t waste time in denial.
    At least half of the senior executives Bain interviewed in January hadn’t accepted the fact that a downturn would hit their industry. Even if it did, they insisted, it would hit other companies, not theirs. “That’s a waste of valuable time,” Mr. Rigby says.