Right now people are worried. Everybody is worried and when people are anxious there is nothing like talking to other people. We are all concerned because we have this budget coming along and we are worried about our financial situation. People are concerned about what’s going to happen, about the future of the company and about being laid off.

There are three pieces of advice in terms of what managers need to do in these difficult times. Studies have shown that the characteristics people most want in a boss are honesty, as in telling the truth, competency and inspiration.

Managing in difficult times requires these characteristics. Winston Churchill once said “I have nothing to offer you but blood, tears toil and sweat.” That was an inspirational speech because that was the situation and he told them the truth. Right now things are bad everywhere and we know the situation is grim. The worst thing that happens in turbulent times is that managers run away or tell half-truths or get in PR or HR or somebody else to do the dirty work, to tell the bad news or to do the inspiring.

People have been let go by overhearing their manager saying the store was being closed. Or you might find you have been laid off because on Monday morning your swipe card does not work and when you eventually get to your desk there is a black plastic bag on it and you have an hour to leave the building.

What people want is fairness. Money is not a particularly powerful motivator but it is a powerful de-motivator. It takes people a very short period of time to adapt to a pay rise. If you give people a 10% pay rise they very quickly get used to it. It will take them longer to get used to a 10% pay decrease but they will get used to it.

It’s a question of adaptation but the problem is when there is seen to be one law for the rich and one for the poor. We need openness and honesty and for everyone to share the pain and burden equally. If the boss models the activity, the cut and the extra work right from the beginning it builds trust and honesty in difficult times. It involves moral courage.

You need to tell people very clearly what principle you are using whether it is ‘last in first out’ or ‘first in first out’. Is it based on appraisals? What are the criteria? We want to live in an orderly, stable world. We want to have predictability but in uncertain times we don’t have predictability, we have ambiguity. It helps if we know the criteria because it gives some sense of predictability. This is part of the up front moral speaking that is required.

Emotional intelligence is also important. There are people who are enormously talented. They are very bright but not very good with people. The psychology of redundancy is the psychology of loss as found in the psychology of divorce, of death, of migration. You are losing something and there tends to be an emotional pattern. We have gone through shock and denial. Next is the emotion of anger and there is a lot of anger about.

Anger is a very powerful emotion. We want somebody to blame. We can blame politicians who will blame somebody else and so it goes, on down the route. It is about the release of anger and how healthy or unhealthy that is. Psychologists talk about ‘anger out’ and ‘anger in’. ‘Anger out’ leads to heart attacks, ‘anger in’ leads to cancer. But anger is a perfectly natural reaction of people who are frightened and bewildered. It can be expressed through anxiety, tearfulness, helplessness and depression.

The successful turbulence manager is able to deal with this emotional stuff. Fronting a meeting with people who are going to get upset is a skilful act. When you finish speaking you need to get people to tell you what you told them because anxious people often do not listen properly and therefore do not hear the message.

People are frightened, anxious, bewildered and they do not know what to do. Part of the skill is admitting these emotions, normalising them and dealing with them. We need to help people express their emotions, accept their emotions and move on. This is an important skill.

When people leave a job they don’t leave an organisation, they leave managers who have not managed well and who do not understand the power of emotion and that work is an emotional activity. Freud pointed out that we have two dilemmas in life, to find a good job and a good mate. Both of these are emotional activities.

There is an issue of communicating to people in these difficult times. They want to see their managers more, not less. If you walk through a company with some CEOs people come up them and are greeted by name. You can see that seeing and meeting the CEO makes people feel confident. In other organisations you see people disappearing into rooms as you move through the building because the CEO does not give comfort.

We have all seen that when a flight is delayed the staff at the help desk disappear and run away when more and more angry people approach them. The people in your company want to see more of their managers now to stabilise the ship. These are worrying times. People are concerned about their jobs. They are anxious and this means that their service to customers is probably not as good as it should be. Their eye is off the ball, which means the company does less well which makes redundancy more likely. It is a vicious circle and a self-fulfilling prophecy where the anxiety fuels the issue.

The question is how to break that vicious circle. What people want is management to be resilient, steady and calm under fire. Even if management do not feel it, they are required to show it because they are in ‘loco parentis’ and need to show leadership.

Management must be vigilant and defiant because bad times are times of opportunity. This is a good time to implement change because people will accept change in a crisis. Management must show they are fit in body and mind. People want their managers to understand both the business and human problems and to help make things clearer with regard to the future.

The business of managing in turbulent times in not that different to managing in good times except that in good times you don’t have to manage as much, you don’t have to care as much and you get away with things. It is difficult because managers are suffering too. They have to deal with their own anxiety and other people’s anxiety while looking strong even if feeling less able and less strong.

It is important that people understand the nature of their work and are as fully engaged as possible.

People find money easier to talk about that other aspects of their jobs. This is the issue around cuts and salaries. If you get the money issue wrong you can annoy people intensely. If you get it right it has very little motivational power.

The single biggest indicator of a person’s satisfaction with their salary are the salaries of their colleagues. It has nothing to do with absolutes but with relativities.

When times are hard some people put in extra effort. We have known since 1922 that the most productive worker produces two and a half times as much as the least productive worker. In turbulent times people are enormously sensitive to equity and they get very upset if the distribution of pain is not equitable.

Managing in turbulent times tests managers. It tests their courage and their skills. It tests their integrity, their emotional intelligence and their communications’ skills. If you get it right you can use these times to be successful. In a sense this is capitalism at its best. If you shake the tree, the weak fall and the strong survive. Is this an opportunity or a threat? How you answer that question may determine whether you succeed or do not succeed in these turbulent times.

Professor Adrian Furnham is a Professor of Psychology at London University. He is a founding director in a management consultancy practice specialising in corporate evaluation and design, and has written extensively on areas such as teambuilding, motivation in the workplace, change management in organisations, and the workplace of the future.