Redefining Success at Work
As an executive coach who works with corporations, Monica McGrath has her ear to the ground. And what she is hearing is this: A number of men and women in middle management are increasingly reluctant to take the next step in their careers because the corporate ladder is not as appealing as it used to be, and the price to climb it is too high. “These people are still ambitious, and they are still driving. They just aren’t driving for the same things they were driving for 15 years ago,” she says.
What may be happening, suggest McGrath and others, is that people are setting career paths based on their own values and definitions of success. They are not burned out or dropping out; they are not going back to school and changing careers; they are not having a mid-life crisis. Instead, they are redefining how they can keep contributing to their organizations, but on their own terms. Rather than subscribe to the ‘onward and upward’ motto, they are more interested in ‘plateauing,’ unhooking from the pressure to follow an upward path that someone else has set.
A number of oft-cited trends in the workplace contribute to this phenomenon: Technological advancements are breaking down the barriers between work and non-work hours, adding to the pressure to constantly be on the job or on call. Strategic decisions like restructuring, downsizing and outsourcing are adding to job uncertainty at all levels and reducing the number of promotions available to mid- and upper-level managers. The continuing influx of women into the workforce keeps raising the level of stress when it comes to work/life balance issues.
Lois Backon, a vice president at Families and Work Institute (FWI), a New York-based non-profit research organization, points to a report FWI does every five years entitled, “National Study of the Changing Work Force.” The latest one was released in 2003. One of their areas of research relates to what the organization calls “reduced aspirations” among various sectors of the workforce. “This is an incredibly important issue, and it offers some of the most troubling data out there for corporate America,” she notes.
For example, in one of its latest reports, “Generation & Gender (2004),” which uses data from the national study to determine differences among generations, FWI found that fewer employees aspired to positions of greater responsibility than in the past. Among college-educated men of Gen-Y, Gen-X and boomer ages, 68% wanted to move into jobs with more responsibility in 1992, versus only 52% in 2002. Among college-educated women of Gen-Y, Gen-X and boomer ages, the decrease was even higher: 57% wanted to move into jobs with more responsibility in 1992 versus 36% in 2002. (Generation Y is typically defined as those born between 1980 and 1995, Generation X as those born between 1965 and 1980.)
“We then did a more focused look at leaders in the global economy,” Backon says. “We took the top 10 multinational companies — such as Citicorp and IBM — and conducted in-depth interviews with the top 100 men and top 100 women. Of those leaders, 34% of the women and 21% of the men said they have reduced their career aspirations.”
This plateauing is part of a bigger phenomenon in the workforce — one that also includes people putting higher priorities on activities outside their jobs, from family to volunteer work to hobbies. For example, in the FWI study, the reason that the majority (67%) of these leaders gave for their response was “not that they couldn’t do the work, but that the sacrifices they would have to make in their personal lives were too great,” says Backon.
“We call it ‘negative spillover from their jobs to their homes,’” Backon adds. “The whole issue of overwork, of needing to multitask, of having to deal with numerous interruptions during their work day” affects employee attitude, not just toward their jobs but also their free time. “Based on our research, we know that 54% of employees are less than fully satisfied with their jobs, 38% are likely to actively look for new employment in the next year and 39% of employees feel they are not engaged in the work they are doing.” Most employees “do want to feel engaged by their jobs. The term ‘reduced aspirations’ does not mean they are not talented or not good at what they do. They are. But in focus groups, they also say things like, ‘I need to make these choices because my family is a priority,’ or ‘I need to make these choices to make my life work.’”
One way to look at this phenomenon, adds Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard, is that some employees “still derive some sense of identity from their jobs but they have, or are seeking, other ways to get that fulfillment.” They are no longer pushing for the bigger raise, the larger staff, the more prestigious title; “they are taking energy that had been focused primarily on goals defined by the corporation and focusing it elsewhere.”
Fewer Promotions, Fewer Pensions
Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, has done extensive research into the changing nature of the workplace. As he and others have noted, companies no longer promise job security, generous benefits packages or even pensions, and employees no longer feel loyal to their employers or obligated to stay for long periods of time. Employees are responsible for managing their own career track and seeking out the mentors and training they need to move on in their current company or, just as likely, in a new company.
Cappelli agrees that organizations “don’t have quite as much influence over people as they used to in terms of shaping their goals and aspirations, in part because people come to these jobs at an older age and change jobs more frequently than in the past. Does that necessarily mean people are on their own career path? It depends what you mean by that. I’m not sure it means they are eschewing corporate success. But they are looking outside their current employer’s definition of success, more so than in the past.”
Cappelli cautions, however, that it’s unlikely employees can go on cruise control and still hope to be retained and valued by their employers. “It used to be you could just lie low and wait for the pension. That doesn’t happen much any more.” And while some employees may not pay as much attention to the goals that their companies want them to pursue, they “continue to work hard because they are afraid of being laid off…. Companies systematically go through and fire people who are not pulling their weight. The ability to punish people into appropriate behavior is one of the great and unpleasant lessons of the 1980s. Employee morale sank and productivity stayed up because people were afraid of being fired,” Cappelli notes, adding, however, that this dynamic changes in a tight labor market.
Wharton management professor Sara Kaplan “could imagine a scenario where people have discovered that there is not too much point being loyal to their employers, and then go on to say, ‘Okay, I have gotten where I am going to get, and I am going to focus on the other part of my life. I will keep working but won’t invest all my energy in my job.’”
But Kaplan also thinks “everyone needs something to be passionate about, so it would be hard for me to imagine that people would simply ramp down on their job without having a crisis or without having found something else” to interest them. Indeed, in today’s economy, she adds, “you can’t keep your job unless you are engaged, to a certain extent. Corporations don’t want people who don’t want to go higher. They don’t want people who won’t strive. You can’t plateau; there are always people biting at your heels.”
Directly related to the issue of job satisfaction is the question of job design. “Management scholars have been studying this for a long time,” says Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade. “Whenever a company designs a job, it must take into account how employees view that job, whether their goal is to get ahead, whether work is central to their lives, and so forth. A company can make a real error trying to redesign a job to be more enriched if the employee doesn’t want that,” especially if the new job definition requires them to work harder.
What is crucial, Barsade says, “is good job fit. Is the person doing what the company needs done? If the answer is ‘yes’ and the person also is good at what they do but simply doesn’t want to do more, then that could actually be a good situation, especially for jobs that don’t include room for promotion.” This is applicable in particular to customer service positions where people need to be engaged while they are providing the service, but are not expected to be thinking of ways to redesign the whole customer service system. “So the fit needs to be between what the organization needs and what the employee wants and values. If that fit isn’t there, that’s when you are going to have a problem.”
When should employees who have no interest in advancing or taking on higher challenges worry about losing their job? “I think as long as these employees are working diligently and competently and are willing to change — whether that means learning a new technology or adapting to a new work process — they should be safe,” says Barsade.
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