Ideas@Work

Chutes and Ladders

Successful careers are no longer a steady climb to the top

Star Trek fans are more or less unanimous in their belief that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the best of the six movies based on the original TV series. I happen to agree with this assessment, and I think a lot of the movie’s appeal comes from the thrilling final sequence where the arch villain Khan pursues Captain Kirk and his crew into the center of a dark nebula.

Their sensors and navigation systems crippled by radiation, Khan and Kirk are forced to fight blind. But as one might expect, the ever-logical Mr. Spock discovers Khan’s one weakness. Khan’s moves, Spock observes, betray a penchant for thinking in only two dimensions. The way to defeat him, then, is to employ a strategy that works in three. Kirk, of course, follows this advice, and Khan’s fate is sealed.

Unfortunately, when it comes to careers, too many of us are a lot like Khan. We think strictly in two dimensions: up and down.

While two-dimensional thinking might have served us well in the past, it is hopelessly at odds with the realities of the modern workplace, says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute.

“The assumption that the career has always been a climb up one ladder is one that had reality in the industrial age,” she explains. “But [it] doesn’t have reality in this economy, with the diversity of our workforce. If you actually look at people’s careers, you see that careers — particularly women’s — are not so linear. People do step sideways, step off, step back on. And they don’t necessarily always want to climb just one ladder.”

Galinsky argues that it is time for our outmoded ideas about what work is supposed to be to catch up with the reality of what work is today. And the reality is that for a variety of reasons, a career is no longer the driving force in many employees’ lives. This is not to say that work is no longer important to them. Surveys consistently show that most workers are more than willing to deliver an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage. But today, work is viewed in a larger context, one that increasingly acknowledges the importance of intangible rewards.

“People are making more informed choices,” says Nadia Haridi, a practice leader with Philadelphia-based Right Management. “We see that compensation is truly not one of the key drivers. Sometimes, it’s second or third down from ‘innovative workplace,’ ‘opportunities for development,’ ‘working on creative and exciting projects,’ or even something as important as their relationship with their manager. We’re seeing now that individuals walk in informed about what they want, because fit is important to them.”

It is often difficult, however, for old-school managers to comprehend this three-dimensional notion of career building. For them, a career that isn’t going steadily upward is a career that is going nowhere. How, they wonder, can one effectively evaluate, compensate, and promote employees who aren’t consumed with the idea of steady advancement up the corporate ladder? Whereas a so-called plateau was once viewed as the end of the line, today’s managers are increasingly forced to work with employees who reach a comfortable level of responsibility and compensation and are happy to stay there. Or, even more challenging for a manager, after reaching such a plateau, some employees are content to sit there for two years or more and then resume their climb upward.

Cathleen Benko, chief talent officer at Deloitte LLP in New York, believes the answer is something she calls “mass career customization.” Using this approach, managers view careers in terms of a lattice. This allows them to plan for periods in which employees choose to power up, downshift, or make lateral moves. It’s a scalable approach that emphasizes two-way communication and makes flexibility an integral part of the career-planning process. And while it is a good deal for today’s employees who value work-life balance, it also makes them accountable for the decisions they make.

“There’s a lot of transparency when you move into something like this notion of customizing careers,” Benko explains. “There are tradeoffs for everything. If you don’t want to take that big promotion because you’re afraid that you’re going to need to work harder, well for this period of time that’s OK. But the tradeoff is you won’t progress as fast. You won’t get to the high end of the comp increase range.”

The transition to a new model for career planning won’t be easy. But smart employers should be willing to engage in the dialogue Benko describes here. As Mr. Spock realized in Star Trek II, the ability to think in multiple dimensions can spell the difference between success and failure, be it in outer space or in an increasingly uncertain and volatile labor market.

Moving Up and Across

In their book Mass Career Customization (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), co-authors Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg argue persuasively that it is time to replace the familiar corporate ladder with a flexible lattice that reflects the needs and interests of today’s workforce. The authors acknowledge the difficulty of shifting the traditional paradigm for career advancement but show that it can be done.

While the ideals and aspirations of Generation X and the Millennials are having a profound impact on the way we work, the 500-pound gorilla of global demographics is still the generation of baby boomers who are now working their way inexorably toward retirement. In her book Retire Retirement (Harvard Business Press, 2008), Tamara Erickson looks at the impact the boomers will have on our businesses and organizations as they either retire or demand new and increasingly unorthodox ways to stay active in the workforce.