There Is No Career Ladder

Priscilla Claman Feb 14, 2012 www.blogs.hbr.org

Reaching the apex of the career ladder by gradually getting promoted to the top is a thing of the past.   From my experience as a career coach, career ladders in most organizations have not existed for at least fifteen years.
Career ladders are an artifact of the Mad Men era, when you signed onto an organization at age 21, followed the rules, were incrementally promoted, and retired with a gold watch.
But those days are long gone. Career ladders died out during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when over 85% of Fortune 1000 American companies downsized their white-collar workforce.* Downsizing has only escalated from there, however in the 80s and 90s the lost jobs were not in manufacturing but white-collar jobs, including management jobs. As companies thinned out, those leadership positions disappeared — and most haven't come back since.
In that period at General Electric, for example, engineers hired right out of school went through a career development process which included managerial training. Over time, the company began to bulge with managers. Jack Welch laid off thousands, "de-layering," as some people called it. With those managers gone, most "next steps" in the career ladder moved two or three rungs out of reach.
So despite their near extinction, why do we still believe in career ladders? Truthfully, intentionally or not, we are still promising traditional careers. There may not be an easy next step for every person in want of promotion. I know of a company that went through an extensive talent management process, which notified, feted, and gave "stretch assignments" to top talent. Four months later, a third of them were laid off in a reorganization.
It doesn't help that managers are predisposed to keep the best employees in their current positions, which promotes stability in an organization. That's one reason so many companies don't allow people to transfer easily to other jobs without their managers' permission.
There are better ways to think about career moves. Try these tips for diverting your attention from the next step up.
Look laterally for career moves. Don't think of job descriptions as much as job families, or groups of jobs that have something in common. For example if you are a financial analyst, consider other analyst positions in your company, perhaps in market research or sales. It's easier to move within a company where you are a known factor. Horizontal experience can also broaden your skills, which improves your chances of moving up.
Prove you can handle a promotion. Volunteer to help your manager with components of her job and learn to do them well. For example, offer to help interview job candidates, train and coach new people, and give them performance feedback. Your progress should automatically make you a candidate for the next manager job.
Grow your skills to grow your job. Seek out and take advantage of opportunities when they appear, and actively exceed expectations. For example, I once worked with Heidi, a medical assistant, who was charged with scheduling training for a new technology at a major hospital. The doctors were impossible to schedule, so she learned the new systems cold and trained the doctors one-on-one. It wasn't long before she was promoted and given the opportunity of a career in information technology.
It's a different world. But if a world without career ladders allows you to take charge of your own career, then it is a far better one.

*Wayne F. Casco. "Downsizing: what do we know? What have we learned?", The Academy of Management Executive, Vol.7 No.1 (Feb., 1991), p.95

Priscilla Claman is president of Career Strategies, Inc., a Boston-based firm offering career coaching to individuals and career management services to organizations.

Does Setting Major Development Goals Work?

For effective leaders, slight shifts are more likely to create a bigger impact

by Brian J. Brim, Ed.D., and David Liebnau November 3, 2011 www.gmj.gallop.com

When it comes to their own development, there's something irresistibly appealing to leaders about setting stretch goals. Just selecting one feels like an achievement. And the idea that with enough energy, focus, and initiative, meeting a single goal could dramatically improve a whole company and turn an executive into a better, more developed "super leader" -- well, who could resist that?

Slight shifts, born from your strengths as a leader, can create positive momentum in your organization.

Hard as it may be to refrain from setting major leadership development goals, it's probably better if executives resist. Gallup has worked with many leaders and managers over the years and has seen that setting stretch goals -- such as deciding to become a leader who can inspire others like Martin Luther King Jr. -- rarely works, for several reasons. Leaders must be reasonable about who they can and cannot be.
Setting reasonable developmental goals is important because as human beings, we all have solid pathways established in our brains that make up our core personality or self-image. Because of this, thinking that achieving a big objective will transform us overnight is not very realistic. We must be more patient. Change takes time and persistence, and it's best accomplished through slight shifts.
One way to think about your development as a leader is to imagine yourself as a ball rolling along in a groove. Leaders tend to stay in their groove. It fits them. It's their identity. It's easy. To make sense of how this groove develops, consider the difference between actions and practices.
Actions are the behaviors that you do with little thought. They are part of your repertoire, and they yield consistent and predictable results. The actions a leader usually takes are determined by the "groove" he or she has developed over time. But how can you grow as a leader if you're forever contained in this same groove? You can't, and that is where practices come in.
Practices are interventions that enable you to establish new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. They are essential to expand and develop your identity. To grow as a leader, you must slowly and steadily expand the groove. Adopting new practices enables you to access a different level of possible actions and create new opportunities.
Development is not about "jumping the groove." It's about "expanding the groove," or taking the best of who you naturally are and pushing the boundaries of those elements to grow as a leader.
Expanding the groove
The best way to expand your groove is gradually, by applying slight-shift practices. Stretching your boundaries a little at a time gives you a chance to test and reflect. It allows you to build on the best of who you are, replay your highlight reels, and analyze your successes and struggles. As you build on what's working and correct what's not, you start feeling more positive about the changes you see. Then you want to do it again.
Slight shifts emphasize evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change. You accomplish them by establishing realistic practices that enable you to experience and understand new behaviors, which in turn allow you to change and grow for the better.
A participant in a leadership development session offered a perfect example of how to make a slight shift through effective practice. This leader was a highly focused individual. Although she cared deeply about her employees and knew she should spend more time with them, her strong work ethic pushed her to spend most of her time "chained to her desk," as she described it.
So she set a major development goal to "become connected as deeply and meaningfully" as her predecessor, a beloved leader who left a legacy of meaningful relationships throughout the organization. She tried to achieve her goal by completely reorganizing her schedule and priorities in an attempt to institutionalize contact with her employees. She scheduled a flurry of weekly group meetings with different parts of the organization. But she just didn't get the results or the sense of real connection that she was looking for. Her activities felt "forced" because her major stretch goal wasn't based on who she was.
After taking part in a leadership development session, she began to look at the problem differently. She thought about what changes would work best for her instead of trying to mimic her predecessor, and it prompted her to try something new.
In the end, what worked best for her was to say "yes" more often. She made it a goal to say "yes" one time per week when she was asked to join the team for lunch, a birthday celebration, or a walk around the manufacturing floor. She realized she was more effective one on one or in small groups that evolved spontaneously rather than in larger, more formal settings. She also started asking questions to learn more about the people in her organization. She found out, for example, that one person was running in a half-marathon, and that prompted a great conversation because she was an avid runner herself.
She soon realized that she was more energized and more productive after each "yes," so she extended her leadership practice to saying "yes" at least once a day. Interacting with her employees daily is now part of her routine.
Easy, but effective
Applying slight-shift practices seems easy -- maybe too easy. But that's the point: When leaders are asked to do something they have the confidence to do and they see immediate success, they gain confidence from the positive feedback. Confidence and success drive them to repeat it. That's how sustainable development and wider grooves are created, and that's how great results happen.
Gallup has seen this approach work repeatedly. Over a six-month period, one company saw a jump in employee engagement, as measured by Gallup's Q¹² employee engagement metric, from the 70^th to the 80^th percentile and a 6% increase in overall per-person productivity. Before this organization started using the slight-shift approach to leadership, performance hadn't varied much over the prior three years. One leader told Gallup that this slight-shift approach meant he took five minutes to deal with problems on the spot rather than putting them off and leaving them to fester.
Slight shifts, born from your strengths as a leader, can create positive momentum in others that will ignite the soul of an organization. It doesn't take much effort. It doesn't feel audacious. But slight shifts can be effective and permanent -- and you can start practicing them now.

Why Appreciation Matters So Much

Tony Schwartz January 23, 2012 www.blogs.hbr.org

I've just returned from an offsite with our team at The Energy Project. As we concluded, I asked each person to take a few moments to say what he or she felt most proud of accomplishing over the past year.
After each of their brief recountings, I added some observations about what I appreciated in that person. Before long, others were chiming in. The positive energy was contagious, but it's not something we can ever take for granted.

Whatever else each of us derives from our work, there may be nothing more precious than the feeling that we truly matter — that we contribute unique value to the whole, and that we're recognized for it.

The single highest driver of engagement, according to a worldwide study conducted by Towers Watson, is whether or not workers feel their managers are genuinely interested in their wellbeing. Less than 40 percent of workers felt so engaged.

Feeling genuinely appreciated lifts people up. At the most basic level, it makes us feel safe, which is what frees us to do our best work. It's also energizing. When our value feels at risk, as it so often does, that worry becomes preoccupying, which drains and diverts our energy from creating value.

So why is it that openly praising or expressing appreciation to other people at work can so easily seem awkward, contrived, mawkish and even disingenuous?
The obvious answer is that we're not fluent in the language of positive emotions in the workplace. We're so unaccustomed to sharing them that we don't feel comfortable doing so. Heartfelt appreciation is a muscle we've not spent much time building, or felt encouraged to build.
Oddly, we're often more experienced at expressing negative emotions — reactively and defensively, and often without recognizing their corrosive impact on others until much later, if we do at all.

That's unfortunate. The impact of negative emotions — and more specifically the feeling of being devalued — is incredibly toxic. As Daniel Goleman has written, "Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are almost as powerful as those to our very survival."
In one well-known study, workers who felt unfairly criticized by a boss or felt they had a boss who didn't listen to their concerns had a 30 percent higher rate of coronary disease than those who felt treated fairly and with care.
In the workplace itself, researcher Marcial Losada has found that among high-performing teams, the expression of positive feedback outweighs that of negative feedback by a ratio of 5.6 to 1. By contrast, low-performing teams have a ratio of .36 to 1.
So what are the practical steps you can take, especially as a manager, to use appreciation in the service of building a higher-performing (and more sustainable) team?

1. As the Hippocratic oath prescribes to physicians, "Above all else, do no harm." Or perhaps more accurately, do less harm, since it's unrealistic to do none. The costs of devaluing others are so great that we need to spend far more time thinking than we do now about how to hold people's value, even in situations where they've fallen short and our goal is get them to change their behavior for the better.

2. Practice appreciation by starting with yourself. If you have difficulty openly appreciating others, it's likely you also find it difficult to appreciate yourself. Take a few moments at the end of the day to ask yourself this simple question: "What can I rightly feel proud of today?" If you are committed to constant self-improvement, you can also ask yourself, "What could I do better tomorrow?" Both questions hold your value.

3. Make it a priority to notice what others are doing right. The more you work at it, the better you'll get at it, and the more natural it will become for you. For example, start by thinking about what positive qualities, behaviors and contributions you currently take for granted among the members of your team. Then ask yourself, what is it that each of them uniquely brings to the table?

4. Be appreciative. The more specific you can be about what you value — and the more you notice what's most meaningful to that person — the more positive your impact on that person is likely to be. A handwritten note makes a bigger impression than an email or a passing comment, but better any one of them than nothing at all.
We're all more vulnerable and needy than we like to imagine. Authentically appreciating others will make you feel better about yourself, and it will also increase the likelihood they'll invest more in their work, and in you. The human instinct for reciprocity runs deep

Why to-do lists set you up for failure

Dave Johnson (MoneyWatch)  www.cbsnews.com January 30, 2012

You've probably seen advice about why it's a great idea to maintain a rolling to-do list of projects -- big and small -- that you need to get done. Some efficiency experts recommend writing a to-do list each morning, in which you meticulously transfer incomplete to-dos from the old list to the new one every day. You might have noticed that this system doesn't work very well, and you probably just assumed that it's your own fault. But according to the Harvard Business Review, it's not you. In a nutshell, the entire system is flawed, and simply sets you up for failure.

Harvard Business Review cites several key problems with rolling to-do lists. Here are some of the most compelling:

The paradox of choice. Psychologist Barry Schwartz has written extensively about the paradox of choice -- when faced with too many options, people feel overwhelmed and respond poorly. A to-do list is a veritable smorgasbord of choices.

Heterogeneous complexity. Moreover, your to-do list invariably contains a mixture of big projects and small ones, hard ones and easy ones. Consequently, you choose the short and easy tasks almost without fail, since there's a much stronger payoff. The other tasks never get done.

Heterogeneous priority. Likewise, your to-do list is filled with tasks of varying priority. There's little doubt that you tend to do the highest priority tasks up front, and push off the rest until circumstances raise their priority as a consequence.

So what's the alternative?

Harvard Business Review recommends "living in your calendar." In other words, don't maintain a to-do list, but rather schedule these tasks right into your Outlook calendar, around your other commitments, while also accounting for the time you'll need to deal with brushfires and other unexpected priorities. This serves, in part, as a sort of commitment device, which is akin to positioning your army with its back to a river so there's no possibility of retreat from the enemy.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. But it's also likely to be more effective than that dog-eared to-do list you always carry around, but never complete.

10 Things Great Managers Do

(MoneyWatch) August 18, 2011Steve Tobak www.cbsnews.com

There's all sorts of rhetoric about what good bosses should and shouldn't do these days. I guess that's a good thing.
Unfortunately, most of it's pretty basic, generic fluff that sort of blends together after a while.
Even worse, a lot of it's, well, utopian. It panders to what employees want to hear instead of giving truly practical and insightful advice on what makes a manager effective in the real world where business is everything and everything's on the line.

This list is different. It's different because, to derive it, I went back in time to the best characteristics of the best CEOs (primarily) I've worked for and with over the past 30 years. It's based entirely on my own experience with executives who made a real difference at extraordinary companies.

Some were big, some were small, but all were successful in their respective markets, primarily because of the attributes of these CEOs. Each anecdote taught me a critical lesson that advanced my career and helped me to be a better leader. Hope you get as much out of reading it as I did living it.

10 Things Great Managers Do

Maintain your cool and sense of humor, especially during a crisis. When our biggest customer - and I mean big - thought I leaked a front-page story to the press, I offered to resign to save the relationship. My boss, a great CEO, gave me a serious look, like he was thinking about it, and said, "You're not getting off that easy." Then he broke into a big smile.

Tell subordinates when they're shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes I can be pretty intimidating and I've had CEOs who shied away from giving it to me straight when my emotions got the better of me. Not this one guy. We'd be in a heated meeting and he'd quietly take me aside and read me the riot act. He was so genuine about it that it always opened my eyes and helped me to achieve perspective.

Be the boss, but behave like a peer. I've worked with loads of CEOs who let their egos get the better of them. They act like they're better than everyone else, are distant and emotionally detached, or flaunt their knowledge and power. That kind of behavior diminishes leaders, makes them seem small, and keeps them from really connecting with people. They're not always the most successful, but the most admired CEOs I know are genuinely humble.

Let your guard down and really be yourself outside of work. You know, teambuilding is so overrated. All you really need to do outside of work to build a cohesive team is break some bread, have some drinks, relax, let your guard down, and be a regular human being. When you get to be really confident, you can be that way all the time. That's the mark of a great leader.

Stand behind and make big bets on people you believe in. One CEO would constantly challenge you and your thinking to the point of being abusive. But once he trusted and believed in you, he put his full weight behind you 100 percent to help you succeed. He'd stand up for you even when he wasn't sure what the heck you were up to. And he'd give you new functional responsibilities - something up-and-coming execs need to grow. Okay, he wasn't perfect, but who is?

Complement your subordinate's weaknesses. I often say it's every employee's job to complement her boss's weaknesses. The only reason that's even doable is because we've all only got one boss. But I actually had a CEO who did that with each and every one of his staff. For example, I'm more of a big picture strategy guy and he would really hold my feet to the fire by tracking my commitments. It felt like micromanaging at first, but I eventually realized it helped me to be a more effective and strengthened the entire management team.

Compliment your employee's strengths. It takes a strong, confident leader to go out on a limb and tell an employee what they're great at. Why? I don't know, but I suspect it's hard for alpha males that primarily inhabit executive offices. Anyway, it's important because we can't always see ourselves objectively. Twenty years ago a CEO identified how effectively I cut through a boatload of BS to reach unique solutions to tough problems. Today, that's what I do for a living.

Teach the toughest, most painful lessons you've ever learned. As a young manager at Texas Instruments, I once asked my boss's boss for advice about a promotion I didn't get. He told me a candid story about the hardest lesson he'd ever learned, the reason he was stuck in his job. He made himself indispensible and didn't groom his replacement. It was painful for him to share, but it opened my eyes and made a huge difference in my career.

Do the right thing. Just about everyone says it, but I've only known one CEO who both preached and practiced it to the point where it became a big part of the company culture. You'd walk the halls and hear people say it all the time. He meant two things by it. When he said it to you, it meant he trusted you to do just that. He also meant it regardless of status quo or consequences. He had extraordinary faith in that phrase. Now I do too.

Do what has to be done, no matter what. It's a rare executive who jumps on a plane at a moment's notice to close a deal or gives an impromptu presentation when a potential investor shows up unexpectedly. It's even more rare when he does it without asking questions or hemming and hawing about it. He just does what has to be done. That kind of drive and focus on the business is relatively common with entrepreneurs in high-tech startups. And it's the mark of a great manager who will find success, that's for sure.

The Days of "Manager Knows Best" Are Ending

Wednesday February 1, 2012 by Sujai Hajela www.blogs.hbr.org

To get a glimpse of what tomorrow's young global managers might be like as leaders, take a look at how today's young people think about communications.
For one thing, they are devoted to connectivity. In a recent survey of more than 2,800 college students and young professionals in 14 countries, Cisco found that more than half said they could not live without the internet, and if forced to choose, two-thirds would opt to have an internet rather than a car. This intense desire to be connected leads to a demand for greater flexibility: Two out of five people said they'd accept a lower-paying job if the position offered greater flexibility on access to social media, the ability to work from where they chose, and choice on the mobile devices they could use on the job. Tomorrow's young managers will share these attitudes, and workplaces will inevitably become more flexible.
For another thing, social media is quickly overtaking phones and email and becoming the dominant form of communication. Young people are driving this change, with the one-to-one mode of interacting giving way to a one-to-many mind-set. Young leaders will use social media to create a running dialog with their employees and colleagues, issuing constant updates about their projects and ideas. Employees will use it to provide instantaneous input and feedback. Workers, via this medium, will insist on having a voice in shaping the company's vision and strategy.
The demand for increased connectivity and flexibility and greater use of social media will shape and change companies from the inside out. Companies will need to think hard about these questions:

• What is the appropriate level of openness? Should employees be prevented from slamming their bosses' ideas, for example? Should managers be restricted in the kinds of things they can say to or about employees?

• How much blurring of public and private life is too much? Social media encourages people to mix work- and nonwork-related communication, but some workers prefer to keep their social lives strictly off-limits.

• How can the company prevent abuse of social media? Things can get ugly quickly — all it takes is one thoughtless comment. Employees and managers need to know that there will be serious consequences for any misuse of this potentially combustible form of communication.

• When employees from VPs to interns are sharing company information on Twitter, on Facebook, and in blogs while your competition is watching, how do you ensure that your employees understand what information is confidential and what is public?

As companies resolve these issues, management styles will evolve. The days when a leader can confidently say "I know best" will come to an end. Managers will no longer be able to communicate with just a small circle of trusted advisers — they'll be expected to interact digitally with a much broader range of people both inside and outside the company.
Not every company will be pleased by this turn of events, of course, but those that embrace it will have new competitive opportunities. With knowledge flowing more freely throughout the organization and decisions being made more quickly, the company will be able to react more nimbly to the ever-increasing pace of change.

You're probably not as busy as you say you are

Jan 30, 2012 (MoneyWatch) by Michael Hess www.cbsnews.com

"Sorry, I've just been so busy."

"I've been too swamped to get around to it."

"I don't even have a minute to breathe."

"There's just not enough time in the day."

We hear -- and most of us use -- exasperated claims like this every day. But in general, it's a fiction. Most of us are not "too busy"; few of us have the "full plate" we think or say we have. These are excuses we make either because we genuinely have ourselves convinced that we don't have time or we simply don't want to do something.

Most people make the time for what they want to do, even at the expense of time needed for what they have to do, and there's plenty of data to support that assertion. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' exhaustive American Time Use Survey is the authoritative repository of such data, and other sources, including Pew Research and the Mendelsohn Affluent Survey, further corroborate.

Our time use has been studied and broken down in every conceivable way. But a salient conclusion is that -- irrespective of education or income -- as a population we aren't as consumed with work as we might have ourselves and others believe. We have plenty of discretionary time: We spend a quarter to a third of our waking hours on non-work related activities, and that doesn't include time spent doing personal stuff while at work. (Come on, you know you do.) Just a few interesting tidbits from the latest stats:

-- Working parents, who are usually (and understandably) at the top of the list of people who claim to "have no time," spend only one hour less on leisure activities per day than do those without the same child-care concerns.

-- People making $100,000 or more spend far more time web surfing and consuming other media than do those making less.

-- Everyone (statistically speaking) watches at least 2-3 hours of TV per day. That's 10% of our 24 hour daily gift of time, and a much higher percentage if you measure it only against the time we're awake. There are countless books, articles and blog posts saying that "successful people don't watch TV." But statistically, they do. And that's OK... there's nothing wrong with shutting your brain off for a while.

-- People who earn $1,200 or more per week do not work more, on average, than those who earn $540 per week.

-- Self-employed people (which, of course, includes most of us who own businesses) do not work more hours, on average, than wage or salary workers.*

*I do take exception to that last one, as most owners are always thinking (or obsessing) about their businesses, and to me -- and most small business people I know -- at least some of that time legitimately counts as work. In fact, sometimes it's the hardest and most stressful work.

I'm like any number of other small business owners out there. My day starts at 5:30 or 6 a.m. with news and e-mails. (I do squeeze exercise in there.) I don't leave the office for lunch. From dinner until 11 pm or later, there's more on-and-off catch-up work, overseas calls and e-mails. By my count I'm owed at least 30 weeks of unused vacation since starting my business. Lots of stress, four-hour sleep nights, yada yada. Woe is me.

So, if you were to ask me about my schedule, I'd say the things we all say: I am buried ... I can't catch up ... I don't know when I could possibly get around to it. I am way too busy.

But the fact is, also like other owners, one of the main reasons I work for myself is to have control of my time, and though I have certainly made sacrifices (I definitely wouldn't want to calculate my actual hourly wage), I find a way to do most of the things I want to do. Whether it's my leisure passions -- sailboat racing, skiing and yoga, if anyone's asking -- going to my kids' various events, or even watching guilty-pleasure TV (Shark Tank rules!), I somehow squeeze it into my unsqueezable schedule. So do you, and you, and you.

I'm by no means suggesting that people shouldn't relax, read, vegetate, travel or do whatever else they want with their time -- life is for living. But next time you blow out that overwhelmed sigh or tell someone (or yourself) that you can't do something because you're "too busy," think about whether that's a fact or just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like moving into a bigger house, we tend to fill the space we have.

By definition, we are indeed using every second of every hour of our lives. We are working, sleeping, eating, playing, relaxing or doing nothing. So being "too busy" comes down to defining how we spend our time, not the certitude that it's all spent.

At the end of the day (or the beginning, or the middle), most of us have the time to do things we say we can't