Outmoded Administrative Practices
Our personnel practices and benefit plans support a concept of career building that is archaic. As employee education level and job specialization have increased in all our institutions, the number of professional workers has grown. The marks of a professional are his independence of thought, his desire to set high standards for himself, and his persistent and aggressive push for freedom to work where his specialty is in demand. The professional has always advocated doing his own thing. But salary, which correlates more with length of service than with any other factor; promotion schemes that insist on a man's going through a certain number or set of musical chairs; and benefit plans that tie security, vacations, and other rewards to remaining with a firm all damp single-minded dedication to career specialization. Perhaps this is one reason for the large increase in consulting firms and indeed of independent consultants within the past decade.
At the very least, these factors tempt the individual to let go the reins of self-direction and encourage him to abdicate his career fulfillment to his company. The fact that management may not actively seek this responsibility is immaterial.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The hazards involved in coupling strong development programs with promotion systems are pretty well understood. If crown prince tactics are used-that is, if systematic methods are put into practice for identifying the most promotable employees and are followed by special training, information, and job assignments-history tells us that a high percentage of those selected will succeed in taking on higher-level managerial or specialist positions. Is it because they have been given so much additional experience that they become in fact better qualified than those not so treated? Is it that the display of confidence and support operates Pygmalion fashion stimulating them to undertake their work with greater confidence and a greater determination to live up to expectations? Could it be that having identified these men and invested heavily in them, we convince ourselves of their superiority and screen out all but the most blatant signals of failure? Do other, equally capable employees, not so selected and trained, perceive the odds against them to be too great and move on to a new environment that gives them a better chance? These are the troublesome questions posed by a highly selective development and promotion system.
No Crown Princes
If the hazards of a crown prince system are great, those inherent in an equal-opportunity-for-all philosophy can be worse. The length of time taken to fill openings may be excessive because inadequate attention has been given to back-up support. Transition time can become overextended and thus detrimental to business. For example, if a man is chosen from another part of the firm, he may have to find his way in a new field or a new industry. He must learn about customers, competitors, organization and product strengths, and similar factors. In the course of learning, he may make costly strategic mistakes.
The theory of equal opportunity for all can in fact limit opportunity and increase specialization. To avoid the lengthy transition period, people are more and more often selected from within the organization. This excludes from consideration a wide range of capable people and perpetuates the design of steep, narrow careers so limiting at top levels. Training, too, becomes quite specialized if it is available to all because, as a practical matter, it will tend to focus on the product or output or specific needs of a given group. If attempts are made to broaden training but keep it available to all, it becomes expensive and administratively unwieldy. Most organizations seeking the best of both worlds settle for some combination of crown prince and equal treatment. Few if any are happy with the results. The point of course is that as long as job openings are primarily filled according to an institutional promotion system and employees as individuals have little access to the process, an unsatisfactory situation continues.
Imprecise Prediction
Decentralization, then, has contributed directly or indirectly to problems in career advancement. A second major source of difficulty is business planning. That all prediction is imprecise is not a new thought. What is new is that the rapid rate of change experienced in technology has added complexity to the problem. On the one hand, the availability of new products and services has opened new markets, so that decision making with respect to a business 5 to 10 or even 20 years hence requires more imaginative assumptions and choices than ever before. On the other hand, the computer provides a tool with which to generate data in answer to the question "What if…?" Most executives are not prepared for other development.
Yet business planning and manpower planning, together with their offshoot career planning, are interdependent. The availability of human resources may well determine in large measure what a firm should undertake in the future. And manpower planning cannot be done adequately unless business plans arc sound and based on expected events that do in fact come to pass. Both areas arc fraught with assumptions that need to be monitored and plans will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Since the record for prediction is not outstandingly good, all those involved in the total planning process need to understand what they are up against. In its simplest terms, estimating a person's potential within a given firm means looking ahead for a prescribed period of time, say, 5 or 10 years; identifying at least in broad outline the kinds of opportunities that will exist at that time, as well as critical environmental factors- political, economic, and social-that will make the work easy or hard to do; and finally, predicting how the person's talents and interests will have matured during the intervening years. The likelihood of our being able to do this soon with any degree of accuracy is remote.
In view of the uncertainty of both business and manpower forecasts, particularly when applied to a given individual or relatively small group of people, career planning must ethically be considered a joint venture- The employee must take part in the decision making, and his decision must be based on knowledge of the projected plans and the major assumptions that have been factored into them. In this way, he as well as the firm is in a position to monitor the accuracy of the predictions and adjust or adapt as is needed.
