Time and Money Reality Shock: Graduating from school, becoming self-supporting, and starting a career is one of life's most exciting transitions. But it is also one of the most difficult because the reality is often quite different from what one hoped for.
The rhythms of time in one's life change dramatically from school to work. Time in class was seldom more than 15 to 18 hours a week. And supposedly, over half of all college students take a nap every day! That immediately disappears when you start work (unless you can catch some winks right at your desk, which of course is not unknown). While in school, time horizons are relatively short-six weeks to spring break, or a month to winter vacation, or only three months to a four-month summer vacation. Of course, most of you worked summers, but it was a different experience. In general, young adult males express the least future orientation and are more hedonistic and concerned with the present than any other age, group, or gender. After graduation, however, time seems to stretch out endlessly. It can seem an eternity until you are eligible for a two-week vacation. The United States appears to have fewer vacation days than almost any other country: on average 14 days compared with a world-wide average of 21.3 days (in Holland, the average is 34.7 days!). Even vacations for American senior executives in recent years have declined from 16 to 14 days per year. And at twenty-one years of age the idea of a forty-year career is incomprehensible.
If time seems endless, money seems to evaporate as quickly as it is earned. Even a business school curriculum doesn't prepare people for dealing with the world of taxes, insurance, and budgets. You may have heard your parents complain about taxes, but that doesn't toughen you for the emotional shock of how much even a modest income is consumed by federal withholding, social security, state income, and local wage taxes. Starting salaries sound high to parents who remember their own pre-1970/1980s inflation income and even high to new graduates in comparison with their summer and part-time jobs. But unfortunately, while every other age group in the United States has over the past fifteen years experienced an increase in their real average incomes (for example, they can buy more than those who were their present age fifteen years ago), employees under the age of thirty are earning less in purchasing power than their older brothers and sisters did at that age. In most firms, starting salaries have not climbed as rapidly as inflation so that the real wages for those eighteen to twenty-nine have dropped by 18 percent in the 1970s and 1980s.
Many MBA graduates are able to leapfrog this stagnating salary picture with offers in the $40,000 to $60,000 range. But even here, many of them sharply overestimate their ability to make time payments so they buy or rent excessively expensive automobiles, apartments, and homes. The Wall Street Journal survey of buying habits documents how impulsive and imprudent younger buyers tend to be. As one respondent in his twenties put it, people of his generation "want things fast and they want it now. They are less concerned with quality. They want short-term pleasure. They are less frugal. Companies have to be more competitive--they need flashier products and flashier names."
Conflicting Individual and Organizational Expectations: School acculturates us to frequent promotions. Something happens every year to mark our climb up the educational ladder. Most of us would like something similar at work. Through rotating training programs and creating new positions from rapid growth, some firms are able to emulate school's upward movement. Promotions every 18 to 24 months were not rare in the past. But increasingly, corporations have come to see such rapid pro-motions as costly. As growth slows, the firm finds itself with excessive managerial levels, and many firms are trying to sharply reduce their number of managerial levels in order to promote more flexibility and greater efficiency.
Even if growth continues, many fast-trackers are promoted too rapidly, beyond the level of their competency so that they fail. Rather like the hot shot high school baseball player who is prematurely brought up to the major leagues, striking out causes confidence to evaporate and a promising career is truncated. Many firms report their intention to slow down their promotion rates, thus reducing the number of promotions in most people's careers. This may be desirable from management's perspective, but younger graduates may not understand why things are moving slower for them than they did in the past.
Business school graduates often are trained with case studies to think like executives by defining solutions to top-level problems. If they enjoy this perspective, they may expect real work to be similar and assume their actual authority will equal the synthetic power accorded in class exercises. But such authority takes years to achieve and the ambitious are impatient.
Firms contribute to this dissatisfaction when they don't provide young graduates with sufficient challenge. Large employers too often treat newly hired professionals as identical and assign them repetitive tasks that could be performed by people with less education. Although perhaps not formal "training programs," these early positions can be a kind of quasi-training, socialization program-the firm testing to see whether you "fit in." In the absence of objective performance results, subjective factors like social behavior and dress can weigh heavily in the firm's deciding whether or not you are a potential star. Older managers may argue that your expectations are unrealistic and you must "prove" yourself before being assigned to more important jobs. But most of us detest being treated as "average" or merely a member of a category. We want to be considered unique, if not special. Management's attitudes and policies may promote the very "immature behavior" that is given as the reason for their establishment. Patience and understanding are needed on both sides.
In thinking about my first two post-college jobs, I am struck by the contrast between the excitement and satisfaction I found as a junior officer in the G.S. Navy and the boredom of my later engineering work at Eastman Kodak. At Kodak (a marvelous company which has made great revitalization strides in recent years) I occupied a desk in an enormous room with only glass dividers between some 300 of us best and brightest. The size of our desks, file cabinets, and coat stands (along with a dress code) were all identical and prescribed. But that was true in the Navy also. What was different, however, was that at twenty-four in the Navy I had a real job: managing four officers and 85 enlisted personnel with additional responsibilities as operations officer and navigator for a destroyer. The lives of 320 men depended on my conning the ship at high speed when on darkened ship plane guard duty at sea. And I navigated the ship from Newport, Rhode Island to Beirut, Lebanon and back. It was heady stuff. How different was my next job at Kodak when I had no authority, no subordinates, and shared a secretary with ten others. I had no responsibility other than trying to persuade middle-aged line managers to follow my advice (which they often thought hopelessly theoretical if not naively idealistic).
Life on a small warship like a destroyer is more like working for a small business than a large corporation. Beginning professional and managerial positions in small firms appear to be more challenging and satisfying than similar posts in the large." Small companies cannot afford to train graduates on marginal tasks, so they put them to work on necessary activities immediately. Such operating responsibilities are more easily measured than large corporate staff jobs so young managers can demonstrate their ability objectively, which in turn gives them greater freedom from conformity to marginal behavior and appearance pressures.
Over Education of Managers?
Managers are increasingly well educated. At least they are going to school longer than did their predecessors. Today, over 90 percent of the executives at the top of American corporations have attended college. Decades ago this would have been less than 50 percent; eighty years ago, less than 40 percent. Even more dramatic has been the increase in executives with graduate degrees. In 1986, 63 percent of chief executive officers had continued studies after getting a bachelor's degree with 22 percent possessing an MBA. By the mid-1990s, perhaps 50 percent of top executives will possess graduate degrees and 10 percent doctorates. The composite of recent attendees at the Wharton Advanced Management Program (average age forty-five and identified by their firms as their brightest coming stars) is 100 percent with bachelor's degrees, 29 percent with master's degrees, and 25 percent with Ph.D. degrees.
Of the college-educated managers who climbed to the chief executive officer level, up until the early 1960s the most common main field of study was liberal arts. In the mid-1960s undergraduate engineering became the most common collegiate field. But by the mid-1980s undergraduate business had emerged as the most represented college major. As a management professor, I can hardly complain about the preeminence of business education as a source of chief executives, but others are voicing deep concern about declining interest among young Americans to study engineering (now under 10 percent), physical sciences (under 3 percent), mathematics (under 1 percent!).14 Exhibit 2-2 summarizes undergraduate and graduate major fields of corporate chiefs as described by a Fortune survey.
This emphasis on managers' educational credentials has transformed the organizational shape from a single pyramid to a small pyramid sitting atop a truncated larger one. The Horatio Alger myth was that a young man with no special education could enter at the bottom and through years of diligent effort work his way to the top on merit (women, of course, were not included in this early dream). This upward climb is virtually impossible today. A college degree or more is needed just to gain entry to the bottom rung of the managerial ladder in the wings of the upper pyramid. In larger firms, these wing positions are more staff than managerial. Only as graduates establish and sell themselves do they move laterally or diagonally into line management. Unfortunately, this emphasis on higher education has made it increasingly difficult for the bright non-college worker to jump from the lower pyramid to the upper. Unless he or she obtains the necessary educational credentials (perhaps by attending school at night), the barrier from lower to upper has become more impenetrable.
No one can knock the desirability of better-educated employees and managers. They offer great opportunity for more creative and productive firms. Nonetheless, the immediate impact appears less sanguine. Boredom and resentment can fester if the skills of the better educated are not utilized. At all organizational levels, employees with more education tend to have lower morale and to perform no better than those with less education working at the same level.17 Thus, high school graduates working alongside college grads tend to be happier. Whether this also applies to those holding only bachelor's degrees working at the same level as MBAs is unknown.
Education increases (some say, inflates) expectations of intrinsic job challenge and satisfaction. So when jobs do not draw on the skills people think they possess, or when they believe they are being used below their status, employees become angry and withhold their commitment (and weld Coke bottles in the doors of luxury cars as has happened at some automobile firms).
These results do not argue for abolishing college (after all, college may be helpful in living a better life, even if it doesn't get you a better job). Rather, the situation suggests that companies should eliminate arbitrary educational requirements in favor of evaluating individual ability. All custodians don't need to be high school graduates, as some blue-chip corporations require. Similarly, all department heads need not be college graduates, nor need all vice presidents be holders of master's degrees. Finally, we need to recognize that greater education cannot carry an automatic guarantee of a more interesting and rewarding job.
Inadequate First Supervisor: Your first boss plays an especially important role in your career. The example he or she sets can dramatically affect the way you think about yourself, your employer, and your career for good or ill.18 Supervisors who think poorly of young subordinates and fail to challenge them generally elicit weak performance in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.19 Even worse, uncaring supervisors who present themselves as negative role models by not setting high standards for themselves cause everyone's performance to deteriorate. Other managers do not want alumni of such groups, so if you work for such a supervisor your guilt by association can mire you in a dead end.
Ambitious young specialists and managers want visibility and expo-sure-opportunities to show senior executives how well they can perform and to learn to understand corporate-wide objectives. Today, such access to the top appears to be even more important than predictable promotions. As an AT&T executive puts it: "They don't want to know how they can go up the corporate ladder; they want to know about the environment they'll be working in. They don't want to know the pecking order as much as if they'll have access to the top."
Earlier generations were more mindful of their lowly status: "I revered the people at the top," says a 50-year-old G.E. manager. "I thought the person who ran the plant was a god. I had no contact with him at all. There was a tremendous caste system. You didn't go to him for anything without going up his chain of command."
A fearful intermediate supervisor can block such opportunity by re-laying all communications himself or herself and not allowing subordinates to see higher levels. Handing a report to your immediate boss with no opportunity to argue in its favor and never hearing what happens to it can be very irritating (especially if you later discover that your name on the cover was replaced by your superior's!). Feeling no control over your job may be the strongest predictor of dissatisfaction and poor performance.
The best firms institute policies to ensure that young professionals enjoy opportunities to communicate with and be evaluated by several higher executives, not just their immediate supervisors. One of Kodak's practices that I came to appreciate was its insistence that the staffer who drafted a proposal be present at each higher-level meeting on the issue. Thus, I would go all the way to the vice president's office (accompanied by my more immediate superiors) if that was to be the ultimate decision level. This gave me an opportunity to understand the vice president's objectives and to show how I could be valuable to the company.
When blocked from on-the-job opportunity to demonstrate your competence to high-level management, you can look for off-job possibilities through community volunteer activities. Whether in Boy Scouts, Junior Chamber of Commerce, or volunteer rescue squads or fire departments, your commitment and good performance can come to the attention of various corporate officials who may then keep a special eye on you at work. One of my key opportunities at Kodak was serving as chairman of the engineering department annual clambake. Planning, coordinating, and executing this big function gave me direct access to the departmental vice president long before anything in my daily job would have (although it was a matter of courage when he insisted I eat raw clams with him-something I had never done before!).
Such outside work participation can be implicitly expected by companies, particularly in smaller cities and rural locales. Indeed, the demands can be so explicit that one can resent them as intrusions on personal time. Nonetheless, they offer opportunities to gain visibility earlier than might otherwise occur at work.
Traditional manufacturing firms often assigned young graduates to older supervisors who had lost out in the competition for promotions. Sometimes they took special interest in their young charges, but all too often the old-timers were perceived as "losers" and they behaved accordingly, thus providing poor models for the newcomers. Just as bad, however, can be initially reporting to stars and "winners." The complaints of young graduates entering prestigious investment banking houses and major management consulting firms are legion. Excited at obtaining a coveted position at a blue-chip firm, ambitious professionals often are disappointed to find that their intensely achievement-oriented superiors just don't have the time (or patience) to talk to them-or at least with nothing more than curt demands.
Craftsman like people who are primarily motivated by their own achievement needs are often very good as independent staff professionals and technical specialists. They are driven to get the job done. Unfortunately, they often run into difficulty as they move into management positions requiring stronger interpersonal skills. They often see other people as tools or obstacles, not as fellow human beings. All too often such managers emphasize short-term results heedless of longer-term consequences-so much so they have been called "destructive achievers."
Mot that intensely achievement-oriented supervisors dislike others; liking is simply irrelevant. What counts for such people is getting others to behave in the interest of their personal achievement. Understandably, most of us dislike such impersonal and manipulative behavior-behavior that often is labeled Machiavellian after the Italian sixteenth-century philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli. And indeed, high achievement need seems associated with a test measuring one's index of Machiavellianism. As a result, poor interpersonal skills represent the single largest reason for early and mid-career managerial failure. The Wall Street Journal article on an intensely achievement-oriented Washington, DC Treasury Department star illustrates this human insensitivity:
In a city where comity and cooperation get things done, and where egos are easily bruised, Mr. Mulford's manner sometimes undercuts his best intentions. That was certainly the case when Manual Johnson, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, traveled across town to visit Mr. Mulford. Mr. Johnson had scheduled the meeting to smooth over some policy differences. Mr. Mulford, however, kept him waiting in his outer office for more than 30 minutes--a first degree insult by sensitive Washington standards. Usually a patient man, Mr. Johnson finally left without seeing Mr. Mulford--and without getting an explanation until months later...
Mr. Mulford defends his policy initiatives, but doesn't entirely dismiss the criticism of his style ... "As I look back over my past experiences ... I was always on my own. Without meaning to, that develops characteristics which are sometimes not as sensitive to coordination as it might otherwise be."
As one executive expressed his concern about current MBAs: "Something has happened. These young people seem intent on destroying each other to get to the top." A former automobile company executive described what he saw as Motown's Machiavelli.
We almost never said publicly what we actually thought about the merits of an issue. Instead, we concocted positions we hoped would help us rig relationships with customers, suppliers or competitors in our favor. I hated this approach which was contrary to my beliefs and harmful--I felt-to (the company's) business ... It took me a while to put the pieces together. But soon I understood that by working at (the company) I was witnessing people betraying themselves and their neighbors in pursuit of personal advancement and corporate advantage.
This Detroit complainer felt that such Machiavellianism brought personal success at the firm's expense so he quit. Actually, I think it is more likely that in time such manipulating managers are rejected by their colleagues because of the havoc they create. And my subjective feeling is that since the evaporation of the Wall Street myth of young wealth in the crash of October 1987, current MBAs are becoming less arrogant in their attitudes toward prospective employers and colleagues.
Surprisingly, managers who are primarily concerned about people also are usually inadequate as first supervisors. Managers who are driven by their affiliation needs often express great commitment and loyalty to the firm and to their subordinates. At first, they appear to young professionals as being desirable supervisors, but in time their faults emerge. Affiliative-oriented managers are dominated by a short-run concern for pleasing people and being liked. When talking with a subordinate, such a supervisor is mainly concerned with the here and now. He or she is extremely sensitive to whether you are happy with what you are hearing. So you leave the meeting with the words you wanted to hear. But later you discuss your boss's promises with your colleagues John and Mary and discover that they have different (and perhaps better) deals. Or in time you become disenchanted when your supervisor is unable to deliver on the promises made.
The problem here is less the affiliative-oriented manager's "lies" than a short-range perspective in which unique deals are made heedless of the precedents they may set or even of the manager's ability to deliver on the promises. Uncoordinated deals are struck with individual subordinates who later are angry with perceived inequities. Because of their inconsistency, such managers are accused of "playing favorites." Some strongly affiliative-oriented managers are so submerged in the moment's emotions that they don't even make notes on what they've promised their subordinates-and nothing will more surely guarantee a manager's loss of credibility.
Managers who desperately want to please their subordinates can make disastrous mistakes in budget management. Particularly right after assuming office, some immediately transfer department discretionary funds to subordinate managers' control. Thus, subordinates are happy to have what appears to be "new" money, but the appreciation-craving superiors have eliminated their marginal control and flexibility. They become victims of an inflexible budget growing out of their own desire to please. To be an effective manager requires transcending the immediate event to see it in the long run. You shouldn't make decisions just to satisfy the present moment without anticipating how the decision will affect others in the future.
Rejection of Supervisory Style: When I was serving full time in university administration, I did very little teaching. I was totally out of the classroom for five years and didn't teach any undergraduates for eight years. Upon announcing my intention to return to the teaching faculty, I consulted several of my junior colleagues for guidance on what teaching techniques worked among young students. I was told that old-style, one-way lectures were anathema. In the absence of compulsory attendance, students wouldn't even show up because they so disliked such a unidirectional, authoritarian style. This didn't surprise me because this rejection began decades ago.
I was surprised to hear, however, that my junior colleagues felt that students also didn't particularly like a Socratic style with the teacher posing questions and guiding the students to uncover the relevant issues by answering their questions with more questions. Students preferred this to lectures but felt (according to my junior faculty advisers) that the teacher was manipulating the class.
In growing alarm, I asked what techniques did work well with today's undergraduates. My colleagues responded, "experiential exercises." In their opinion, what students like the most are exercises in which the faculty role is minimized. After structuring the exercise, the professor steps aside and the students behave. Records are kept, notes taken, and results tabulated which are then discussed. But it is the exercise itself and the ensuing discussion that elicits learning, not the teacher. Students construct the meaning of what they've done from the experience, not from the teacher's knowledge or expertise being handed to them or used to influence their answers.
Of course, the professor is not as passive in this process as the students may think, but my young faculty colleagues' observations are entirely consistent with what has been termed the "self-developing" motivation of today's best and brightest students, young professionals, and junior managers. They are supposedly characterized by the following attributes:
Skepticism about authority: It is less that they reject authority than they don't believe its experience and expertise are relevant to the situation they confront. As managers themselves, this means they feel uncomfortable telling their subordinates what to do, preferring joint decisions and participation. This contributes to their long work weeks, many over sixty hours per week.
Lack of faith in the firm or in loyalty: They have learned (validly) that the "organization man" route of upward success through loyalty is dead, so they don't believe the firm has the right to make decisions about their careers without their involvement. Indeed, many believe their primary obligation is to their own career so that all opportunities must be listened to, even if not solicited.
Rejection of passivity: Skepticism about the knowledge or intentions of the firm forces young self-developers to conclude that they must be active in structuring their learning environments. They don't want to be told what to do by a wise or expert superior, but would rather learn through trial, error, and success.
A "playful" attitude: They desire a blurring of the boundary between work and play, so that work is "fun" and "fun" occurs on the job. Superficially, this takes the form of practical jokes, company ski lodges, and Silicon Valley--like afternoon beer parties. More fundamentally, it means discretionary resources to "play" with in exploring new ideas without having to account for immediate results as closely as with regular duties.
These attitudes are a distillation of values found among today's best and brightest so they are not a description of any single person. Nor do they purport to describe the majority of young people, many of whom express more traditional views. Self-developers are clearly socioeconomic and educational elite. Nonetheless, most of my graduate students feel comfortable describing themselves along these lines and feel no need to apologize. Many older executives, however, disagree because to them these attributes are devoid of a sense of commitment and responsibility- and are just plain selfish.
Whatever one's value judgment about the attractiveness or unattractiveness of this self-developer motivational profile, such people are uncomfortable with superiors whose leadership styles are bureaucratic ("obey because the organization chart says I'm the boss"), authoritarian ("obey because I have the power to hurt or help you"), and even persuasive ("do it this way because my expertise and experience indicate it's the best choice"). Rather, they are best motivated by a superior who creates a kind of game, allowing room for their autonomy and innovation. By giving them resources to play with, allowing them time and freedom to do so, and promising a share in the rewards from their innovation, such a leader draws out their best energy and effort.
