Presidents of corporations talk about the need for top talent to fill prospective executive positions while within their firms capable men and women are frustrated in their attempts to move up the ladder. Managers who have been around for a while feel they arc bypassed in favor of younger men. Young people cry foul in two instances. If the institution with which they're affiliated is active in moving employees around in order to broaden experience, they may claim their privacy is invaded, their right to manage their own lives is threatened, or they are victims of a manipulative system. If, on the other hand, companies follow a will-rise-to-the-top policy, they say industry is uncaring and abandons its human responsibilities.
When promotion systems are opened to professional scrutiny, in fact, the knowledge barriers inherent in prediction, the lack of sound career philosophies, the gap between a firm's intentions and its effect, and many short end expediencies all become glaringly apparent. In addition, the inadequacies of business planning, our poor ability to understand and define job requirements systematically, and our adult education failures are reminders of the good game we talk but fail to play. Of all the problems, the knowledge barrier is the most serious. It emphasizes the need for experimentation to find out what is effective in today's and tomorrow's setting. Experimentation in the career area, however, takes courage, imagination, and funding-elements singularly lacking in most manpower development programs.
Why are we in such a predicament? What has been happening in recent years to deepen the need for resolving career advancement problems?
Decentralization: A Key Factor
First of all, most institutions have grown, and with increased size have come organization changes, notably toward decentralization. While decentralization solves some problems, it is not a panacea, and it generates some obvious hazards. The president or general manager or managing director- whatever his title may be has less opportunity to know the talents of the young comers. He is often at the mercy of lower-level managers who may in fact be concealing good men in their efforts to meet their clearly defined objectives. These young men may hold positions that fit their talents well. They may be developing at a normal rate. But they may not be moving to new assignments soon enough to satisfy them, to accelerate their rate of growth and broaden them for different and more important future positions.
Second, corporate systems designed to overcome this problem by systematically identifying high-potential men and developing" individual career plans for them are difficult to enforce. "How can I meet the very tough objectives I've agreed to if you take my best man away at just this moment?" is a typical conversation stopper. Such systems tend to bog down in paperwork. "All I know is that all these forms arrived with a note from topside saying that they should be completed and returned within a month. We did it, got a lot of people excited about it, and sent them in, and nothing-has happened since." They offer, moreover, little or no reward for managers who do their development homework and supply talent to other departments of the enterprise. "Why should I give up good men? All top management looks at is the figure in the lower right-hand corner of the balance sheet!"
First Job, First Boss
Another enduring problem that is intensified in decentralized operations is early identification of top performers. Much of the so-called promise of workers is deduced from how they do on early assignments. But the nature of the work delegated to a man and the supervisor or manager to whom he reports are significant determinants of the extent of promise or potential that he can reveal. Just as some quite brilliant students are turned off by the lack of challenge they find in the schoolroom, so very capable people may appear uninterested and sluggish and perform no better than average because of the unchallenging work they are asked to do, the low-level standards of the manager, or the kind of environment in which they work.
Managers often suffer from feelings such as these: "I did the dull stuff in the beginning; so can everyone else. You only get ahead if you learn the business from the bottom up. Reading instruments may not be exciting, but somebody's got to do it. It's time you learned there's no such thing as a perfect job. To be fair, we must acknowledge that few recognize their own attitudes for what they are. They are so ingrained that these managers no longer stop to analyze them. But think of their effect on a bright, well-trained young man trying to find himself in a strange world. He may say to himself: In this company, it doesn't matter what I know or know how to do. I've got to do a certain amount of drudgery just to meet the requirements of the system." Work becomes meaningless to him; he doesn't identify with it at all. Or if he shows some spunk and asks "Why?" when he's told to do it, he is labeled difficult to get along with from that time on.
It is important not to overlook the fact that the foreman, supervisor, or manager at the bottom of the pyramid is often in one of two career stages himself. He may be a hotshot, moving ahead rapidly. In this case, he is probably inexperienced and self-centered and thus unconcerned about the motivational needs of others in the organization. Or he may have rose at this level, so that his own upward movement is unlikely or rather far in the future. In this case, he may well view those who report to him through his own perspectives. He may judge capabilities and contribution in terms of his own. He may expect very little and never get close enough to employees to see that they have much more to give.
