Surveys lately have found that many Americans don't want to be promoted. It's a hard thing to measure, since nobody tracks how many people were offered promotion but turned it down, but I have seen several different results showing that around half of people would refuse promotion if they were offered it. We also had a couple of accidential experiments done when companies tried to bribe people to come back to the office:
Take Dell, whose executives thought they came up with an ingenious plan to get everyone back into the office. If employees didn't come in at least three days a week, the company announced in February, they would be ineligible for a promotion. The response from Dell's workforce was a collective shrug. Months after the directive, nearly half of employees were still remote, apparently happy to remain in their current roles as long as they could keep working from home. It was a clear sign that in 2024, promotions just aren't the incentive they used to be.
I'm certainly in that situation; I never had any interest in further promotion once I became a principal investigator, that is, the lead scientist on my projects. When I have accepted management roles it was basically because there wasn't anyone else to do them. I tried for a couple of years to refuse raises – because in my business the more money you make, the less time you have to do technical work and the more you have to focus on management – but my boss waived off my objections, because she was worried that if we had a slowdown somebody would look around, see that this Bedell guy had been denied raises two years in a row, and decide to lay me off first.
But the desire to climb the corporate ladder isn't exactly ancient:
The original work ethic in America — the Protestant one, espoused by the likes of Benjamin Franklin — dates from a time when most Americans were self-employed as farmers and artisans. It was rooted in a rugged individualism that was skeptical of authority and hierarchies, fitting for a country founded on the idea of freedom from tyranny.
That became a problem when the Industrial Revolution arrived. Companies exploded in size, and more and more Americans found themselves working for someone else. In 1820, 80% of the workforce was self-employed. By 1870, that share had shrunk to 33%. By 1940, it was 20%.
"The moral vision of American society had been based upon the image of the independent, self-employed person," writes Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School who has studied the history of work. "Many social critics feared that people would be less likely to work hard under the wage system and, even worse, that something in their very natures might change." America was facing an identity crisis.
The solution was to forge a whole new work ethic.
That is, the ethic of climbing the ladder. Which is also, of course, related to the decline in hereditary class distinctions and the rise of meritocracy, and to the growth of huge bureaucracies like those in the Federal and state governments and mega-corporations.
None of the articles I have seen mention this, but I have to think that our ever-growing wealth also plays a role. In our society people like nurses and archaeologists can lead quite nice lives, with houses and yards and the internet and hundreds of tv channels. If you feel financially ok, why seek out a more stressful job?
Like millions of my contemporaries, I think medium chill is the happiest kind of life.
I tried for a couple of years to refuse raises – because in my business the more money you make, the less time you have to do technical work and the more you have to focus on management – but my boss waived off my objections, because she was worried that if we had a slowdown somebody would look around, see that this Bedell guy had been denied raises two years in a row, and decide to lay me off first.
ReplyDeleteThis largely encapsulates my problem with most upper managers.
You've got distant people making decisions about employees they only know as "this Bedell guy", and they can't tell the difference between said employee "being denied" raises and "refusing to accept a raise". And so they're willing to lay off someone who is actually MORE valuable than their fellow employees (because they're willing to do the work for less), because they're ignorantly detached from reality.
Upper management in every company I've ever worked for has been a bunch of shadowy cryptids who exist in a nebulous "headquarters" somewhere in a totally different part of the continent, who sometimes descend from on high to take a quick glance at things on the ground, fail to comprehend them, and then make snap decisions that will throw the system into chaos, and then be rescinded or amended in 6-12 months once the analysts tell them it didn't produce the expected results.
It's been a while since I've been in the workforce, but . . . If not getting a promotion is noted anywhere, it's probably noted in your personnel file, along with the reason why you turned the offer down. It's not that they don't know, they do. Corporate mentality wants someone who took the promotion more than someone who didn't, so when downsizing, the one who turned down the promotion gets the heave-ho first. They probably think you're not ambitious enough or something. Then when you are making too much money, they can you as a cost saving measure. 🙃
ReplyDeleteThis is changing a bit as more and more employers realize their best workers/technicians are just as important to the organization as good managers are, and sometimes more important. Turning down a management opportunity can be the "appropriate" decision to make. Also, a great technician can be a lousy manager. Happens all the time.
Also, a great technician can be a lousy manager. Happens all the time.
DeleteThe Peter Principle, jokingly postulated circa 1969:
"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
When someone excels at their job, they get promoted to a higher position, which requires an expanded or different set of skills. If they also excel at that new position, they will be promoted to yet another position with yet more different skills required. Once they reach a position where they lack the required skills to excel, they stop being promoted and remain in that position.
Thus the corollary: "In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties."
Honestly, I feel like Corporate America's aversion to training is a massive factor.
DeleteLike throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, companies just haphazardly promote employees into new positions and see how it works out. If they perform well, then great - everyone is happy. If they perform poorly, then whatever - just put them back in their old position (or fire them from the company entirely) and try again with someone else.
Partly it's a mentality born from a wrongheaded sense of "cost cutting" - they don't want to "waste money" on training, despite the fact they often lose much more money through all the impacts of high rates of turnover, poor employee performance due to lack of training, etc.
My own job currently suffers from this to a moronic degree. Corporate doesn't want to spend a penny on training, so new hires are left to "figure it out" on their own. This leads to massive numbers of mistakes, which result in customer orders being compromised. That then leads to us having to issue refunds, offer discounts, and otherwise spend time and money trying to satisfy frustrated customers - and inevitably losing some percentage of said customers in the process.
This then negatively impacts our performance metrics, for which new hires get chewed out and blamed, and most get fed up and quit, meaning we then have to hire again. But corporate doesn't want to let us hire anyone, because they look at the poor metrics and say "You're not performing well enough to justify that many hours / people on the team."
It's a classic Catch-22:
The department can't succeed without corporate spending some money to help it.
But corporate won't spend any money to help the department unless it succeeds.
And so we limp along, providing sub-par service to frustrated customers, with a revolving door for incoming hires and outgoing burnouts, with corporate breathing down our necks asking why performance isn't better and then ignoring us when we give them the truthful answers. And nothing improves, and nobody is happy - with the possible exception of the corporate accountants who get paid handsomely to crunch the numbers which justify the "cost cutting" that prevents the problems from being fixed; and the definite exception of the c-suite executives, who pull in six to eight figures and don't care what actually happens on the ground so long as they are able to sweet talk the investors to keep them happy and complacent.
A friend of mine who was teaching at MIT at the time once told me that part of the reason the US graduate fewer engineers relative to countries like Germany and Japan was that beginning engineering students learned that they would be required to spend part of their careers in management. That is, at the time, "up or out" was the only way, and these students wanted to be engineers because, well, they wanted to engineer. When they heard that would be taken away from them as a matter of course, and the effort they were putting in to learn engineering would become in some sense irrelevant, they were turned off. (Note: we were having this conversation in the mid nineties, I think.)
ReplyDeleteObviously, there would be many other factors to the failure to graduate more engineers, like the exaggerated esteem in which lawyers and doctors were held, with pay commensurate, poor math teaching at the primary level, etc., etc. I have the impression doctors and lawyers no longer rate as highly in prestige. According to the NYT, finance is now the "it" field, at least at the Ivies.
My father is a retired doctor - through him, I can confirm that doctors absolutely no longer rate highly in prestige the way they used to; and the pay is also nothing like what it used to be, primarily due to malpractice insurance rates skyrocketing some decades ago and never coming down.
DeleteWhen he went to medical school, being a doctor was one of the most venerable professions in society. When he was a child, his parents constantly implored him (as well as my uncle) to become "a rich and important man" - specifically, to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a judge. (But not a politician, as they felt that wasn't an honest living.)
And when he actually graduated medical school and then completed his residency, it very quickly completely transformed his life - he went from a poor nobody, second son of even poorer immigrants, to being a genuinely wealthy man, who people sought to know for the social prestige of his association.
It really was everything he had been promised it would be - for a few decades anyway. But by the 2000s, the profession had lost virtually all cultural cache associated with it, and the costs of running his own practice had ballooned so dramatically that he couldn't justify the demands on his time, health, sanity, etc, for so much less money than he used to earn, so he decided to simply retire early.
Training budgets and travel budgets are usually the first cost savings casualties. I worked in software development, and as schedules started slipping, and milestones were being missed, the testing schedule would be shortened to catch up. Sometimes I wonder how anything worked first time out of the box. Whenever I think of the disaster that was the first deployment of HHS' Health Care (sign-up) app, I think of this. An international humiliation.
ReplyDelete