For those who might read this blog and be in the middle or just finishing off their fresher week, here is the good news: In a few years, when you will at last have your diploma, and you will at last get that so much wanted job in that such heard-of company, all will be simple, at first.
You will move from the gullible intern to the smart analyst, and then to the reliable senior analyst/associate praised by their managers and envied by their peers.
Your tasks will be clear in most of the cases. You will get to know someone slightly older as your “manager”, who is almost certainly not the person who signs your pay check. What you are being accountable for is easily traceable, and the forty something years old director or managing director of your team will seem like a very old intimidating far away figure.
However, as you will start getting older and more experienced, things will become complicated.
In the clearest of situations, an evolution in someone’s path in a company would be moving gradually from execution roles to decision making ones, from being managed to being a manager. If the situation remains simple, and for career oriented individuals, it is simply a matter of managing bigger and bigger teams, or managing managers etc.
If only it was always that simple. For, you see, in this more and more demanding environment, executive managers have to give the illusion of promoting all the people they need to, for their own career but also to keep their staff motivated.
Firms can’t always pay employees as much as in the hey days. Moreover, they have to abide by the requirements their executive committees around the compositions of the teams etc. And how does one ensure to promote women and minorities if there are no senior roles, or the ones that exist still go to the same people?
An idea that is applied in some firms is to create titles.
It’s really an art and craft exercise. Let’s give a situational example:
How would you motivate someone whose job has been to enter complicated numbers in a software for years, and really would deserve a promotion you cannot give them?
Well, if those numbers relate to how many apples, pears, and quince are harvested every day, and that person is the only one who knows exactly how to record those numbers, let’s create for her the new role of “global head of pomaceous fruit recordings”.
Another example:
You have a problem with employees A, B, C, D in your large team. They all are competent individuals but have stagnated too long in the same role, and really, you have got incentive from your company to only promote E and F. Your pool of junior analysts is such that, unless you have every senior employee manage one person and only one person, you can’t really provide everyone with management opportunities.
Easy. You create a new committee, called the “Promotion and Career Committee”. You charge it of dealing with people who stagnate too long at the same role, and to propose solutions for that.
You nominate, in order of stagnation years, A and B as co chairs, C as secretary and vice chair, and you ask E and F if some of their junior guys can spend 1h a month in that committee. As you are careful to ask for that as a favour during their promotion meeting, they are quite happy to be the benevolent knights.
D won’t be happy to be left out, but you tell D that their job has become too important for them to spend time in that committee, because they are now the global head of pomaceous fruit recordings.
As such, D will go to all the meetings where pomaceous fruits will be discussed, including the company’s official committee on supervising all the recordings. They will also face the regulators on pomaceous fruits legislation, to represent the recordings section, while other duplicate of D in other departments will represent pomaceous planting, pomaceous selling, pomaceous storing. Of course, their bosses will be there too, because those bosses are the only ones entitled to sign off anything of importance (and liable also), but D alone will get to be called global head of pomaceous recording! And they can put it on LinkedIn and say “am glad to announce that I am now a global head”.
These types of promotion, which are largely applied in some companies, create this new breed of Managers Without a Team (and with a very small remit).
It has become very standard to look up in a firm’s contact book the global head of something or the Manager of a matter or the other, and to find it is one person by herself, sometimes with an intern or a junior analyst at best.
In each company, there are thousands things to do, sometimes unique to that company. A (real) manager have technically an infinite number of choices from which to nominate his team favorites as the universal head of something.
To be fair, there are a lot of cases when these nominations and titles are really part of a manager’s effort to motivate her team, and to provide them with a form of recognition, especially during tough times where it is more difficult to show appreciation with salary raises or bonuses.
However, these rare real promotions are shadowed by the many occurrences where it is used to follow some sort of unofficial compliance framework.
And sadly, rather than providing support and real opportunities, these titles-only promotions are too often used as a check box exercice to show a career path was provided to women and minorities.
More generally, what really matters is not being the boss of someone or many people, as I truly believe the future lies with more dynamic hierarchies.
The crux of the problem is allowing for promotions based on merit, that enable more people – with different perspectives – to take, or significantly participate, in decision makings.
The problem of this new trend of managers without a team or managers without impactful remits is that these employees under the illusion of being responsible of something, remain unable to take any primary decisions, and might miss out on more meaningful roles and evolutions.
Some firms have actually understood that – generally speaking- very competent people do not put being the big boss of all the bosses as the foremost goal of their career. In fact high expertise and high potential individuals know they have options, especially in this rapidly evolving environment. So they generally value much more making impacts and enabling decisions than status and titles.
Some firms (an example below from an FT article) have made this feature in their set up and it is apparently working. The gaming industry have long had the reputation to have very little titles nor hierarchy, though this was demystified in some cases (as reported by the guardian), with some employees likening the workplace to a high school. Links to the articles at the end of this post.
Some institutions are moving to project work where importance is per impact level, though this does not necessarily work whilst maintaining the old systems of hierarchy in parallel.
And some companies have “Senior adviser” titles which I find personally better than being the “managing director of trading two points of a rates curve”.
Many experienced professionals, especially those with high expertise, are likely to not want a promotion that comes only in an exalted title, in a role that manages extra large teams. They would be more interested, I would assume, to lead large impact projects or workflows, or be working as a decision maker in a team setting (e.g. as a board).
It is clear that a generally older population, people working longer, the need for inclusion and the upcoming need to work with AI tools, will mean firms need to think carefully whether the current system of rewarding seniority works.
Maybe the way to go ahead is to have management teams rather than one single senior person. The UK government digital service claims to have done that Management by the team, not the managers – Government Digital Service.
Maybe that is the way to go?
Some sources:
New titans of Wall Street: how Jane Street rode the ETF wave to ‘obscene’ riches
No bosses, no managers: the truth behind the ‘flat hierarchy’ facade | André Spicer | The Guardian
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