You must, however, take two preliminary steps to prepare the ground. First, you need to remove the barriers
to occupational mobility. Such barriers take many forms. Policies
(formal or tacit) regarding required time in role between job changes
may be too strict. Your organization may have a job-posting system but
still fill most openings through under-the-table recruiting that
bypasses official channels. Your company may be tacitly unwilling, or
even unconsciously disinclined, to invest in extensive training for
employees over a certain age. Managers may get away with blocking
employees from new assignments, and policies forbidding such behavior
may be enforced loosely, at best. And employees themselves may perceive
role changes, career redirections, new training, lateral moves, and
flexible work arrangements as signs of inadequacy or failure.
Second, be sure to find the keepers.
If you can identify high potentials through your performance management
system, then surely you can also identify the next tier down. You want
to go beyond the stars (who are probably getting special attention
already) to find the other valuable contributors—the B players, people
who will probably never make it to the executive suite but whose skills
and experience you need to retain. These are the people you’d like to
see eventually moving into flex retirement, not full retirement. Once
you’ve identified them, pay special attention not only to their
potential, performance, and progress but also to any warning signs of
middlescent disillusionment and stagnation.
To help you keep those keepers, we’ve identified six fundamental tools.
Fresh assignments.
A
fresh assignment, often in a different geographical location or part of
the organization, lets you take advantage of a person’s existing
skills, experience, and contacts while letting him or her develop new
ones. The best assignments are often lateral moves that mix roughly
equal parts old and new responsibilities.
During
our interviews, for example, we met with Jeff Kimpan, a longtime HR
executive at General Motors. He worked in Mexico during the mid-1980s, a
period of explosive growth there. Then he joined the executive ranks,
most recently running HR for worldwide manufacturing operations. In the
spring of 2005, the HR director for the company’s fast-growing China
operation quit, and Jeff volunteered for the job. It was actually a step
down in corporate status and scope, and his colleagues were shocked
that he’d accept what seemed a less than lateral move. He acknowledges
that he had to check his ego, but he was ready for a change, and he knew
that he could apply what he’d learned 20 years earlier in Mexico. His
children were grown, and he was excited about getting away from
restructurings and downsizings to work in a growing business.
It
isn’t an easy job. The China operation hopes to double its sales in two
years and redouble in four, so the unit was already facing shortages of
experienced technical and professional people when Jeff arrived. But
he’s having fun. “I can’t wait to get to work each day,” he says. “I
come home just as tired as I did in Detroit—it’s just a better kind of
tired. This place is like a lab: Solutions aren’t known, and they have
to be invented every day. You’d have to be dead not to have fun in this
job.”
Principal
Financial Group routinely chooses empty nesters like Jeff for
relocation, particularly those moves that would be difficult for
employees with young and growing families. So does GE, which also taps
experienced managers to integrate new acquisitions—an ideal way to offer
an employee a change of scene and bring to bear a career’s worth of
organizational know-how. Diana Tyson, who has spent 22 years in
organizational development with AT&T and now Lucent Technologies,
recently left corporate headquarters for a yearlong engagement in the
fast-growing Asia-Pacific region. “After this experience, it would be a
lot harder for another company to recruit me,” she told us.
Marriott
International’s information resources group takes another innovative
approach to the fresh assignment. Tenures there are long and turnover is
low, which means high levels of competence but little potential for
upward mobility. So senior managers have been offered opportunities to
take on a second, lateral role, while off-loading some of their current
responsibilities, as a way to introduce new challenges. For example,
Patton Conner, the vice president of guest services systems, recently
took on a second “day job” as the regional VP for information resources
of Marriott Canada. George Hall, a veteran human resources manager, is
now also managing application development for the HR function. His new
peers around the table are his customers in his other role, which he
says gives him terrific insights into how to solve their problems. The
more-junior employees who report to people like Patton and George have a
chance to take on greater responsibility, since their bosses now have
more to do in other areas.
Dow
Chemical is one of the best examples we’ve seen of a company that has
truly removed the barriers to career revitalization. Executives there
assume that careers will always be in motion and that employees of all
ages should always be preparing for their next career within the
company. Dow backs up that expectation with tools that help people plan
their next roles. One such is a career opportunity map that helps people
determine which skills to acquire and which jobs to seek out. Another
is a global job-posting system that alerts people to opportunities in
other areas. It’s a flat organization, so this approach allows the
company to offer new and different work, even if it can’t offer everyone
a promotion.
Hewlett-Packard’s
Cathy Lyons has had a half-dozen very different assignments within the
company over the past 12 years, from running a manufacturing operation
in Italy to managing the U.S. toner supplies business to her most recent
assignment as chief marketing officer at corporate headquarters. She
believes that three or four years is long enough to be in any one
position. “When you’ve stopped learning, it’s time to move on or step
aside,” she told us.
Career changes.
Middlescents
often dream of—and in some cases end up pursuing—something
fundamentally new. Yet jumping the corporate ship is risky, so an
employer that can offer an attractive internal career change has a
chance to retain valuable talent. An employee may develop a new
specialty, assume an altogether different job, or sometimes return from a
management track to an individual contributor role.
Before
joining Prudential Financial’s Prudential Relocation business, Jim
Russo spent 13 years with a major competitor in a customer relations
role that kept him on the road. Looking for less travel and more time
with his young family, Jim joined Prudential Relocation’s new Phoenix
office in 2000 as director of service delivery, managing a team of 21.
The move was good for work/life balance, but after a while Jim became
disenchanted: “The job wasn’t my strength or my passion. I didn’t feel
as motivated, I missed working directly with customers, and I felt I was
just getting the job done.” By all measures, he was doing a good job,
but he knew the situation wasn’t right.
Jim
liked the company and networked with a variety of managers to learn
what kinds of opportunities there might be. He landed a position in
field sales, a role for which he had no direct experience but which
seemed to play to his strengths. The results—for Jim and the
company—were beyond excellent. As sales director for the West Coast, he
went up against his former employer. “I’m competitive by nature, and the
job really fit,” he says. “It gave me new life, more passion, more
confidence, and companywide recognition—I know I’m a more important part
of the company, and that really matters.” In his first year, Jim was
one of the top two salespeople; in his second, he tripled his sales
target. His advice to others: “You’ve got to have passion for the job to
add value every day. If you find yourself just going through the
motions, do something different—perhaps very different. We all have
strengths; find yours and play to them.”
Such
career shifts should be a natural part of corporate life. Dave Nassef
has had three distinct careers in his 30-plus years with Pitney Bowes.
He started as a personnel manager in a factory and made a lateral move
to marketing. When the company centralized HR, he was one of the few
people with both manufacturing and marketing experience, and at 40 he
was given HR responsibility for half the company. He’s since changed
careers within the firm twice—first to take on the newly created job of
corporate ombudsman and problem solver and then to move into the policy
sphere, representing Pitney Bowes in Washington in legislative matters
relating to the mailing industry. Each time, Dave surprised everyone
around him with his willingness—eagerness, even—to make a lateral move.
Dave’s philosophy: “You have to ask yourself whether you want to thrive
in a company or merely survive. If you want to thrive, then be prepared
to take the risk of making a career change.”
Mentoring colleagues.
Putting
experienced employees into mentoring, teaching, and other
knowledge-sharing roles has the dual benefit of reengaging the midcareer
worker and boosting the expertise and organizational know-how of
less-experienced employees. For middlescents, serving as a mentor is a
personally fulfilling way to share a lifetime of experience, give back
to the organization, and make a fresh set of social connections in the
workplace. Mentor relationships are often stereotyped as one-way
transfers from old to young for the purposes of youthful personal
development and career advancement. In fact, they should be viewed as a
two-way pairing of knowledge to gain with knowledge to share.
That’s
how mentoring works at Intel, where the partner may outrank the mentor.
The program began in a chip-making factory in New Mexico in 1997, when
Intel was growing, and many of the factory’s managers and technical
experts were being transferred to new locations. New experts needed to
be developed in a variety of fields. So the factory’s top managers
started matching partners with mentors who had the needed skills and
knowledge. Today, a companywide employee database, which tracks skills
attained and desired, helps match partners with mentors, who (thanks to
the Internet) may be in another country. Both mentor and partner take a
class to learn some guidelines—what to talk about, how to maximize the
mutual benefit of their relationship—and then they set the details of
that relationship in a contract that specifies goals and deadlines.
Mentoring
is the best way to put the greatest number of midcareer workers into
knowledge-sharing roles. But there are other ways. It’s common practice
for experienced and expert employees to develop and deliver training
programs. They can also teach and guide colleagues through
internal-consulting roles, participate in business performance reviews,
and lead business improvement projects. Many midcareer workers are happy
to take charge of change initiatives, which are especially appealing as
a way to assist colleagues, improve results, and serve the higher
mission of the enterprise.
Fresh training.
Corporate
training today is disproportionately aimed at the young (especially new
employees who need to learn the basics) and at the high potentials. The
tacit assumptions are that midcareer people have been trained already,
and what little additional training they might need they get on the job.
These assumptions are, at best, only partly true.
Many
of today’s midcareer workers are well educated and have retained their
love of learning. They know that increasing their skills will raise
their chances for personal and professional advancement. However, many
find themselves too busy for extensive education and training; personal
development time comes at the sacrifice of other responsibilities, both
on the job and off. And some people, especially those who have reached
positions of authority, stop seeking development opportunities because
they hesitate to take risks or don’t want to admit that they have things
to learn.
Meanwhile,
too many organizations foster a silent conspiracy against education:
They cut the training and development budget first in lean times. They
stand silent when managers discourage employees from seeking training on
the grounds that it will interfere with getting the work done. And they
fail to require managers to set career development plans for all their
employees. As a result, many midcareer workers are overdue for a serious
infusion of training—which can include refresher courses, in-depth
education to develop new skills, and brief introductions to new ideas or
areas of business that expand their perspectives and trigger their
interest in learning more.
Fresh
training is, of course, often integral to career changes as well as to
employee retention. Lincoln Electric’s Leopard Program, for instance,
was designed explicitly to enable employees to “change their spots.”
When patterns of demand for steel fabrication products changed, the
company trained dozens of factory and clerical staff volunteers to
become assistant salespeople. In some Japanese manufacturers,
assembly-line workers regularly train to become product service
technicians. After years on the line, such employees literally know the
products inside and out, and probably want a change of work. And the
U.K.’s National Health Service is responding to chronic nursing
shortages by training aides to become nurses—a shift to a very different
career path.
Sabbaticals.
One
of the best ways to rejuvenate, personally and professionally, is
simply to get away from the routine of the job for a significant amount
of time. A common feature of academic employment relationships,
sabbaticals remain rare and underused in the business world. In 2001,
Hewitt Associates surveyed more than 500 organizations in the United
States and found that just 5% offered sabbaticals, either paid or
unpaid. Yet a survey the same year by Principal Financial Group found
that more than 50% of employees say they long for a sabbatical but feel
they can’t take one because of financial concerns or employer
discouragement. Employers’ reluctance centers on cost and, for key
employees, potential disruption to business operations. Employees’
reluctance comes from fear that taking a leave will somehow mark them as
less committed than those who don’t interrupt their work. One manager
in the media industry said that her company had made an apparently
generous offer of an eight-week paid sabbatical every few years. But,
she added, she knew of not a single person who had taken advantage of
the benefit. It was universally assumed that when you returned, you’d
find your desk out in the hall. You might not be fired, exactly, but the
general opinion was that you’d be displaced. This perception is
unfortunate because people tend to return from sabbaticals more
committed than ever. They’ve had a chance to recharge, to do something
different, and they’re appreciative of their companies for giving them
the opportunity.
There
are organizations that get it—that know that the cost of replacing a
middlescent worker in need of a break may far outweigh the cost of the
paid time off. Intel employees are eligible for an eight-week
sabbatical, with full pay, after every seven years of full-time service.
Silicon Graphics’ regular full-time employees in the United States and
Canada can take six weeks paid time off after four years. Adobe Systems
offers three paid weeks off after every five years of service. Arrow
Electronics offers up to ten weeks after seven years.
Hallmark
Cards uses sabbaticals not only to get people out of the routine of
work but also to place them into enlightening settings with the goal of
recharging their artistic talent. They might spend time at the company’s
innovation center; go on “creative research travel” to museums,
conferences, inspiring locales, or places where they can study customers
and social trends; or simply spend time at the company’s 172-acre farm.
Most Hallmark sabbaticals are brief, but senior creative staff can also
be honored with a sabbatical award of six months away from work to
pursue an area of artistic exploration.
Wells
Fargo’s Volunteer Leave program, more than 20 years in operation,
offers employees with at least five years’ service and a qualifying
performance rating the opportunity to work in a community service
setting of their choosing for up to four months in a calendar year while
receiving full pay and benefits. The work they do is often inspiring:
People have used the time to volunteer at a camp for cancer victims; to
represent Mothers Against Drunk Driving, traveling across the country to
speak with high school students; and to work in Armenia to help women
develop small businesses. This last was so successful that the project
was adopted by the United Nations, and the participant was allowed to
extend her leave to assist the UN in setting it up. For its part, the
company reaps benefits on several fronts, including good publicity both
within the corporation and out in the communities where participants are
serving. The most important benefit, of course, is a returning employee
who is highly energized and recommitted to the organization.
Expanding leadership development.
Many
of the executives we spoke with in our research cited shortages in
their leadership succession pipelines. On the face of it, this is
surprising because, in terms of raw numbers, there are plenty of
midcareer workers eager to move up the ladder and fill senior management
slots. But corporate restructuring and flattening organizations have
eroded the old career paths, and people can’t accumulate the needed set
of leadership skills on the job. The situation is sadly ironic—midcareer
managers are frustrated by the lack of promotion opportunities, and
corporate executives are concerned with a lack of candidates with the
right experience. The solution is to widen access to leadership
development programs to both rejuvenate midcareer managers and refill
the leadership pipeline.
Participation
in leadership development programs is a form of recognition of an
employee’s value and potential, and workers graduate from them with a
renewed commitment to the organization’s goals. But in many companies,
it’s difficult for people not already recognized as high potentials to
get in line for these opportunities. We strongly recommend admitting
late bloomers, making it easier for midcareer employees to take
advantage of these programs.
Independence
Blue Cross has put one-third of its top 600 people, most of them
midcareer employees, through a leadership program focused on individual
development and learning by doing. It includes a weeklong session at the
Wharton School, individual coaching and career development planning,
and work on an important business project. The insurer is now thinking
about creating a graduate course for people who have already been
through the program. The company is also trying to maintain career
momentum after the program through a broader-based approach to
succession planning and by finding its graduates new assignments that
enable them to move around the business more.
The
fast track should have both off- and on-ramps. A communications company
shared the story of one individual who dropped off and then rejoined
his company’s fast track. A 12-year veteran, he had come up through
finance, been deemed a high potential, and then plateaued and started to
look elsewhere. Top managers at first figured, “Oh well, he wasn’t CFO
material anyway.” But later they took a look at people who had dropped
out of the high-potential program to find out why. This employee had
stalled in his career because he hadn’t found work that really excited
him. After further assessment, he became procurement director for a
product line, where his innate skills and enthusiasm as a negotiator,
financial analyst, and savvy gambler paid off. In his first year, he
saved the company $20 million doing work he loves.
Rekindle Now
We’re
not talking about rescuing a few stragglers at the corporation’s
fringe; we’re talking about tens of millions of capable midcareer
employees who are frustrated in their desire to do something new and
exciting, who are stymied in their wish to contribute to the
organization’s success in different ways. What’s stopping companies from
tapping into all that potential? Perhaps it’s the assumption that
careers belong to employees—that people are ultimately responsible for
developing their own skills, for marketing themselves, and for charting
their own paths. This is true; the responsibility for career moves
belongs primarily to the individual, and most employees would agree. But
the fact is, organizations create the conditions under which career
initiatives flourish or fade. It’s in the enlightened self-interest of
the organization to remove the institutional barriers to individual
fulfillment and ambition, to pay the attention and devote the resources
needed to keep new possibilities open and revitalize careers. This isn’t
paternalism—or a return to employment practices of yesterday. It’s good
management.
Over
the next ten years, workforce demographics will turn against employers.
If your organization wants to control its fate (and costs) when the
boomer retirement wave and associated brain drain hit with full force,
start today to systematically retain—and recruit—people with the skills
and capabilities you will want to keep on hand for the long run.
Recognize that many of your midcareer employees are in middlescence: For
personal and professional reasons, they’re getting restless. Don’t just
assume they’ll stay, and then hope for the best. Reengage them by
energizing their careers now.
Many of your midcareer employees are getting restless. Don’t just assume they’ll stay, and then hope for the best.
The
techniques we’ve recommended are not exclusively for midcareer workers,
of course, but they will have the greatest impact on this cohort. They
should prove neither expensive nor difficult to practice, and the
payback—renewed commitment and productivity on the one hand, reduced
replacement cost on the other—hits right away. The actions we recommend
are largely a matter of paying closer attention to the often silent
majority—the midcareer employees who form the heart and backbone of your
workforce.
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