Bamboo You

The Space Between

Yesterday I visited one of my favorite blogs. It had been a few weeks, so I scrolled down to see that Barbara had been featured on POV where she'd been interviewed about one of POV's most recent shows, Waging a Living. It was beyond depressing. It forced me to look at the intersection between personal responsibility and society's responsibility. Not that this isn't something I often consider, but lately I've been focused on what we can do as individuals in our career life and this show brought me smack up against some realities of the workplace in which we're operating.

Here's what Roger Weisberg, maker of Waging a Living, says in an open letter to viewers:

Dear Viewer,

Like many of my peers, I grew up believing in the American work ethic — the belief that hard work will invariably lead to economic success. Yet the hard-working low-wage earners we met while making "Waging a Living" felt trapped in poverty by dead-end jobs. Some worried that their earnings were failing to keep up with their bills, while others despaired that they were unable to provide their families with the same standard of living that they enjoyed growing up. They all believed in the American dream but discovered that the ladder out of poverty was steeper than they imagined. .

The percentage of workers trapped in poverty rose 50 percent between 1979 and 2000, and today 30 million Americans — one out of four workers — earn less than the federal poverty level for a family of four. Even more unsettling, most economists believe that families need to earn about twice the federal poverty level to be self-sufficient. One of the most disturbing trends is the rapid growth of income inequality. Between 1979 and 2000, incomes for the top 20 percent of wage earners rose 33 percent while incomes for the bottom 20 percent fell 9 percent. It is a sad irony that a growing number of full-time workers are unable to provide the basics for a decent life in a society that supposedly values and rewards hard work.

Over the past 10 years, I've done a lot of consulting work with federal, state and local governments who serve welfare clients, laid off workers, etc. Most welfare programs sell the story to clients that if they just find a job (usually at minimum wage), that will be their ticket out of poverty. This story makes it clear that that isn't the case. In fact, the wages that the people in this story earn are  "dream" wages for many welfare clients and even for some of the dislocated workers who are "blue collar" and lower skilled. Yet they still can't make it.

The reasons for this are complicated. Some of them have to do with individual choices, lack of skills, etc. But when even those who are college-educated find themselves slipping out of the middle class and into a life of economic volatility, there's something else going on that we need to pay attention to. Says Barbara:

That was the promise of a college education: you get your degree, work hard, get some kind of a white collar job, eventually you might get promoted, and retire with a pension. We all know that's not true anymore. People bounce around. Elaine Chao, our Secretary of Labor, recently confessed that you could expect nine jobs in the course of your career after college — if you went to college, that is.

What's happening is what some economists call income volatility in the middle class, which means people getting battered by layoffs, outsourcing, downsizing. People could be making $100,000 a year and living in a big house on the block, but one day they're suddenly gone, they're not there anymore, because they got laid off, they went through their savings — and even upper-middle class people don't have much savings anymore — and they can very easily end up in exactly the kind of situation as the people profiled in Roger's movie, "Waging a Living." That is, they could be working for $8 or $10 an hour at Circuit City or Wal-Mart or somewhere like that.

What an incredible waste of human potential we have going on here. People who are willing to work hard and play the game, but who don't have the resources to become more highly skilled and,therefore, are trapped in a series of low wage, marginal jobs. And people who DO have the skills, but who can't find work that lets them use those talents. This creates for us a vastly larger underclass, a growing core of underutilized talents and people who will soon lack the financial resources to purchase the goods and services made by the companies that have laid them off.

I feel like I'm dancing around something really huge here--there are so many aspects of this situation to explore and I'm all over the place in thinking about them. This is a story about where personal responsiblity ends and social responsiblity begins and what happens in those spaces in between. It's about how we've gone from a nation that 50 years ago saw investing in its citizens through things like the GI Bill as a critical part of public policy, to a nation that see its workers primarily as an expense. It's a story about inequality, injustice and frustration. It's a cautionary tale about our future and I wish I knew where to go from here.

How Do You Define Career Success?

At my new favorite blog, they're talking about ways to define career success beyond the traditional "ascend into managment" route. Among other things, Kathy suggests that companies need to seriously consider career "advancement" strategies that reward individual contributors by allowing them to remain individual contributors. She points out--rightly so--that many people are forced to make a trade-off between work that they love and advancement. "How about a Venn diagram, rather than a vertical organizational chart," she asks.

I think that there are actually two threads of thought going on in Kathy's post. The first is "how do organizations define and reward success? "The second is how do individuals define their own career success? Two interesting questions, I think. . .

On the organizational level, I'm brought back to Buckingham and Coffman's conclusions in First Break All the Rules. They ask the old Peter Principle question--Why do we keep promoting people to their levels of incompetence?

My answer is that it's because we insist on believing that managerial skills are just some advanced form of individual contributor skills. That somehow your experiences as a programmer would somehow prepare you to supervise other programmers. Yet time and again we see that this is not the case and that, in fact, the talents it takes to be a good manager often have nothing to do with what it took for a person to be an effective individual contributor. Unfortunately, though, all too often it seems that organizational rewards, respect, and kudos all go to those who "advance" into management.

Now Buckinham and Coffman have a solution to that problem--they say that companies should "create heroes in every role."

"Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession. Many employees will climb the conventional ladder, and for those with the talent to manage others or to lead, this will be the right choice. However, guided by meaty incentives, many other employees will decide to redirect their energies toward growth within their current roles."

Their essential argument is that excellence depends on employees in EVERY role focusing on their individual areas of talent and expertise. They suggest a number of ways for companies to address this issue, including using what they call "broadbanding," an approach to pay that rewards individual performance by creating broad, overlapping bands of pay with the top end of one role overlapping with the bottom end of the role above. One of the benefits, they argue, is that it slows the "breathless climb up," forcing employees to seriously consider if they want to move into a different role within the company because to move to a vastly different role would actually entail a pay CUT.

So from an organizational perspective, for those who choose to be really thoughtful about what they do with their staff and how they use them, there are ways to move out of the traditional definitions of success and create alternative paths for employees. But Kathy's post also opens up for me some thoughts on how we as individuals define success.

She suggests that rather than using money or position as our personal yardstick, we should look at how well our current jobs match what it is we WANT to do. That is, I'm successful if I go to work every day and love what I do, regardless of the status of that job or how much I make.

I couldn't agree more with that sentiment and have lived that career advice for the past 20+ years. But I think that definition should be expanded to include things like:

• Is this work that leverages my particular talents and what I bring to the world? If I'm engaging in tasks that I'm competent to do, but that don't really use my greatest talents, then to me, my career is unsuccessful.
• Is this work that lets me learn new things, meet new people and participate in different projects? Whether I'm an individual contributor or a manager, my ability to keep a job and be competitive in it depends a huge amount on my ability to learn new skills. Given that most of us in full-time employment don't have a lot of time for outside education, work that lets me hone and deepen my skills is part of how I would define my personal career success.
• Is this work that lets me live my most important core values? For me, creativity, independence, integrity, an opportunity to have an impact on my wider world--these values are critical to my personal sense of having lived a successful life. If I engage in work that violates these values, then I don't consider myself to be successful.

Of course, in my perfect world, employers would define and reward success on my terms, developing an organizational culture that supports and rewards these things that I think determine career success. To my mind, both companies and individuals would benefit if we redefined success to mean  helping employees find and feel rewarded by work that is interesting to them, leverages their strengths, allows them to learn and matches their core values. Think about the kick-ass customer service we'd provide if we received THAT kind of support from our employers.

**UPDATE--Fast Company has something to say about lateral moves, too. Of course, most of them mean moving on, but maybe some companies will get the hint.