Climbing the Corporate Ladder
Welcome to the workforce. Your employer proposed. You accepted. You got married, enjoyed the honeymoon, and are ready to get down to work. You may have previously moved in together with an internship program in college, but now it’s the real deal.
At first, the workplace can look like a variation of the game of Achieve and Advance. That’s understandable, particularly for vocational-related majors since the whole point was to advance from student to employee status as quickly as possible. You’ll meet with the hiring manager, most likely not your first time together. You may even get the American dreamwork ethic pep talk: “You can be anything you want.” “Hard work creates future opportunities.” Grab a coffee—a good one if you’re lucky, and focus on the tasks in front of you. Be sure to keep your head down. Get results. Learn your craft. The more you do, the better you are. The better you are, the better your chances to advance. That’s the way it works, or so it seems.
The game of work is Climbing the Ladder. It’s something you probably heard about in glowing terms when you and your organization were courting.
A brief historical flashback:
The ladder was born out of the scientific school of management to control and incentivize work through greater predictability and uniformity.1 Like your ancestors and my cousin Nathan, their work was divided into functional units, and functional units into smaller pieces. The organization creates a progression of jobs based on bigger chunks of work and increased expertise, locks them together in a ladder structure, and puts someone in charge to manage the people below them at every rung along the way. Each new rung has more formal authority, which is a big deal to a lot of people. Do this for each functional organization and you have a set of functional hierarchies. Much to the dismay of executives and the delight of management consultants, this frequently leads to feudalistic practices and fiefdoms, commonly known today as “silos.” More territory in Ladder Climbing organizations usually means more authority, more status, and a bigger paycheck.
Inside the Game
Here’s how the game is played. As an employee, your manager gives you a series of tasks to perform. Performance yields results. Results score points. Your goal is to score enough points to move to the next level. When you score points, your organization scores even more points. It’s like the difference between the wholesale price and retail price for the same item—namely you. To pump up motivation, organizations use a series of external rewards: (1) bigger salaries with bonuses, (2) promotions with more impressive titles, and (3) more status and prestige.
Moving up looks like a simple Achieve and Advance strategy. It’s not. Since you’ve had to focus on your responsibilities at least through the first couple of jobs, you may have missed what’s going on at higher levels. For starters, there are rungs that don’t fit together or are missing, built-in roadblocks, poorly defined roles, gaps created by frequent reorganizations, untrained managers, broken promises, and a whole host of health problems. These conditions create uncertainty and lack of control, the opposite of what scientific management and the ladder were intended to do. People compete against each other, making for some winners and more losers. One can achieve, but there’s no guarantee they will advance.
As Climbers, you are apt to think the ascent is easier than it looks, especially since you played Achieve and Advance for at least 16 years, and double especially if you’re a high achiever. You can be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking that consistent performance equates to automatic promotion and everything that goes with it. That’s not how the game is played.
Take Two of These and Call Me in the Morning
Here are two pills, both on the bitter side, that may help you feel better by knowing what to expect in advance. The first has a long name, as medications often do. It’s known as, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, the title of executive coach Marshall Goldsmith’s book.2 The skills needed to advance successfully are about building relationships, selling your ideas, and making decisions, not personal achievements. This is somewhat akin to the Peter Principle, that people are promoted to their level of incompetence.3
The cream rises until it sours.
—Laurence Peter
The second is a stark realization. Climbing the Ladder is not about performance. It is about the judgment of performance. That changes everything. If you’re thinking that “a good job should speak for itself,” think again. This was Emma’s Dilemma: Why would you have to go to your manager and plead your case for a promotion, particularly when it’s not an issue of competing for the position? You’ve met your objectives, so what’s the issue?
Even with the same performance criteria and same evaluation process, there’s no way of knowing if managers will judge performance the same way. Fair and equitable judgment of performance takes clearly defined standards and consistent application. When the ladder is not structurally sound, the ordeal is subjective and demotivating. The father of the Total Quality Management movement, Dr. Edward Deming, describes it this way. When it comes to annual reviews and performance evaluations:
The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.4
Heading Down the Road to Not Good Enough
As you climb higher, you begin to see the game for what it is. You’re in a competition—fewer opportunities for less real estate with more restrictive covenants. When high achievers look up, they think they just need to work harder and longer, to do their best. That guarantees nothing. When women and people of color look up, they don’t see many people who look like them. At higher altitude, you may think it’s the lack of oxygen that’s fogging your brain. It’s not. The game is revealed for what it is: The Road to Not Good Enough.
How is it that people are so entangled in a dysfunctional system? Easy. Because they allow other people to control their career advancement. As a player in the game, there are too many moving parts to coordinate and impact that you have no control over. Even if you were equipped and had an army of like-minded colleagues, it’s not a battle you’ll win. You’re climbing and going nowhere.
The Hazards of Ladder Climbing
Alert: Unless you are a tall (roughly 6 ft. 2 in.), aging, white male with a deep voice and in fit condition, landing a top spot on the ladder will be tougher and your ascension limited.5 The size of your paycheck could be $850,000 less over the course of your career.6
Why? Many reasons.
Homogeneity, Inequity, and Exclusion
Values comes in two varieties—those that are espoused and those demonstrated in action. Saying that all people are created equal and deserve dignity and respect is as American as you can get. But saying is not doing. Values in action and the behaviors that support them, good or bad, are a completely different story. In my opinion, nowhere is the contrast between espoused and actionable values starker and the discrepancy more evident than in the game of Climbing the Ladder.
Take the Ladder’s two big reward systems: pay and promotion.
Pay Inequity
For every $1.00 earned by a white male in 2020, a white woman earned $0.81; a black male, $0.87; and a black woman, $0.75. Even when controlled by position and qualifications, the gap between white men compared to women and people of color is 2 to 3 percent higher—same job, same background, same experience, different gender, and different skin color.7
Promotional Inequity
Read down the columns and across the rows in Table 3.1. What jumps out at you? Statistics? No. These are personal stories of overt discrimination that millions of women and people of color have endured in their climbs. These numbers and what’s behind them defy reason and compassion, but that hasn’t stopped people from rationalizing.
Table 3.1 Percentage of employees by level at the start of 2020*
| Entry level | Manager | Director | VP | SVP | C-Suite |
White men | 35% | 44% | 51% | 57% | 59% | 66% |
Men of color | 18% | 18% | 15% | 13% | 13% | 12% |
White women | 29% | 26% | 25% | 24% | 23% | 19% |
Women of color | 18% | 12% | 9% | 6% | 5% | 3% |
Total | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
*Adapted from Women in the Workplace Report, McKinsey (2020).8
Why Are Women Paid Less Than Men?
Data from a 2020 survey by Payscale show:
Part of the reason for the gender pay gap is that women are more likely to take a break during their careers to have children or to seek lower paid positions that offer more flexibility to make it easier to manage a family. Some people mistakenly assume that this “explains” the gender wage gap and eases fears over sexism. However, this explanation does not fully account for the gap. Neither do differences in education, experience, and occupation, as we can see from the controlled gender pay gap. It also doesn’t negate sexism in the workplace.9
How Do Organizations Rationalize the Lack of Racial Diversity?
Inside organizations, discussions about racial diversity are still whispers, a long way from full-throated dialogues. Avoidance and rationalization are the responses of choice. Among these are:
• The enduring meritocracy myth. Some people believe that if people of color just worked harder, they could have the same outcomes as their White counterparts. Many assume that, if you’re White, you earned your position based on merit, but if you’re Black, you got the job because of race.
• Diversity ends once a person is hired. This is the same sink or swim mentality rampant in Ladder Climbing organizations. Hire someone of color, throw them into the deep end, wish them luck, and see how they do.
• The one-and-done mass education approach. Hire a consultant to give everyone in the organization the bulleted version for how to cure hundreds of years of discrimination in 60 minutes or less. Check the box.10
Proof That Diversity Is Worth It
When you think like a Ladder Climber, you need the justification for bottom-line results, proof that it’s worth it:
• The Boston Consulting Group—companies with more diverse management teams have 19 percent higher revenues.
• Bersin/Deloitte research—companies that are inclusive are 1.7 times more likely to be innovated leaders in their markets.
• McKinsey—businesses with diverse workforces outperform their competitors by 35 percent.
• Glassdoor—diversity creates a higher job acceptance rate, with 67 percent of job applicants saying that a diverse workforce was important to them.11
To think that the justification for diversity is economic is, yet again, textbook Ladder Climbing mentality. Hire for greater diversity, treat people with dignity and respect, and maybe everyone executes their jobs better and gets better results. More diversity makes for better business. What a clever concept.
When diversity efforts focus exclusively on recruiting, the result is too often that the firm hires people that are different but then fails to promote them—precisely because they are not the same.
—Professor Susan Fiske, 2009
We have a lot of work to do.
Warning: Climbing Can Be Hazardous to Your Health
Stress is an occupational hitman, known to kneecap anyone at any time. Four out of ten workers report their jobs as very or extremely stressful.12 The biggest source of stress at work? The boss. When bosses are stressed, they spread it to their teams. Unfortunately, there’s no vaccine available for that.13
Stress has a relative that goes by the name “burnout.” Once it hits town, it doesn’t want to leave. If you look closely at the rungs of the ladder, you’ll probably see fingernail marks and messages from others that say, “I burned out here.” In 2019, among the 76 percent of employees who experienced burnout at least sometimes on the job, 63 percent were more likely to take a sick day, 23 percent more likely to go to the emergency room, and 2.6 times more likely to look for a new job.14
The climb hits at the head, the heart, and the body. Is it worth it?
Culture to the Rescue?
Culture is a hot topic in the organizational world, a modern-day remedy for everything from increasing employee morale to slowing down the Great Resignation. Culture is defined as “what it’s like to work here.” It reflects the values of an organization, the fundamental principles that embody what’s important. Cultures are values in action, something you see and feel, not something you read on the wall. When you walk into an organization for the first time, you’ll form impressions about the culture from the lobby, how people greet you, the convenience of filtered water, the types of spaces, fake or real plants, open or shut doors, WiFi availability, and the location of the restrooms, of course. It’s worth checking out the posters or pictures on the wall and what they “say.” You’ll want to compare these to what you see. When you spend more time in the organization, you’ll witness other cultural clues—like who are the go-to people, how people communicate, how decisions are made, or the extent to which the place feels sane or crazed. How we experience culture is at an emotional and personal level, especially when you see how people are treated, what’s acceptable behavior, and what gets recognized and rewarded.
Cultures are patterns of behavior—both good and bad—reinforced by intent, neglect, or both. Cultures exist inside organizations long before you walked through the halls for the first time. Some are great places to work, witnessed by how people greet you with a smile. Some are snake pits, where direct eye contact is a sign of aggression.
Changing a culture is a test of endurance. Speaking from personal experience, the best example of a sustained culture change I participated in took four to five years. The initiative had all the textbook requirements for success:
• A leader—believer in charge
• An engaged team around them
• A set of value-based behaviors that was the basis for a homegrown talent development process
• Managers trained as coaches
• Help for nonbelievers to move on
• The careful selection of a new crop of employees
I have also worked in culture change initiatives that went nowhere. Several years ago, my business partner and I were involved in an initiative with two manufacturing plants, both part of the same organization. My partner’s plant manager was jazzed about the changes, and he got his team rallied behind him. They created a new position for better cross-shift communication, a “war room” for visual progress updates and a place for team member discussions, and used my colleague’s knowledge and experience for all it was worth. I teased him about creating a cult, “groupies” who hung on his every word and idea, even mimicked his ability to wallpaper the room with charts. They made substantial gains, and my business partner did a stellar job.
My experience was at the “this was not my idea” facility. You can probably predict the outcome. One time I was meeting on-site with the leadership team when a plant worker stopped the production line because of some potential problem. The crew stepped back from the equipment when the plant manager, operations director, and shift supervisor flew out of their “meeting” with me. The operations director grabbed his wrench as he and his two colleagues got up into the equipment as deep as grease and gears would allow them. The rest of us just stood around watching because we weren’t sure what else to do. That pretty much shot the whole day. Speaking of games—I had a hunch this was a game the employees had to see how fast which manager would come running when someone pushed the red button. I can’t say they were taking bets, but it looked staged to me. As far as my consulting prowess and impact on changing the culture, I added zero value to zero support.
Who Is to Blame for Employee Engagement?
Today, employers are scrambling to find and retain talent, a problem more immediate than trying to fix the Ladder. The concerns for talent— both attracting and retaining it—are not new. In 2016, the Gallup organization conducted a comprehensive study to understand the impact of engaged employees on the organization. What they discovered endures in today’s workforce: There is a direct and measurable correlation between employee engagement and business performance, including productivity, retention, customer satisfaction, safety, and profit.15
But there’s a new issue in the war for talent. The aftermath of the pandemic and working from home have employers scrambling to offer alternative working conditions. Workers have the upper hand, and organizations are trying to do what they can to make themselves attractive— redesigned offices, better perks, and more money.16 Engaging employees requires changing the game, and this is where it gets tricky. Most organizations are creating environments within the overarching game of Climbing the Ladder, particularly with the use of extrinsic rewards as motivators. As Herzberg researched, the impacts of these—safety, security, pay, and promotion—are “hygiene” factors, the baseline for what people expect.17 They become more important when they are missing than when they are present. Factors like autonomy, challenging work, and recognition are motivators, closer to what engagement looks and feels like when the hygiene factors exist. Changing the culture changes the rules, but the overall structure and winning the game remain unchanged—pay and promotion in exchange for achievements and results.
When people say money motivates, what they mean is money controls.
—Edward Deci
Where the Finger Points
Most employers are not trained behavioral psychologists who can precisely tune their environments to motivate employees. That’s not to say they lack an appreciation for the people side of business, but their skills and experience are built around how to deliver products or services. For close to 40 years, I have worked with clients using engagement surveys and undertaking culture change initiatives. I am struck by what I call the “finger points up” mentality, and I don’t mean that finger. Somewhere in the saga of constructing and Climbing the Ladder is the belief that someone else, like your boss, or their boss, or someone higher up, is responsible for your level of engagement.
I don’t buy it.
I understand that organizations are working with what they can control, namely shaping the environment to create a culture where people feel engaged. But these initiatives are intense and destined to fail unless they can tap into an employee’s intrinsic motivation. Is that even possible? How can you blame your boss for not motivating you at a deeply personal level?
And there’s the use of extrinsic rewards. Engagement through extrinsic rewards is not sustainable. Engagement over time doesn’t happen by Climbing the Ladder unless you are one of the few who defy tremendous odds. It doesn’t happen because you have a long list of accomplishments. Engagement happens when you realize that the workplace is an emotional rather than physical place, the real estate inside your head. When employees are looking for engagement, the questions shift from money, safety, and security to, “Is this job worth it, no matter how good the free snacks are?” With different expectations from recent graduates and the autonomy of working from home for many employees, the question has become deeply personal—“What gives me meaning and joy?”18
Engagement is not something that your employer will give you, not because they don’t want to but because they can’t. Engagement is your responsibility. Yours, and yours alone. Work with meaning and purpose is your pursuit. There are plenty of people who love what they do, who’ll tell you they haven’t worked a day in their life. Why? Because of what they’ve accomplished? No, because of who they are, the people they surround themselves with, and the sense of purpose they derive from doing something together that is bigger and more important than just what they do. These people are not responsible for finding you. It’s your responsibility to find them. They value human connection and learning about the people they’re with. They direct their energy to help others succeed. They have a breadth of interests, thrive on challenges, and look for purpose, wherever that takes them.
It’s time to stop blaming and thinking somebody owes you something, particularly when it comes to workplace engagement. Finding meaning is your responsibility.
Food for Thought
1. How do you characterize your experience if you work in a Ladder Climbing organization?
2. Money and promotions are important. Under what circumstances have they motivated you the most? The least?
3. What do you need from an employer to make your job “worth it?”
4. Has the level of inequity in pay and promotions impacted you, and if so, how?
5. How can you engage others in speaking to issues of equity and fairness? What actions can be taken that are steps in the right direction?
6. How do you describe your organization’s culture? To what extent does it contribute to your sense of engagement?
7. How would you rate your level of engagement in your work on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high)? What would it take to move that rating by 1 point? 3 points?
