Question: MOTIVATING INDIVIDUALS BY PERSONALIZING CAREERS AT DELOITTE
As the chief talent offi cer for a company brimming with talent, Deloitte's Cathy Benko knows how challenging it can be to create stimulating environments and opportunities to motivate a diverse workforce. And having traveled an unconventional path herself ("lots of zigs and zags" is how she describes it), she knows that a relentless 40-year climb up the corporate ladder is not for everyone. The conventional ladder concept has never been right for many employees, and it is less appealing to a growing portion of the population. Benko explains that in the time span of just two generations, society and the workforce have been transformed to such an extent that the old ways of work don't work anymore. In studying this lack of fi t between workplace and workforce, Benko and her colleagues identifi ed five key issues:
• A looming talent shortage . Talk of not enough people to fi ll jobs might be difficult to fathom in the aftermath of a deep recession and continuing high unemployment, but the long-term trend is unmistakable. By 2025, the shortage of knowledge workers could be as high as 35 million people.
• A vastly different society . The corporate ladder-and with it the idea of devoting one's working life to a single company in order to climb one's way to the top-was conceived back in a time when two-thirds of U.S. households consisted of married couples in which one spouse (usually the husband) went to work and the other (usually the wife) stayed home. In a sense, this family structure helped support the corporate ladder by "freeing" the husband to devote himself to his company and career. Today, however, only about 15 percent of households fi t that mold, and the old workplace ideals clearly don't fi t them.
• Expanded professional roles for women . After years of gender imbalance in the workplace, women now hold more than half of all management jobs (although the ratio at the top of the ladder is still biased strongly toward men). Plus, women now earn nearly 60 percent of bachelor's and master's degrees, so the presence of women in professional positions is only going to expand.
• Different desires and expectations from men . A growing number of men are ready to explore a more balanced life with more flexibility and personal time than the constant ladder climb typically offers.
• A dramatic shift in generational attitudes . To a large degree, the Baby Boom generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) defi ned itself by work, and the more of it the better, it seemed for many. However, the two generations that came after, Generation X and Generation Y, have different outlooks, with a much stronger desire to adapt their work to their lives rather than the other way around.
After pondering these tectonic shifts across the social landscape, Benko and Deloitte chose a new metaphor. Instead of a ladder, with its implication of a single path from bottom to top, they now speak in terms of a lattice, a crosshatch of horizontal and vertical lines. Just as a rosebush on a garden lattice can grow sideways and even downward for a while if upward isn't the best choice at the moment, a career lattice offers employees much the same flexibility. Deloitte calls the model "mass career customization," and it mimics the idea of mass customized production described in Chapter 9(page 206 ). Employees defi ne where they've been, where they are, and where they'd like to go next, based on four variables: pace (from decelerated to accelerated), workload (reduced to full), location/schedule (restricted to not restricted), and role (individual contributor to leader). For example, to take time to have children or go back to college, a manager could step into a non-managerial individual contributor role with a reduced workload and less travel. "Our goal is to offer people options to keep their work and personal lives in sync," Benko explains, "and to give employers the loyalty of their best and brightest people. It ends up being a perfect fit."
1. How might Deloitte's lattice approach help motivate employees and improve job satisfaction and performance?
2. How can managers determine whether a Deloitte employee is working at a decelerated pace in the career customization model or simply isn't working very hard?
3. What are the potential disadvantages, from the company's point of view, of giving employees this much flexibility?