The End Of Management As We Know It
The End Of Management As We Know It. The changing nature of work will include a major shift in the prevalence and role of managers GETTY
No career is likely to change more in the years ahead than management. A decade from now it won’t be recognizable.
Most managers understand this, and a new survey indicates that even now many of them wish they were doing something else. More tellingly, perhaps, the vast majority of employees not in management, by a ratio of nine to one, say they’re not interested in managing. This doesn’t bode well for the once-coveted corner office.
But don’t expect the management career ladder to totally disappear. Expect it to morph into something significantly different, more in tune with the rapid-fire age we live in.
The company of the future will have fewer traditional managers than today—and good riddance, the majority of employees say.
Instead of the management “ladder” there will be other ways for employees to advance. Employees who would have competed for management positions in the past will pursue alternative career paths: as talent coaches, experts in their specialized disciplines, project honchos, troubleshooters. Companies slow to change will lose out in the talent wars.
“The days of top-down, trickle-down decision-making are coming to an end,” said Vinciane Beauchene—one of the survey organizers—when I spoke with her recently. Rather than operating in a command-and-control fashion, she said, future generations of managers will be responsible for promoting teamwork, solving problems and spearheading innovation.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, a step back is in order.
For many decades, and in many companies, “moving into management” was seen as the sole path to advancement. Join the management team and you too, the dream-makers suggested, could be on your way to the C suite; you might even become CEO someday.
This was an especially alluring belief when individuals joined companies early in their careers and stayed with the same employer until retirement, some of them “climbing the ladder” to line manager, middle manager and, for a fortunate few, senior manager.
Most careers, however, don’t work that way. As employee tenure data compiled by the Employee Benefits Research Institute shows, workers tend to move around, and always have.
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