After the difficulties of making the transition from school to work and exploring various jobs until commitment to a career is made, most of us in our thirties experience the most rapid self-actualizing expansion in our lives. Most of us accept our growing interdependence with family and work associates in return for dramatic growth in use of our potential that is matched (hopefully) with greater autonomy, authority, and income. For career-oriented, ambitious men and women, this period from thirty to forty years of age is marked by enormous concentration on work and family. As a consequence, social contacts tend to be reduced, many friendships lapse, and time for hobbies and play are very limited. All of this sets the stage for some of the common mid-life problems.
Changing Managerial Skill Demands: Modern corporations can be visualized as a smaller managerial and professional pyramid sitting atop a truncated larger operating pyramid. Blue-collar, white-coverall and most clerical and support personnel are in the lower portion, substantially blocked by educational limitations from entry into the upper pyramid. That upper managerial/professional arena can be divided into three layers which define the primary personal skills needed to succeed there.
The primary skill requirements in the upper pyramid's lower section are technical: understanding equipment, procedures, processes, and analytical techniques. Entry depends on the firm's judgment (usually based on educational credentials) that you can perform or quickly learn the tasks. Rewards and promotions are based on a combination of performance and seniority at this primarily technical level. Some people will be satisfied with remaining here, but most graduates probably aspire to advance upward.
The primary skills in the middle of the upper pyramid are different. They are more oriented toward interpersonal, communicational, human relations, and political abilities. To be effective as one moves into middle management you need to influence people, to build coalitions, and to function as a team member. Of course, technical skills do not suddenly become irrelevant. They are still important, but there is generally a shift in relative weight from the technical to the political as one moves upward.
This can be a difficult transition for many capable young professionals. They may feel overwhelmed with the unfamiliarity of the new challenges. They find themselves promoted to first-line management precisely because they are the most technically competent, but they soon become anxious about the interpersonal dimension. The worst course for such people is to ignore leadership and attempt to do all the technical work alone. Unless they are superhuman, however, the load will be just too great to handle. Failure would be inevitable and higher executives would conclude that the young specialist-now-manager does not have promotion potential.
The transition from the middle to the upper sector is even more difficult. Emphasis shifts from interpersonal to conceptual skills: ability to think strategically, to understand how the parts and functions can be integrated, and to perceive the "big picture." Of course political skills (and even technical knowledge to some extent) are still important, but an additional and rarer attribute is needed to move successfully to top-policy levels. A president of the Koppers Company has commented on what it was like years ago as a young engineer without an MBA making the transition to management.
As an engineer, I was suddenly in a whole new world. In those days, an engineer got exposed to very little. I had had a survey course in business law and economics, but all I remembered about economics was that there is decreasing utility in adding more fertilizer to land. I didn't know how to read a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet and here I was 33 years old. I had never done any significant philosophizing.
These skill transitions suggest a lengthening of time perspective as one matures and climbs. The early, short-run anxieties of immediate task accomplishment become tempered by longer-run interpersonal or political perspectives. Time must be carved out of the present to invest in relationships. Further along, successful conceptual people seem able to project their visions well into the future, to spend time now on activities on which they may receive little or no personal feedback. Thus, greater personal patience, longer-time perspectives, expanded ambiguity tolerance, and faith in the future become essential in managing at the top.
Plateauing: The geometric reality of organizational pyramids is that a squeeze occurs as one moves closer to the top. Unless a firm is rapidly expanding, insufficient openings exist to maintain an early career promotion rate. In recent years, this rate of upward mobility has probably sharply declined. Staff pruning and reorganization to eliminate excessive management levels in order to speed up decisions is reducing the number of possible hierarchical promotions. A beneficial aspect of this trend is better visibility for junior managers and longer tenures in positions, thus offering greater opportunity to really learn their tasks. But, measuring career progress by promotion frequency is so ingrained in American culture that the slowdown also will cause frustration and uncertainty.
In a less competitive past, large American corporations often handled loyal of burned-out managers by transferring them away from critical operating positions on the power axis to peripheral staff positions with apparent high status but little power. Thus, social prestige was protected, but the way upward opened up for younger stars. Of course, insiders usually saw through the facade and the "losers'" egos were bruised a bit, but they could reduce the pain by enjoying their secure salaries until retirement. In recent years, however, it is precisely these upper middle managers from forty-five to fifty-five years old who have been most hurt by the corporate restructurings and staff eliminations. More than any other age group, the career expectations of many of these executives have been shattered.
Of course, moving away from the power axis to the organizational cone's surface is not necessarily a sign of "losing." It is a mature and wise move if a manager truly prefers the actual content and behavior of the new role. In many corporations (unfortunately) personnel or human resource management is seen as peripheral and is populated by people who didn't make it up the power axis functions. Nonetheless, human resources management clearly offers attractive career challenges, particularly if you can make senior line management understand how increasingly critical it is to firm performance.
But in making such a move outward, you should be aware of the near impossibility of ever moving back to the power axis. The new role should be what you want to do, probably until departure or retirement.
Small firms offer a special problem as you move upward. Remember that beginning professionals and managers in small companies tend to be more challenged and satisfied with their autonomy than similar young graduates starting in large firms. Fifteen or so years later, however, as such people approach senior management the satisfaction reverses. The more experienced managers in large firms report more challenge and autonomy, whereas senior managers in small companies complain about lack of authority and autonomy.
The problem in the small organization is that one can start bumping into the top-and discover that you were born to the wrong parents because your firm is still family dominated. Or if not family controlled, the small firm may be run more authoritarianly because the chairperson is the founder-genius who invented the critical product and owns most of the stock (not rare in entrepreneurial firms). He or she may simply reserve all important decisions to him or herself. This can be particularly frustrating because it is much easier to move from a senior executive position in the large to the small than the reverse.
Generativity versus Stagnation: The so-called "mid-life crisis" has become a cliché with its images of buying a sports car, chasing younger sex partners, job failure, and divorce. The cliché is of course an exaggeration of what is a normal challenge for most people. But it is still a challenge.
Sometime in the mid to late forties, most of us become aware that the illusionary optional doors of our life have closed-that we really can no longer consider doing what mother wanted by going to medical school or fulfill father's wish for us to get a law degree in order to enter politics and make it to the U.S. Senate. We may not really have wanted to do these things but the distant possibility was in itself a comfort when our real career was going poorly. Age and responsibility (and enjoyment of what our income provides) gradually dissolve these comforting illusions.
Indeed, mid-life problems can be even greater if our career has gone smashingly and we have fulfilled our youthful dreams. Easy, early success can be particularly burdensome because later accomplishments may pale in comparison. For some, the question can mirror the popular song, "Is that all there is?" Or less pessimistically, "Is the dream from my 20's still valid for the last quarter of my life?" For many (perhaps most), it may well be, but even the happiest people must at least reexamine the dream and make a new commitment.
People who encounter stress from their very success often have skewed their values in the service of their careers. The pain they feel is from a life out of tune with their deepest beliefs. A psychoanalyst with many such patients comments:
More and more successful people are becoming troubled, conflicted, or emotionally damaged by their work and career climb. In these people, the drive for career success exists alongside a parallel, but less visible, drive for meaning and fulfillment from work which becomes subordinated to career striving. One of the people studied was a public relations executive for a television network who was becoming addicted to cocaine. She and her boyfriend had a relationship based mainly on the enjoyment of their possessions. They had a beautiful house in an exclusive section of Georgetown, a BMW and a Volvo, expensive video and stereo equipment, trips to Europe, safaris in Kenya. But she complained it was all hollow. Such people are trying to find a way to feel more alive, or to protect themselves against the sense of emptiness.
Most are not neurotic, but are the "working wounded." Unfortunately, many of these people continue to suffer. It's the lucky ones who have developed a life of balance, in keeping with their full values.
Following the maturation issues --trust-mistrust, autonomy-shame, initiative-guilt, industry-inferiority, identity-confusion, and intimacy-isolation--, the problem of mid-life is generativity versus stagnation. People with high needs for achievement and power (characteristic of many executives) have found excitement in confronting new tasks, using their analytical, creative, and political skills to accomplish valuable results. The question becomes whether repetition of this pattern will continue to satisfy, or whether new behavior is necessary to avoid stagnation. Five general options exist: repetition, shifting focus off the job, finding new challenges within your career, shifting satisfaction to nurturing, and changing careers.
Repetition: Some of us (probably a minority) are simply able to continue what we've been doing, still finding exciting risk and achievement satisfaction from our tasks right up until retirement age and even beyond. Whether this works or not depends on the fit between our needs and the job's possibilities. For example, research on MIT graduates suggests that virtually no engineering graduates were happy simply practicing engineering until retirement. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that there is no such thing as a viable life-long career in engineering. The tasks become too repetitious and boring (perhaps because management shifts the more challenging work to younger engineers skilled in newer analytical techniques). In contrast, Ph.D. scientist graduates seemed to find continuing stimulation in their research and development activity. They en-countered no mid-life decline in career satisfaction, probably because they enjoyed more autonomy and opportunity to stay at the cutting edge of their fields. Most of us would probably find simple repetition very stifling, leading to frustration and stagnation.
Shift focus off the job: If life at work becomes sour at mid-life, some of us attempt to maintain a sense of generativity by focusing more on family or avocation. We continue to do our jobs until a probably early retirement but make this less central to who we are. Something like 25 percent of all men over fifty-five appear to be retired either because of illness, forced departure, or voluntary retirement! Rediscovering family and pursuing hobbies can indeed be satisfying. People who retire successfully generally seriously pursued an avocation long before actual retirement so the shift in focus occurred gradually rather than traumatically.
This graceful shift is attractive, but unfortunately it probably wouldn't work for most of us. Career-centered, ambitious men in the United States (we know little about the retirement transition with women, but it appears to be much less traumatic than for men) tend to so define their personal self-worth in terms of job success that we don't believe ourselves when we say we are making a mature decision to shift our life focus away from work toward home and family. In a perverse way, men often "blame" their spouses and children for imagined lack of support that supposedly handicapped them in achieving greater career success. Given the popular notion that excessive career commitment undermines family happiness, it is ironic that higher income and feelings of success are both associated with greater family involvement.
Find new challenges within your career. An exciting life includes numerous repetitions of engagement and letting go:
- We confront a task about which we know little.
- We experience the stomach butterflies that entice us to flee.
- We begin to master the new task and enjoy an exhilarating sense of personal growth as we improve and repeat the task with a sense of accomplishment.
- But then the learned task becomes a bit too easy so we begin to seek a new challenge.
Thus, at the very time when we are at peak performance, we let go of the known and embrace another unknown repeating the cycle of anxiety, growth, and mastery. By "losing" the past, we confront the future and stay vital.
Some years ago the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a comprehensive retrospective of the art of Pablo Picasso. The paintings and sculptures were arranged in chronological order from the top down a circular walkway so viewers could observe seventy years of output without changing floors. What struck me were the periodic dramatic style changes-from the artist's youthful realism to his imitation of the late nineteenth century impressionists to his twentieth century co-invention of cubism to his personalized neoclassicism and onto the grotesque comic structures of post-World War II. I didn't like all the styles (and I doubt that Picasso did either), but that is not the point. What he did was remain alive by letting go of what he already did well in order to embrace/invent something that he didn't know.
In effect, we deny death and remain alive to the extent that we have sufficient physical energy and moral courage to repeat this cycle by letting go of what we know in order to confront that which we don't. The most creative of us seem able to unceasingly explore new aspects of our jobs, even without later career promotions or position changes.
Shift satisfaction to nurturing: Repeatedly inventing new tasks and styles is a difficult road, perhaps suited only to the geniuses among us. More feasible for most of us is shifting our career focus away from personal accomplishment toward creating an environment in which others can achieve. "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" is a bit harsh, but shifting to the role of mentor and teacher can be very effective for emphasizing generativity in later career. Effective nurturing that takes joy in seeing a subordinate surpass you reflects the most attractive aspect of the "good face of power" we discussed earlier. The great Renaissance Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to have said, "The master whose student doesn't surpass him has failed."
This change of self-image from being a personal dominator-achiever to orchestrator of an environment in which others can achieve is particularly appropriate in modern firms employing well-educated professionals. With the pace of technical innovation and competitive transformation, senior management's personal experience is less relevant to centralized decision making and less popular among young managers and professionals seeking autonomy and responsibility. Thus, the "gamesman" or "innovator" type executive who enjoys creating an environment that challenges and gives freedom within limits to subordinates is the most successful. Of course, it can be a fine and difficult line between such innovative leadership and laissez-faire abdication.
Such innovator-type mentoring is certainly an attractive answer to the generativity versus stagnation issue, but intensely achievement-oriented careerists often find it impossible to subordinate their personal accomplishment to that of protégés. Some even see their juniors as threats so that they are eliminated as soon as their abilities begin to approach their superiors'. Such fearful executives can even self-destruct as they reject juniors making themselves less accessible, while their leadership style becomes increasingly autocratic.2
Changing careers: The old saying is that "you can't go home again." What is implied is that no one can turn back the clock and start over (however attractive such a notion is in numerous movies and daydreams). Perhaps, however, one can revitalize one's life by starting a new career, thus sort of recycling back to the exciting establishment phase of career growth as illustrated in Exhibit 12-2. In the 1970s much enthusiasm was voiced for corporate efforts to facilitate such recycling by providing educational benefits and sabbaticals enabling employees to retrain for new careers elsewhere. Many of these benefits have been victims of the harsher economic realities of the competitive 1980s, but some large firms like IBM and Xerox still tout their support for such career renewal.
I once helped conduct a program to train middle-aged business executives to become Health Maintenance Organization administrators. Most of the executives had been quite successful (average income was close to $200,000 per year), but they had plateaued, were bored with their jobs, or hoped to make another contribution. Because physicians tend to be poor managers, Penn's Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics developed a program to help them prepare for new careers as managers of HMOs. It was exciting to feel the enthusiasm of these middle-aged "students" as they embarked on a new career in a new institution.
Such career changes and the preparation for them, unfortunately, are very expensive. Someone has to foot the bill for education and living while in training. A few firms like IBM supplement the salary of an early retiree if they enter teaching or community services, but for most people starting a new career will usually mean a significant income reduction (for the business executives becoming HMO administrators, the average starting salaries were about $80,000-not bad, but a far cry from their earlier $200,000). Most successful career changes seem to occur where merger or pruning has forced out executives with a nice early retirement package of a year's salary plus a pension to ease the transition. But even here, it helps greatly if the exiled executives already had strong volunteer or avocational interests that they were able to build into new careers. Predictions of the decline of the "linear life" have been voiced. That is, the predominant future pattern will not be the past's education-work-families-retirement. Pictured, rather, are more flexible, cyclical lives alternating work, education, and leisure through several repetitions. And even that retirement will be postponed or eliminated for most because of more demand for employees than people available. For some it may be an attractive image, but the reality today is still tending toward earlier retirement (a third of all males retire while still in their fifties; the average age is sixty-two).
