SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : PART ONE: GETTING AHEAD : Exploring Paths to Promotion : Being a Boss Isn’t Always the Best or the Only Way to Get Ahead
At the time, few would have guessed that being rewarded for a job well done could have produced such unhappiness. Certainly not computer programmer Avi Meshar.
After giving a standout on-the-job performance, the soft-spoken Meshar was promoted in 1986 to supervise a team of about 10 programmers at Transamerica Information Services in downtown Los Angeles. To be sure, the new job offered more money and corporate status, but after two long and dissatisfying years, Meshar threw in the towel. He was simply miserable being a manager.
“I felt pressure from people below me. I felt pressure from people above me. I felt pressure from my peers. There was nothing I could do,” recalls Meshar, now 41. “I felt stuck. It was just a bad job fit.”
For a while, Meshar seriously considered quitting the company, but in the end he simply returned to his old job, where he is now part of a team supervised by a programmer he once managed.
And Meshar couldn’t be happier. “I liked my company, but I was just not cut out to be a manager.”
As Meshar’s experience clearly illustrates, liking your job and excelling at it are not enough to ensure success as a boss. You have to want to be one. Corporate leaders everywhere have long known that a simple desire to lead the troops is also not sufficient to produce a good manager.
So what does it take?
In many respects, management consultants say, being a good boss is a lot like being a good parent. You must guide, mold, coach, teach, cheer, counsel, motivate, sympathize and discipline.
In short, says Carol Shuherk, a professor of management communications at USC, “You make others look good. You don’t do the work yourself. You just make sure that the work gets done.”
And, just as in raising a child, gratification is usually delayed.
“To me, it’s fun and challenging to get people to do what you want and feel good about it,” says Mark Schuerman, 38, executive vice president for residential lending at Long Beach Savings & Loan. “In fact, it’s the only way I know for a guy like me--who doesn’t have any musical talent--to get a chance to lead an orchestra.”
Although the job description of a good boss seems fairly clear to them, many experts argue that the management selection process in most American businesses is, at best, muddled. The result often is unhappy bosses, wasted talent and frustration up and down the ranks.
“The basic pitfall of our management selection process is that it fails to clearly communicate the downside of being a boss to aspiring managers,” says Morgan McCall, a professor of management and organization at USC. “To be a good manager, you have to give up doing what you’re best at and become good at a new skill of helping others do the job that you once did so well. You’re essentially changing your career. That’s hard.”
Nevertheless, many workers, including a good number who aren’t cut out for it, try their hand at management. The reason is simply that for many the lure of being “a boss” and “in management” is often too strong to resist.
The plain fact is that most bosses are better paid, better regarded and better treated than rank-and-file workers. They also are perceived as having power, that is, they can tell people what to do rather than always being on the receiving end of orders.
Although those are common reasons for entering management, they are all the wrong ones, according to Judith Segal, a Los Angeles management consultant.
“People who say they want to be a manager because they want to tell people what to do are practicing a fallacy. Everyone has a boss,” she says. “Further, being a manager is not a matter of ‘me, me and more of me.’ It’s about helping and training other people.”
Whitman Browne, a vice president of Philadelphia management consultants R. J. Carroll Co., keeps lists of what he calls the right and wrong reasons for becoming a manager. Among the latter are a desire to control people and things, a need for elevated status and financial rewards, and a feeling that if you don’t become one you’ll be regarded as a “wimp.”
The correct reasons, he says, are a desire to build organizations, to share, to take charge and to contribute to the overall group. The best managers, he claims, are those who view the job in human terms, not simply as a matter of technical excellence at whatever task is being performed.
What this means, he says, is that the best engineer, best teacher or best sales person isn’t necessarily the best choice for promotion to lead engineer, school principal or sales manager.
So what about the technical stars who either don’t want to become managers or whose lack of “people skills” has already made them unlikely candidates for a promotion? Should they be forever left behind?
The answer in an increasing number of companies, particularly technology and aerospace firms, is the so-called dual track approach to advancement.
At Hughes Aircraft Co., engineering employees are allowed to join the “technical track,” a path that gives them all the financial rewards and the perceived status of the management track, at least through the upper-middle ranks of management.
“This allows people to progress up the ladder and enjoy the increases in status and money without going into line management,” says Robert Williams, corporate director for employee research, education and development.
According to Williams, Hughes also offers employees the choice of joining the “program track,” which involves the administration of entire aerospace or defense systems. He estimates that Hughes’s 67,000 employees are divided fairly evenly among the tracks.
