>At times (when I am in a sufficiently cynical mood), think that career
>experience really refers to how "flexible" you are able to be to all the BS
>that management can and will dish out. When you are completely broken and
>will go along with just about anything, you have career experience! ;-)
Eric- I personally suspect that if you are willing to put up with the
managerial BS and and willing to go along with just about everything, you
get career PROMOTION!
Has anyone else on the list also noticed that being promoted up the ranks
in organizations is a function not of value-added learning or serving
external customers, as it should be, but a function of learning how to
accurately guage and serve the egos of seniors.
All the title "department head" or "vice president" really means is that
you have managed to brown nose your way up the ranks especially well,
being particularly adept at playing corporate politics. I have seen so
many nice but average sloww and steady "rankers" high up in organizations-
and far fewer charismatic leaders- those people or that behavior is
suppressed or ejected long before employees have served enough time to get
to those sorts of senior levels. Perhaps this is why the services of
consultants are in increasing demand.
Promotions are a reward for compliance with the organization's policies.
Promotion is a reward for managing to subsume your personal beliefs to
those of the company- a reward for successful organizational
socialization- for learning about and adopting the organization's patterns
and norms of going about doing business.
This is not the sort of learning that I consider positive and useful- we
human social animals naturally pick up signals and feelings (in admitingly
varying degrees) from other people both in a work and other living
contexts. Its just the orgaanization has rules which emphasize which
behavior is accepted and rewarded to spur this learning process along.
Learning seems to ccome in two forms; routine and value-addded. The
routine stuff is that necessary just to continue to share a common context
with other people (not necessarily comfortably). Value-added learning is
that which contributes insights and the discovery of new truths. Business
organizations are currently all about routine learning and not much about
value-added learning: depite the fact that "an ounce of inspiration is
worth a pound of control".
Maybe migration to a learning organization should be concerned with
figuring out to substitute the current emphasis on routine learning with
greater encouragement of value-added learning. Value-added learning
discoveries are spurred principally I believe through "downstructuring": a
removal of organizational rules and policies such as job descriptions,
arbitrary promotion policies, politics and so on prevent each individual
employee from realizing their full potential. If you cannot maximize your
full value-added learning potential WITHIN the organization, you exit the
company as I ddid to prevent the onset of cynicism.
Rgds sincerely Simon Buckingham, www.unorg.com, buck@dial.pipex.com
--Simon Buckingham <go57@dial.pipex.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>