Several news stories reported in the last few months claim that young employees don’t want to become managers. More than a third say that. The same story has popped up in the U.K., where 42% don’t want to be managers. That is followed by some pop psychology explanation that the cause is something different about their upbringing, like having iPhones. Then, that is followed by a call that companies have to do something or they will be in for a massive problem filling the middle ranks of their organizations.
So many things are wrong with this line of thinking that it is necessary to slow down and take them apart. First, if a survey shows that a third or more young employees don’t want to become managers, that still leaves a lot of people who do—even if some are reportedly “not sure.” How many do you think we need? In the big retail companies, the number of managers per frontline worker is one to several hundred. Most organizational charts have flattened so that we don’t need nearly as many managers as we did a generation or two ago. The issue may be more a concern that the corporate model of using promotion into management as the carrot to motivate employees isn’t working.
Second, how do we know that this is really something new? Did anyone ask young people 20 years or so ago whether they wanted to be managers? I can remember when I was in college, I knew no one—and I do mean no one—who even wanted to go into business or administration work. If you were good at science, you wanted to be a doctor; if you were good at social sciences or liberal arts, you wanted to be a lawyer. The reason was for independence. We wanted to be individual contributors, and the claim now is that this is something new the younger generation wants.
To see how much this has changed in my lifetime, I can tell you that when I was applying to college, it was not that difficult to be admitted as an undergraduate to business at Wharton. In fact, if you were admitted, you had to promise not to try to switch into the College of Arts and Sciences and be a pre-law major(!). Now, it is extremely difficult to be admitted to Wharton, and if you are admitted to other undergraduate programs here, we have to prevent you from trying to switch. (I think it is a very good thing now that not everyone wants to be a doctor or a lawyer.)
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that young people today are less interested in being managers. First, please stop calling them Gen Z—thank God we have run out of letters so that consultants can’t name a new “generation” in another couple of years. They are just young people whose views are always different from those who are older. There is no evidence at all that they are a different “generation” whose values are different than those the same age were in the past.
The “Fundamental Attribution Error” is a bias where we assume that the behavior we see in people is caused by who they are rather than what is happening to them: If we see someone who is angry, we assume they are just a hot head without knowing whether they may have a good reason for being angry that will pass. We have been assuming that anything we see different in the behavior of young people and work is a generation story—their heads are now wired differently—rather than asking whether something is different about the context. For example, a simpler explanation for The Great Resignation is that it was caused by a tight job market and more opportunities rather than a “kids today…” story. A simpler explanation for the “skills gap” myth in the 2010’s is not that the unemployed suddenly became unemployable, but that it just became harder to find candidates with the same skills and low wage demands that we saw right after the recession.
What could we do differently now that would be a simpler explanation for any decline in interest in becoming a manager? Well, we gave up training people to become managers—surveys show that a massive proportion of managers never got any training before they became one. It’s therefore harder to know what management jobs are, let alone how to do them. Nor is there much if any career development to help people see an advancement track for them.
When they do get promoted into management, we often don’t give them a pay increase (as I’ve noted before), the so-called “dry promotions” where leaders think that the new title will be enough. Third, the jobs have gotten a lot harder—more direct reports to supervise, more stress to push employees harder, and more complaints from employees about those pressures.
As for getting employers to worry about filling their future management jobs, they just aren’t going to do anything about that. Unless they are in a business like pharmaceuticals, where drugs can take decades to come to market, they just aren’t thinking 10 years out about anything. They don’t seem interested enough about filling their current jobs to get better at it, but that is an issue for another column.
Peter CappelliGeorge W. Taylor Professor of ManagementDirector - Center for Human Resources for the The Wharton School