Rapid Organizational Change by Steven Bleistein

Author:Steven Bleistein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119219040
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Pro Forma Meritocracies and Other Sesame Grinders

Old habits die hard. Seniority‐based promotion was once the hallmark of the Japanese company and enshrined in official policy. Like lifetime employment, companies are turning away from the policy. However, the practice continues. For example, I suggested to the leader of a client company of mine to promote a star‐performing manager to a division head position. His response was that he could not possibly do that because it would mean that he would be at the same level as managers who had served years longer than he had. This is a company that had supposedly abandoned seniority‐based promotion. I asked why not.

“The other managers at his level would feel bad,” the leader claimed. None of the other managers were performing as well as the junior star.

“Why are you worried about making your mediocre performers feel bad by promoting your stars? I would be far more concerned about alienating your star performers because you don't recognize their achievements, while you coddle the mediocre.”

The efforts to reform seniority‐based promotion in many companies with which I work are more often pro forma than proactive. For those accustomed to a seniority‐based system, merit‐based promotion is easy when it happens to correspond more or less with an employee's seniority. It's when it does not that makes people uncomfortable, like in the example above—the junior manager was so good that he was certainly ready for the position, even though he was 15 years younger than would‐be peers at that level.

The opposite case can also make people uncomfortable—a senior employee who doesn't make the grade and is held back will at some point find their manager is younger, less senior then they are in the company, or is otherwise a peer in terms of length of service. It is in these cases when a company is tested, as is the resolve of its leadership. Managers sometimes decide simply to push the employee up rather than confronting that awkward and imbalanced situation. However, doing so is a disservice to the business and to the junior staff whom the manager will now lead.

The pressure on Japanese companies to end the system of seniority‐based promotion comes not just from economic imperative. As Japanese companies become more international in mergers and acquisitions overseas, maintaining a two‐class system for employees—a Japanese one which is seniority‐based and a non‐Japanese one which is merit‐based—simply becomes untenable. A large global foreign client firm of mine acquired a Japanese business. As overseas employees began to be transferred to Japan, working alongside Japanese managers, discrepancies in attitude became immediately apparent—their Japanese counterparts appeared slow‐moving and unconcerned, with little sense of business urgency, and there was an alarming lack of business acumen among the managers.

One foreign manager who was given a department full of Japanese employees from the acquired business remarked, “I have to learn a whole new way of talking one‐to‐one with my staff as I mentor them. In other countries, it is through career discussion that I have been able to motivate and influence staff.

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