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2018-05-03 12:21:43
Jennifer Petriglieri
As the head of a large manufacturing plant at a multinational conglomerate, an
executive I ll call David had proved himself a competent, trustworthy manager.
So when the presidency of one of the company s key businesses unexpectedly
became vacant, the CEO sat David down to share the good news that he had been
chosen for the role. He had earned it.
Sudden career announcements like this are actually pretty common. Even so,
David was caught off guard and didn t know what to say. The head of HR who was
at the meeting sensed his surprise. Though the offer may have come earlier than
expected, she explained, his current boss had been consulted and supported the
move. It was a golden opportunity for David, and everyone was rooting for him
to succeed. He would have time to make all the necessary arrangements, the CHRO
added, and the company would gladly help his family move to the other side of
the country, where the business he would run was based. He would start in four
weeks.
After asking a few questions and learning about the generous raise that would
come with the promotion, David thanked the CEO and the CHRO warmly and promised
to discuss the opportunity with his wife that evening. Of course, they
replied, smiling.
They were shocked when David turned down the offer the next day. He was
committed to the company and to his career, he said, but he was also committed
to his wife s career. She had a challenging final year to complete in her
surgery residency program, and a move now would hurt her. David suggested
various options taking on the role at a later date, commuting for a period, or
working remotely. The CEO rejected them all. Leadership is about showing up,
he snapped.
A joyful occasion had turned sour in less than 24 hours. The CEO was angry. The
company had invested heavily in David. Where was his dedication when it
counted, and how could he expect to advance if he was not willing to move for a
leadership role? The CHRO was equally confused and upset by David s response.
After all, she had introduced work-family policies and generous mobility
allowances to support employees like him. David felt cornered. He had been
presented with an untimely, rigid option, and now he was being punished for
daring to try to negotiate it.
The company soon found another candidate for the job. David continued to
perform well in his role, but things had changed. He felt that he was no longer
on the top team s talent radar. Nine months later, when his wife, Helen,
completed her residency and was again mobile, she and David put out feelers for
career opportunities. David was immediately headhunted by a rival company to
lead its largest business, in a city where Helen found a position at a
prestigious hospital. David s career was back on track, and his wife s was
launched. And David s old employer had lost a talented leader after spotting
him, grooming him, and offering him a plum role.
Companies tend to have long-held ideas about what ambition looks like.
I learned about David from the CHRO, who told me that the company still had not
figured out how best to manage the growing number of its employees who want to
advance but also care deeply about their partners careers. I ve seen this
again and again in my work over the past several years. Otilia Obodaru, of Rice
University, and I have studied more than 100 dual-career couples across
generations and organizational settings (interviewing both members of each
couple), and I have conducted in-depth interviews with the heads of people
strategy at 32 large companies in tech, health care, professional services, and
other industries. I also work closely with the heads of talent and learning at
companies that send executives to the management program I codirect at INSEAD.
Most talent VPs, I ve found, are keenly aware of the rise of dual-career
couples. Today, in almost half the two-parent households in the United States
(compared with 31% in 1970), both parents work full-time. Still, companies
struggle to anticipate and mitigate the effects on their talent pipelines.
People in David s predicament resign after their employers have invested in
them, and those stories spread like wildfire in organizations, prompting other
dual-career high potentials to look for the nearest exit.
The crux of the problem is that companies tend to have fixed paths to
leadership roles, with set tours of duty and long-held ideas about what
ambition looks like. That creates rigid barriers for employees and recruitment
and retention challenges for their employers, many of whom are failing to
consider the whole person when mapping out high potentials career
trajectories. To reap the benefits of their investments in human capital,
organizations must adopt new strategies for managing and developing talent. I
ll describe them, but first let s take a closer look at why traditional
approaches often fail.
The Trouble with the Usual Talent Strategies
Although most companies deny having traditional career ladders, executives in
midsize and large organizations are widely expected to cycle through a variety
of divisions and functions en route to the executive suite. This
talent-development model usually involves multiple relocations. It originated
in the early 1980s, before technology had opened the door to efficient,
productive virtual work. For the most part, talent was unbounded (my term).
That is, spouses didn t have competing careers, so they managed home and family
life, freeing up executives to meet their companies demands.
Times have changed, of course, but most talent management programs are still
designed as if every couple had a dedicated homemaker and the internet didn t
exist. For executives whose partners have full careers, such programs create
two major challenges (and, my research suggests, two top reasons to resign).
They are:
The mobility challenge.
Members of dual-career couples understand that they ll need to make multiple
moves across functions and geographies if they want to ascend to senior roles
and they re not averse to that. But having to drop everything and move at a
moment s notice forces them to choose which partner s career will lead and
which will follow. These days, fewer couples are willing to make that
trade-off.
Take Melissa and Craig, both of whom were managers in their companies future
leader programs. They had long harbored dreams of working abroad, but when
Craig was offered a now-or-never golden opportunity in London, he turned it
down. Melissa could probably have found a job in London, but not at the same
level and on the same track, he told me. Equality is important to us, and we
know that senior careers are uncertain. So we want to hedge against risk by
balancing our careers. We need to move in a more planned way.
Eventually, the two did make an international move. First they agreed on a
destination Dubai and then they launched parallel job searches. Melissa s
interest in moving to the Middle East landed her an internal transfer and a
boost in responsibilities. Craig s company was less keen on a transfer, but he
found an exciting new role with a competitor.
Failing to make several moves in short order may risk looking stagnant.
Craig s company lost a talented manager to a rival not because he wasn t mobile
but because it couldn t match mobility options to his needs. Even if he had
accepted the London job, his employer might have paid a price in the long run.
Expatriate assignments and geographic relocations are often cut short when an
executive s partner struggles to adapt to a new community, for example, or can
t find a suitable career opportunity. Because Craig secured a good job in
Dubai, Melissa s expat assignment was more likely than many others to succeed.
The mobility challenge is exacerbated when organizations expect several moves
in a short time frame, which is not unusual. At one global chemical company,
for example, a new management acceleration program moves people through three
functions and to three locations around the world within a year and a half.
You move every six months, the head of talent explained. This rounds out
participants experience and knowledge in an efficient way. But, she added, it
certainly doesn t work if you re in a dual-career couple or for anyone who
doesn t want to drag their family around the world .So it stops a lot of great
talent from even applying.
Even when managers are not enrolled in formal rotation programs, many companies
expect their best people to spend no more than three years in any role before
moving to a new challenge. Those who don t progress at that pace will look
stagnant and perhaps be shown the door. I m dealing with a very talented woman
who is going to lose her job, the vice president of HR at a global logistics
firm lamented. She s at the end of a three-year role, and she cannot relocate
because of her husband s career. Rather than being flexible and saying, You
can still live in Charlotte and commute to Atlanta three days a week, her
manager is saying, No, it s all or nothing. We ll just have to let her go. It
s frustrating. Retaining senior female talent is a key priority for us, but
the business is stuck in this rigid way of operating.
I heard stories like this from about 40% of my research sample. It sounds crazy
to set an arbitrary three-year limit on someone who is doing excellent work.
But most companies assess executives on potential as well as performance and
people who don t want to move are dinged on potential, because they re
perceived as lacking ambition. Thwarted advancement is the most likely outcome,
particularly for junior and midlevel managers. But at senior levels, where
fewer lateral moves are available, there s a great deal of pressure to move up
or out.
The flexibility challenge.
Every family has tasks that must get done buying groceries, making meals,
taking the car in for maintenance and repairs, driving children to and from
school and activities, and so on. In traditional couples, the noncareer partner
assumes the lion s share of these responsibilities. For dual-career couples
(even those who can afford to hire help), managing all this on top of work is a
constant juggling act. As I studied these couples, it was clear that they do
not want to work less, but they do need to work smarter and more flexibly.
Most leadership roles and paths, however, lack flexibility and people who seek
it are penalized. This can lead to what one executive, Emily, called the
Whose job is more important today? roulette. She and her partner, Jamal, had
a finely tuned system: Emily dropped the kids at school in the morning and
worked late in the evening, while Jamal did the opposite. However, when they
hit a bump sick kids, home repairs, elderly parents who needed help the system
broke down and frantic negotiations began. Even when the system worked well,
they found themselves being punished. Jamal, a management consultant, described
being passed over for a promotion: I brought more business to my firm than any
other senior manager last year, but I left work at 5:30 PM every day. That was
noticed. It s not that I wasn t working. I always put in an extra two or three
hours after the kids went to bed. But I was told that my lack of presence
signaled a lack of commitment to the firm.
The expectation that rising stars should always be in the office made more
sense when most business was local or regional and much of it had to be done in
person. But now business is global, runs 24/7, and in many cases must be
conducted virtually and yet physical absence is still stigmatized. The head of
learning and development at an engineering firm told me, We re one of those
companies that has had a flexible working policy for a long time, but due to
stigma we have not allowed or encouraged people to take full advantage of that,
and those who do have been sidelined in their careers.
The irony is that research has shown the benefits of flexible working for
instance, improvements in efficiency and knowledge sharing. And in my
interviews I ve found that an organization s commitment to cultivating and
valuing flexible work is a key draw for members of dual-career couples. HR
teams are well aware of these advantages. That s why they put flexible policies
in place.
If companies know what works in theory, why do they keep reverting to their old
ways of managing and grooming talent? A big reason is inertia: It s how they ve
done it for a long time, and they re more likely to make incremental changes
than overhauls. There s also a dues-paying element, I ve learned. People at the
top tend to think, Well, if I did it, so should the next generation. It can
be hard for them to identify with dual-career constraints if they came of age
in a different time and never faced those constraints themselves. Because the
current crop of high potentials aren t willing to sacrifice their partners
needs, a bit of a stalemate results and mobility and flexibility challenges go
largely unaddressed.
The head of learning and development at a large recruitment company put it this
way: Our Millennials are as ambitious and committed to their careers as other
generations, but they also hold a place for other people in their lives .This
affects how they want to work and progress. If we cannot change to cater to
them, we will lose more and more talent.
That generational shift is the result of changing marriage patterns that have
profound implications for organizations. Over the past three decades,
assortative mating the tendency of people with similar outlooks and levels of
education and ambition to marry each other has risen by almost 25%. Nowadays,
when an organization hires a manager in his or her thirties, that person s
partner is also likely to be an ambitious professional with a fast-paced
career. Paradoxically, a trend that should expand the talent pool for companies
shrinks it instead, because of their outdated ways of developing people.
A New Talent Strategy
Designing effective leadership-development paths for members of dual-career
couples requires two changes: a revised notion of what is needed to achieve
growth and advancement, and a shift in the organizational culture to embrace
flexibility in the talent development process.
Recognize that what matters more than where.
Organizations must stop worrying so much about where aspiring leaders serve
their time and instead focus on the skills and networks to be acquired. The
talent management director of a global engineering firm described her company s
approach like this: We have a list of experiences that future leaders need to
have, but they are location-agnostic. For example, managing a business in
crisis or doing a turnaround sometimes you don t have to move at all to get
these experiences. That s a departure from the days when the company s CEOs
believed that one had to work in set locations to move up. Shifting the focus
from where to what opens a range of creative solutions, such as brief job
swaps, short-term assignments in various organizations or units (sometimes
called secondments), and commuter roles.
Take Indira, an executive at a large pharmaceuticals company who needed to
build experience and knowledge of the Chinese market. To accommodate her
dual-career situation, her company facilitated a six-week job swap with a peer
in China, followed by a six-month strategic project for the pair to work on.
Because it was a job swap, we felt a mutual responsibility to help each other,
Indira told me. We acted as each other s coaches, extensively briefed each
other before the swap, spoke almost every day during it, and worked closely
together on the subsequent project. This model of having a peer-coach coupled
with a burst of intensive experience acted as a development accelerator, she
said. I absorbed so much in that process.
For instance, Indira was able to quickly build (and then maintain) a strong
network in China. Her Chinese peer made great introductions, vouched for her,
and asked people to look after her on the ground. (She did the same for him
in the United States.) Acutely aware that she would be there for only six
weeks, she didn t want to waste a second, so she made an enormous effort,
working evenings and weekends. In that time Indira acquired important knowledge
of the local market, the cultural aspects of doing business in China, and the
variations in company culture between the two countries. And she gained
valuable perspective, having never before worked outside the United States. As
she put it, she saw that there was more than one way to skin a cat. She said
she became better at problem solving and dealing with uncertainty.
Indira s experience is common. Job swaps and shorter-term assignments
facilitate rapid development of the networks, skills, and perspective required
to progress which means they can circumvent, or at least minimize, the mobility
challenge.
When more time six months to two years is needed for development, some
companies are experimenting with partially remote leadership roles to
accommodate members of dual-career couples. Managers work three or four days a
week at the assignment location and the remainder of the week at home.
Historically, this sort of arrangement has been stigmatized, as the head of HR
at a global mining company explained: Business leaders believed it signaled a
lack of commitment and that people used it to simply work less. But companies,
including his own, are changing their position. More and more people in the
talent pool are asking for it, and we have the technology to make it work, so
we re a lot more open especially when it s likely that someone will return to
their home location at the end of their assignment. This view is supported by
a growing body of research showing that people who telecommute don t work less
than their colleagues at the office. In fact, they often put in more hours and
are more productive in the hours they work.
Though networks, skills, and experiences can be acquired through job swaps,
short-term assignments, and remote-leadership arrangements, full-time
relocation is sometimes necessary to move one s career forward. Members of
dual-career couples know that, yet they often feel let down by organizations
that offer what one executive described as a wealth of resources but little
real support. She explained that the resources made available to mobile talent
are usually tailored to trailing homemakers or secondary-career partners, not
to full-career partners. They typically include cultural adaptation courses,
introductions to homemaker networks, and information about various social
activities. When career help is offered, it is geared toward part-time
secretarial or teaching posts, for example, or volunteering. Thus, even when
resources are abundant, they are often not appropriate for dual-career couples.
Some companies are tackling this shortcoming by using resources such as the
International Dual Career Network as two-way headhunters. The mobile employee s
partner can register to receive access to workshops, placement support, and
other job seekers services. And without paying a headhunter s fee, the mobile
employee s organization can fill other vacant positions with qualified people
in the network, who are quite clear about their location requirements. As one
IDCN member told me, We ve filled some of our key senior positions through the
network. This isn t a pool of trailing spouses. We re tapping into a pool of
highly skilled people, in some cases more skilled than the talent who is
leading the geographic move.
Remove cultural obstacles to flexibility.
Even when companies redesign their talent strategies so that their people can
expand networks, skills, and experiences in new ways, those policies often get
blocked culturally. That risk is particularly high when leaders from the
unbounded generation subscribe to the view that the mobility and flexibility
challenges of dual-career couples are, as one executive put it, personal
things that talent should work out for themselves. For HR s benefit, such
leaders may pay lip service to supporting members of dual-career couples or
they may genuinely believe they re being supportive while still, consciously or
not, discouraging or punishing the use of flexible work policies.
Some companies experiment with partially remote leadership roles.
To give their new talent strategies a fighting chance, companies need to change
their culture. First, they must educate senior leaders about contemporary
talent and the best ways to attract and nurture it. One organization I spoke
with was using reverse mentoring partnering a senior executive with a talented
Millennial to foster this awareness. It s very effective, the head of HR
said. Once leaders understand the challenges, they are much better at
accommodating them and of course those executives who really get it are able
to hoard the best talent. The strongest examples I ve seen set up the reverse
mentoring in a bilateral way: The senior executive mentors a Millennial on
career and organizational matters, and the Millennial mentors the executive on
a range of current issues sometimes technology and social media, but more often
what motivates Millennials and what their lives are like.
That this exposure changes mindsets mirrors a discovery in another area of
study: the finding that men whose wives have careers are less likely to
discriminate against women at work and more likely to facilitate their career
development. The psychological mechanism at play here is personalization.
Someone who experiences the other s situation firsthand is much more likely
to understand it and respond in a supportive way.
When companies broaden senior leaders minds through reverse mentoring and
updates on the proven benefits of working flexibly, attitudes about flexible
work quickly shift, and that s what transforms the culture. Here s how it
happens: When executives see that Millennials (and others) with flexible
schedules are still working hard and producing results, they revise their
assumptions and begin to adjust their own ways of working. That has ripple
effects. Even if the boss makes only small changes, the signaling impact is
large it gives others tacit permission to work more flexibly.
One HR professional in a manufacturing company pointed out, Now we have
leaders saying, Hey, listen, I ve got to take off and run to a ball game, or
We re going out for dinner. Or whatever it may be. That helps set the tone.
It s especially powerful when senior men behave this way. That challenges the
gender stereotype and also creates a more desirable place for members of
dual-career couples to work. Joshua, a manager in the high-potential program of
a global consumer goods company and part of a dual-career couple, explained:
Word gets around the HiPo group which senior managers encourage flexible
working, and we compete like crazy to get assignments with them.
CONCLUSION
Companies must embrace a new model of talent management to attract and retain
tomorrow s leaders. When high potentials see that it s possible to grow and
advance in their organizations without sacrificing their partners success,
they ll feel safer opening up about their mobility and flexibility challenges.
As a result, their organizations will be able to plan better for the future and
make the right kinds of investments in the right people. Everyone will come out
ahead.
A version of this article appeared in the May June 2018 issue (pp.106 113) of
Harvard Business Review.