The divisive culture making organisations less relevant

There is a glut of advice out there for young people trying to progress with their careers. So much that it is almost suffocating. However, it is also so similar in tone that you could summarise most of it in one sentence; change how you communicate, put yourself first and be more resilient. I get why this is where we now are, particularly for marginalised groups who appear to miss out on career progression because they are not always blessed with the inherent confidence to put their hands up for promotions or ask for more money or provide solutions instead of concerns. It’s a fair evaluation of how career progression works today but it’s also intrinsically flawed. It still assumes that the problem lies with people not adapting to old systems, instead of why these rules exist in the first place and whether they are even relevant.

We all know that business is designed around competition. A multitude of market forces mean that organisations have to outperform others to thrive. That will probably continue to be true for some time. However, it is the internal mechanisms of competition that are undermining what organisations need today; to operate in multiple channels, offer seamless service delivery, be innovation-oriented and create an AI-driven infrastructure. All of these require organisations to think and behave like a unified ecosystem, which is fundamentally undermined by the way businesses currently enable divisive cultures.

Ecosystem thinking can inspire new infrastructures and processes but ecosystem behaviour is a tough ask when we tell people to think of their career progression as a competition. On an individual level, the seniority funnel means that colleagues must compete against other colleagues for another bump up the hierarchy, knowing that there are only a few spots available. People are often paid based on their historical ability to bargain for more and their ability to boast about their comparative worth. Departments are measured on their individual revenue or profit or performance, often pitted against others within the business. All of these rules encourage a competitive mentality that often destroys the ability for people to understand and feed other parts of the ecosystem.

So how can we reward talent and ability while being relevant organisations today? My belief is that we need to adopt the meritocracy method to only reward people based on evidence of them effectively performing the work that benefits an organisation; teaching others, learning more and doing tasks well. For businesses, this means being more accountable and transparent about what the work actually is, how to learn it and how we measure it, finding ways to connect tasks and processes together to show how they deliver on something holistic. If all organisations did this, it would allow young people to focus on simply being great at contributing better, instead of how they need to change who they are to get ahead of their colleagues. Here’s hoping we are all ready to start making a change for the better.