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Hello and welcome to Working It.
This week I headed across the City to Investec, to join its staff — and a life-sized model zebra 🦓 — for a great session on the benefits of reverse mentoring from Patrice Gordon, author of a book called (yes!) Reverse Mentoring.
Patrice is an expert on this practice of having younger staff, often from diverse backgrounds, act as mentors to older, more senior people. She puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of curiosity in intergenerational workplace relationships. Older people who are curious and open to change might also help to solve the problem of the “frozen middle”: longstanding managers who aren’t going anywhere.
Read on for more on this chilly phenomenon. We’ve also got some divisive tattoo content (isn’t it always?) and Office Therapy deals with someone who feels unappreciated 🥀.
PS I’m interviewing Patrice next month at a free virtual conference with an extremely dynamic title: Driving Innovation in a Changing World. It’s for HR leaders and is run by Headspring, the FT/IE business school joint venture. Register here.
Always here for your thoughts, rants and ideas: isabel.berwick@ft.com
Stuck in the middle with you
If my “work radar” (wodar?) is in any way accurate, one phrase that has been popping up everywhere in recent months is “the frozen middle” 🧊. It describes longstanding staff who are not being promoted any higher while also not moving, either internally or by taking a job elsewhere. The result? A “stuck” promotion pipeline.
The frozen middle is a term beloved of people in the organisational change business (or “transformation” as some of them call it, which is just too exciting/magical for me to take seriously 🧙🏼). But, jargon and magic aside, it describes a real thing. Permafrost is a feature in many organisations that have made progress in recruiting and retaining a diverse range of early and mid-career staff. They don’t want these people to leave, but there are few opportunities for them to rise in the organisation.
The uncomfortable truth about the frozen middle is that people matching this description are, for the familiar structural/societal reasons that I won’t repeat here, likely to be white men (sorry, men 🤷🏼). But . . . not always. I was hesitant even to mention this issue because, in middle age, with more than two decades’ tenure at the FT, I’m also “on the tundra”. (Like an Arctic fox, but less appealing.)
So I “get” that this is a term that really causes people to turn defensive. And then some. How can leaders tackle the frozen middle issue: encouraging change without causing backlash and misery? I asked an expert in this area: Lucy Kallin, executive director for Emea for Catalyst, a non-profit consultancy that aims to build better workplaces for women. Senior staff, especially in financial services, she says, have until now just had to sit tight. They probably have large personal outgoings and can’t afford to leave. Even if they are offered new internal job opportunities or training (an MBA, extra courses), they won’t take them. “They can’t do anything. They feel threatened: ‘I don’t want to lose my job, I don’t want to lose my bonus’.”
Catalyst works with companies and their HR departments to listen to every worker and, as Lucy says, they work to keep things positive by “flipping it to something personal”. This might be a legacy question — many managers would like the chance to show they’ve effected change by promoting more diverse staff members. Or it may be a personal story — yes, having daughters can change fathers’ minds. Whatever works. (But I am a bit 🙁 about this. Remember the phrase “as a father of daughters”, or as we called it, AFOD? A few years back, male leaders who’d discovered diversity suddenly started saying this . . . a lot. I mean: what if they didn’t have daughters? Would that mean they would not be interested in boosting women’s prospects?)
By being proactive, and positive, some unfreezing happens. But not by magic. And not immediately. What else can leaders do? Grace Lordan, associate professor at the London School of Economics and founder of The Inclusion Initiative, suggests working with the frozen middle staff who really want to be effective leaders in helping to bring on fresh talent, “but who struggle to do this when there are many diverse perspectives in the room”. Ideas for change include “training on how to lead team discussions and manage outlier ideas. They must learn to set their ego aside and be more open to challenge.”
Have you successfully unfrozen the middle in your organisation without causing upset? Or are you a manager who has personally found a way to, as Disney’s Elsa says, Let It Go? Email me: isabel.berwick@ft.com
This week on the Working It podcast
When my colleague Pilita Clark wrote a column about the new acceptability of visible tattoos in the workplace, the response was . . . extreme. Lots of (anonymous) FT commenters left us in no doubt that they did not, in fact, find ink acceptable in the office. I’m biased: I have a tattoo, and in this week’s podcast episode I talk to Pilita, and to fellow FT ink enthusiasts Isabelle Campbell and Lucy Snell.
We delve into this strange and divisive subject, trying to work out why there’s such a generational and class divide — and guessing that a lot more body art is going to be visible in the workplaces of the future.
Office Therapy
The problem: I know my manager wants to give my job to a new hire. I have been asked if I’d like to apply for an opening coming up, but I resent being pushed. I am good at the job but refuse to travel much because of family. That counts against me as there are clients who want to see us (during the pandemic it was no problem of course!). Should I accept my fate, negotiate, dig in? I am feeling very anxious and unappreciated.
Isabel’s advice: This situation seems to be moving ahead with or without your approval. To be blunt, all you can do is control your reaction to it. How? I asked Viv Groskop, author of Happy High Status: How to be Effortlessly Confident, for her advice.
“Where change is likely to happen, it’s really important to separate the feelings out from the facts,” she says. “The key here is this: ‘I am feeling very anxious and unappreciated.’ There’s no point in denying these feelings. I suspect they’ve been sparked by the fact that you feel rejected.
“But could the facts tell another story? The spec for the job you’re in has changed since the pandemic: it sounds like it is going to involve increasing amounts of travel. Is it possible that your manager is trying to do you a favour by moving you away from a job where travel is required?”
Viv’s point is an important one: in any situation, our information is “asymmetric” — we only see our side, or what’s being told to us. You haven’t been privy to the discussions about your current role, nor do you know the full picture about the new hire.
What next? Viv says: “Two things matter here. First, to address your anxiety and this sense of being unappreciated. Can you talk to a friend or a former colleague in confidence? They will be able to help you figure out whether your fears are justified. Second, ask your manager for an open conversation about your current role and this new opening. How can you make sure you’re in a role that suits both you and the company? I might be missing something here. But I think my granny would say that you’re looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
Got a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: isabel.berwick@ft.com or via a voice note. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleagues or underlings will never know.
Five top stories from the world of work
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Why expenses are a fraught form of fraud: Last week’s megahit story about the sacked Citibank analyst’s expenses claim provides the fuel for Pilita Clark’s sprightly column about the murky world of workplace expenses. Includes mention of the FT’s own byzantine system . . .
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Is the secret to employee happiness — not working? During the pandemic, many companies introduced extra time off via ‘wellbeing days’ for staff. Emma Jacobs investigates their continued popularity. Do they achieve anything when employees are overworked?
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The CEO: Mike Wirth of Chevron: The boss of the oil and gas giant talks about avoiding divisive issues when he has staff in both progressive California and conservative Texas. A fascinating read from Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Jamie Smyth. And the company has just bought another producer, Hess.
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Business in a bind over messaging on Israel-Hamas war: As Anjli Raval and Emma Jacobs report, criticism of corporate responses to the conflict “shows how fraught with risk reacting to geopolitical crises has become for business executives and their employers”.
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Why are some jobs so greedy? Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize in economics has brought her work to a much wider audience. Tim Harford offers an examination of “greedy jobs” — a term popularised by Goldin — meaning the full-on professional work that is particularly ill-suited to family life.
One more thing . . .
Who really runs a city? You don’t have to live in New York to appreciate the brilliance of Intelligencer’s “The Most Powerful New Yorkers You’ve Never Heard Of”, a list of 49 people, including the man in charge of the city’s parks, some behind-the-scenes financiers and the managing editor of the New York Times — she decides who gets the plum jobs (or not). It’s a fascinating insight into all sorts of workplaces and sectors. Make sure you scroll to the end. Number 49 is 😳.
A word from the Working It community
I am shaking things up a bit this week: in honour of Halloween falling before our next newsletter, here’s Amy Hwang’s latest workplace cartoon, ‘Hidden talent’. (Find her excellent work in print in the FT magazine and on Instagram.)
Normal service resumes next time 🚚.
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