Job Ladders Are Adding to Diversity Challenges in Big Tech
Let me start by saying historically I’ve been a big fan of job ladders. I have written job ladders with my HR partners for groups I’ve led at Microsoft, Intel, and Verizon. However, I’ve come to think the way they are being used now is contributing to the problem with Diversity and Inclusion in big tech.
I think the ladders originated for good reasons, in part because tech companies had some bad managers in the mix. Some managers were in their role because it was the only way to move up and make more money, or they had been there from the early days, or they were a favorite of an executive. I’ve been lucky to work for some good ones. As tech companies grew bigger and products diversified, performance management and expectations became inconsistent across orgs, functions, and levels.
As job ladders evolved, they attempted to bring consistency to those expectations per function by level. In several ways this made the evaluation and promotion process more transparent and empowered employees to drive their careers. Yet, biasing, stack ranking, and favoritism still factored in regardless of what the official company line was. I’ve sat through countless meetings where my peers and I tried to fight for a rating or a promotion and kept running up against interpretation challenges of what was written or not written in the job ladder. The debate on the interpretation by each person in the room is hard to keep unbiased despite best efforts.
Same results same behavior
The word that kept popping up for me over the last few years is “same.” Sameness. Early on, job ladders described what results (or capabilities) managers could / should expect from an employee of a specific level. I realized that’s another way to say we expected sameness from each employee in the same level and same function.
I believe challenges around interpreting sameness were a key factor in big tech changing the process to try and evaluate not just “What” the employee did but “How” they did it. If using “How” was trying to sort out bad behavior, it could have been addressed in other ways. “How” is incredibly subjective to the person doing the interpretation of a behavior and a common outcome of a disagreement in an evaluation is to take the worst connotation as the final ruling. In my experience “the How” has been used to tip the scales negatively more often than it is used for good.
employees went from being expected to deliver the same results to also being expected to act in the same way
There’s often an unwritten and subjective set of rules on how behavior or adherence to a value system is judged. With many companies also including peer reviews as an important component of evaluation this complicates the interpretation challenge further. In other words, this is when employees went from being expected to deliver the same results to also being expected to act in the same way.
The company wants the same thing from each of us and if it’s not in the doc it doesn’t count [unless it does]. It is not acceptable to compare people’s results to each other so it changed to a comparison to a fictional [perfect] employee as described in a ladder. That’s what they effectively are. A “meets expectations” rating (or the like) now requires more than just the same type of results from everyone in a function level. It requires the same behaviors.
As a result, workforce anxiety continues to rise as people struggle to figure out how they are being judged and job ladders have continued to get longer and more complex trying to document the what and how. And it is judging by managers and peers alike.
It seems obvious, but we are not the same. None of us. I don’t want to be the same as all my peers and I don’t want the same employees. I don’t want robots. I want all the uniqueness of their life experiences, upbringing, culture, education, socio-economic status, beliefs, values, opinions, and more to be added to a bunch of other people equally unique. They are not going to act the same way because of everything that makes each of them unique. Sameness is anti-diversity and not inclusive at its core.
Not intended
Take a big tech company like Google where you could literally have 10,000 unique individuals in 1 corporate job ladder. How could anyone ever expect to have a document of “What” and “How” each of those people need to deliver and act every day across all geographies on Earth? There’s always going to be a need for management judgement that cannot be captured in a written job ladder. It’s not meant to be a recipe to be followed exactly. It needs tailoring to that person and that role.
Lately I’ve found more and more people who want to use it like a checklist to prove they are ready for a promotion or rating; possibly in an attempt to tick the boxes or trying to avoid being judged. The ladders are either not descriptive enough to capture the specific role or are way too expansive to an extent that no one person can be all that. Rigid interpretation of these documents has also created situations where I’ve had to argue to give people review rating credit for delivering crucial results not described in their job ladder. Ladders are not supporting diversity of talent in the same role well.
A friend in Seattle and I were discussing this topic recently and I’ll summarize an analogy he gave that resonated (I normally don’t like sports analogies). If you are the Seattle Sounders FC, you might want the best Forward in the MLS. That’s great, but you might also need a solid Midfielder who can also be a solid Defender. Some players have multiple talents and some are just great at a limited set of things. You probably need both. I questioned if the Sounders were a tech company, how many job ladders he thought they would have? 3? Players, Coaches, Managers? We had a good laugh because it’s probably true…
I don’t think anyone intended them to be used in this way but it’s how I’m seeing them used more often. By either over simplifying or outlining an ever growing list of coding, problem solving, troubleshooting, people managing, executing, teamwork, deal making, thought leading, and more of expectations as well as behaviors and values that must be displayed it has created an impossible fairness challenge and emotional labor for all.
Fear of being seen as unfair or subjective is discouraging leaders from acknowledging talents, personalities, results, and differences that deviate from what’s in an official document; not to mention legal risk. There has to be a better way, and disempowering managers to rely on overcomplicated process and documentation isn’t it.
“one cannot codify the way humans will implement the rules” — Steven Sinofsky
Part of the Solution on Career Ladders
I think part of the solution here is an acceptance that most big tech companies need to reinvest in making management stronger. We should do things like:
- Invest in real manager career paths; most management roles don’t allow anywhere near 40 hours/week for managing as all managers have a full individual project load
- Spend money on management training and development for all stages of managers; I’ve experienced a few great development courses at big tech and a lot of really bad ones
- Get people coaches whether they think they need them or not and don’t take them away; you’re never done needing a coach
- Invest in organization development practitioners and make them proactive as orgs are always developing
- Provide an array of tools and guidance and allow folks to tailor them to their own teams and style of managing
- Hire supporting roles so individual contributor work currently being done by a manager could be done by a senior non-manager
- Support managers and their teams being themselves by proactively hiring folks that fill in missing attributes the team needs for success
- Allow managers to adjust roles to people’s talents and adjust theirs
- Make it ok for people to give up managing and go back to leading as a senior non-manager
- Acknowledge that “fit” is a real thing both for managers and individuals and we should have a safe and respectful system to make people changes; performance issues or reorgs are not that
This is just a perspective to be considered.
There’s a ton more that needs to be done to make the workplace more inclusive and diverse and I’m in no way saying this solves that problem. What I am saying is managers must play a critical role in making it better and they need the support of the company and functions like HR to do it. We need to acknowledge we can’t expect everyone to act the same way and have all the same abilities.
We are different and that’s a good thing.
Note: I’m not an HR professional and I’m expressing my opinion based on my own experiences in big tech. I don’t think the system was designed intentionally to discriminate but I think it does. I’m not writing about any specific company practice nor providing legal advice. If this all was so easy to get right then there wouldn’t be thousands of books written on performance systems / performance management. I’m sure I will have folks that will disagree with my opinion. However, I think it’s important to have a dialog about how we can be diverse when we increasingly expect our people to act and work the same way.
