公司內中層經理的"辛酸淚"

Not long ago, thousands of workers in the US were asked if they fancied the idea of being promoted to the rank of manager. You might have thought they would mostly have said yes. After all, the US is supposed to be the land of opportunity and the entirety of corporate life is founded on the principle that it is better to be on a higher rung of the ladder than on a lower one.

Only they did not say yes at all. A mere third of the workers canvassed by CareerBuilder said being a manager appealed to them. The remaining two-thirds said no thanks, I’d rather stick with the lowly job I have.

Within the numbers were some depressingly predictable variations. For instance, 40 per cent of men wanted to be promoted, against only 29 per cent of women. Less predictably, gays and lesbians turned out to be more ambitious than most, with 44 per cent of LGBT workers wanting to be leaders. I’ve no idea what this proves, except perhaps that having had some success in rolling back homophobia, they are in an optimistic mood.

So why don’t most people want to be managers? More than half of them explained they liked the job they had and therefore saw no reason to change it. This strikes me as an excellent reason. Given that the pyramid is at its widest at the bottom, it is good if lots of people are happy to keep on keeping on. It is only a shame that we are so hooked on the idea of progress, we place so little value on lives spent like this.

About a third of the sample said what put them off were the long hours and the responsibility that went with being a manager – which is also fair enough.

A smaller minority did not want to put themselves up for promotion because they did not have the qualifications. This is the only bad reason given – it is a shame and a waste. There are lots of things that stop people from becoming great managers, but the lack of formal qualifications is hardly ever one of them.

Implicit in all this is a truth that companies try to keep quiet about. Being a middle manager is the most thankless job ever invented. Workers are not idiots – they look at what the people above them are doing, and think: no way.

If anyone still clings to the fantasy that it is going to be nice to be a middle manager, a big study written up last week on the Harvard Business Review website, puts the record straight. It looked at companies that together employ 320,000 workers, and examined the profile of the least happy 5 per cent of them.

The researchers expected to find that these 16,000 miserable workers were mostly downtrodden foot soldiers, or misunderstood cranky geniuses, or the hopelessly incompetent who could be sacked at any minute.

Instead they found the typical profile of the terminally miserable was rather different. They were mostly middle performing, middle managers. They were the ones who were doing perfectly fine and had been working in the company for five to 10 years. In other words, they ought to have been the salt of the earth, or at least the glue that holds the company together.

These managers gave a litany of reasons for their misery: they felt under-appreciated, overworked, not listened to, stuck and full of a sense of meaninglessness. But most of all they complained that the people above them were not up to much.

So what can be done? The authors of the survey blandly conclude that it is all a matter of leadership.

“Every employee deserves a good leader,” they say.

Well yes, but everyone deserves all sorts of things in life that they often do not get, including good health, freedom of speech and three meals a day.

Most of us are not going to get good leadership and, even if we did, it would not help those in the middle very much. Almost all companies are necessarily dysfunctional, and the place that dysfunction hurts most is half way up.

譯文僅供參考

不久前，美國數千名企業員工被問到一個問題：他們是否有過希望被提升到經理級別的想法？你可能會認爲他們大多應該會回答是。畢竟，美國被認爲是機遇之地，而且職場中的一大原則就是，處於階梯高層比在低層好。

但結果很多人都沒有回答是。在凱業必達(CareerBuilder)的調查對象中，僅三分之一的人說，當一名經理對他們有吸引力。其餘三分之二的人說：不，我寧願繼續做我的低級別工作。

調查結果顯示了一些意料中的差異，令人泄氣。例如，40%的男性希望被提拔，而女性中僅29%有此想法。出人意料的是，同性戀者其實比大多數人都更有雄心，44%的LGBT（同性戀、雙性戀及變性者）想要成爲領導。我不知道這能證明什麼，除了或許可以在一定程度上化解對同性戀的恐懼症，因爲他們擁有樂觀的心態。

那麼，爲什麼大多數人不想成爲經理呢？超過一半的人解釋說，他們喜歡現在的工作，因此沒有理由去換。我認爲這是一個極好的理由。鑑於金字塔的底部纔是最寬的，如果許多人都樂於繼續留在底部，那這是一件好事。只有當我們過於着迷升職，而又認爲這種生活沒有多少價值的時候，才應感到羞愧。

大約三分之一的受訪者說，他們不想升職的原因是當經理工作時間長、責任又大——這也有道理。

有極少一部分人因爲沒有相關資格而不想爲升職做準備。這是唯一糟糕的理由——是一種恥辱和浪費。阻止人們成爲偉大的管理者的因素很多，但缺少正規學歷永遠不是其中之一。

這些數字背後隱含着一個所有公司都儘量避而不談的事實。擔任中層經理是人類有史以來發明的最吃力不討好的工作。員工們都不是傻瓜——他們看着自己上面的人都在做些什麼，心裏想：沒門兒。

如果還有人繼續幻想做一名中層經理是一件很美好的事情，那麼近日哈佛商業評論(Harvard Business Review)網站上刊發的一項大型研究報告可以幫助弄清真相。該研究跟蹤了總共擁有32萬名僱員的多家公司，並剖析這些僱員中最不快樂的5%人羣的特徵。

研究人員本來以爲會發現這1.6萬名悲慘工人大都是受壓迫的步兵，或是沒有得到理解的古怪天才，或是隨時會被解僱的無望的無能力者。

相反，他們發現這些特別不快樂的員工的典型特徵與想象的迥然不同。他們大多是業績中等的中層管理人員。他們工作表現很好，並已爲公司工作5至10年。換言之，他們理應是公司的中堅力量，或者至少是能使公司上下團結的粘合劑。

這些經理給出了讓他們苦惱的一系列原因：他們認爲自己的能力被低估，工作過度勞累，意見沒有被聽取，職業發展停滯以及感覺工作毫無意義。尤其是，他們抱怨自己的上級也不怎麼樣。

那麼，我們能做些什麼呢？該調查的作者冷靜地得出結論：這完全是領導的問題。

“每個員工都應該有一位好領導，”他們說。

嗯，是的，但每個人也都應該得到生活中各種各樣的事物，包括身體健康、言論自由和一日三餐，但常常無法如願。

我們大多數人都沒有好的領導，即使有了，對那些中層管理者來說也不會有多大幫助。幾乎所有的企業都會存在功能失靈問題，而受功能失靈傷害最大的就是中層經理。

我所知道的那些最討厭自己工作的人，全都被卡在這個位置。他們的工作就是執行他人做出的糟糕決定。他們還要爲不是自己的過錯承擔責任。他們既無法升職，也退不下來。他們比任何人都更多地遭受辦公室政治風暴的衝擊。這不是好事情。
真正的問題不是在頂層，而是在底部。問題在於如何說服勤奮出色的員工：爭取升職是值得嘗試的。鑑於升職的過程是那麼的糟糕，看到那些踏上這條路並走到頂層的人經常大發雷霆就不足爲怪了。此外，一些人如果身處頂層可能會做得更好，但他們依舊呆在底層，他們只是明智地拒絕向上爬而已。