Career progression: playing a rigged game
Many mentees start our programmes feeling “hopeless” about their career development but as our Insight and Reporting Lead, Jordan Saxby, explains, the mentoring journey can help increase confidence, willingness to network and self-promote within organisations where the progression ‘game’ is biased in favour of those in positions of privilege…
Progression within organisations is a game. The rules may often be ill defined, but the likelihood of being promoted due to task performance or leadership potential alone is lower than when considered alongside other behaviours, including self-promotion, networking, and impression management (this is supported in a wide number of fields, including banking, accountancy, managerial professions and drum n’ bass DJs in Vienna).
This becomes particularly important when considering how to best enable the progression of those sitting on the other side of privilege. Imagine playing Monopoly with a friend, but every time they pass Go they get twice as much money as you do. As soon as you noticed, it would become dispiriting — you may even stop playing entirely. There is evidence that something similar may be occurring within careers.
At Moving Ahead, we survey new mentors and mentees to understand their perceptions about their careers and organisations. Many “types” emerge, and one of the most consistent to show up in any programme is a “hopeless” type, mentees who see almost no potential for career progression. These are most likely to sit at intersections, particularly those involving gender, ethnicity and long-term health issues. These employees perceive the game as rigged against them to the point where there is no point in trying to progress.
I recently came across the concept of “informational hazard”, a true piece of information that creates harm from its knowledge. The existence of bias in organisations can be seen in a similar way. Imagine you are again playing Monopoly with your double-money-for-passing-Go friend, but this time you don’t know it’s happening. You would be likely to keep playing the game for longer; over the long term, these “double money” players will win more games of Monopoly, but in the specific game you are playing, you may still win.
Here, I must again underline that information hazards concern true information. Global institutions, organisations and people, are on-average biased in favour of those in positions of privilege and there are many actions that should be taken at political and institutional levels by those in positions of power to correct these imbalances and ensure a fairer, more inclusive society.
But for individual mentees on our nine-month mentoring programme, positive impacts include increased confidence, willingness to network and self-promote (i.e. “play the game”), and more time spent on career planning. Importantly though we also see a decrease in “hopeless” perceptions – mentees become less likely to say that their organisation only promotes people who look and think in the same way, and are less likely to say “who you know” is the only way to progress.
We clearly cannot make global progress against bias without understanding it intimately and deconstructing its presence from our institutions; but we must also work to ensure that this knowledge does not produce a loss of hope. Some people may be in truly trapped situations, but some are in situations that only appear that way when combined with the knowledge of societal injustice. We have found that external perspectives (e.g. mentoring) can help (and potentially give those in power a view into the challenges that do exist in their organisations), but this is a difficult challenge to face.
Many HR professionals consistently express frustration around the difficulty of getting people to take charge of their own development, regardless of demographic status. Could they be doing more to remove biased systems in their organisations? Certainly. But that doesn’t change the fact that modern development functions are set up to help those who ask for it and who know what they want.
Progression within organisations is a game. The rules are ill-defined, and it is rigged in favour of those who are already in power; but we also need to think about the psychology of progression, the emotional and irrational decision making that we all use when thinking about our careers. In almost all domains we have been shown not to be rational actors – our interventions and strategies on progression (diverse or otherwise) shouldn’t assume we are.
written by Liz Dimmock, CEO & Founder of Moving Ahead