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In a three-year research project, I studied the career trajectories
of minority and white professionals at three
major U.S. corporations. The story of one of the participants
—Stephen Williams—sheds light on many of the
differences in career advancement between whites and
minorities. (In the interest of privacy, I have used
pseudonyms for the participants)
Williams, an African-American, was born and raised in
a middle-class neighborhood in Washington, DC. After
earning his bachelor’s degree at one of the nation’s leading
colleges, he began his career as a design engineer at a
multibillion-dollar electronics corporation. On his first
day in the lab there, he encountered a large banner that
read, “George Wallace for President.” That proclamation
for the pro-segregationist former governor of Alabama
was an omen of the uphill battle Williams faced. And yet
Williams eventually reached the executive level at his
organization. Why did he make it when so many other
minorities plateaued in middle management?
First, Williams had the good fortune to be hired by
Nathan Barrett, a white manager who continually
expanded Williams’s responsibilities and advised him on
office politics. By the end of his early career, Williams
had won additional supporters within the company,
including Barrett’s boss and several white peers who,
when they were promoted to management before
Williams, vouched for him with their colleagues and
recruited him for plum assignments.
Although it took Williams longer to reach middle
management than he thought it should, he avoided
becoming cynical even as his white peers were being promoted.
Instead, he concentrated on strengthening his
technical proficiency, taking numerous in-house courses
and seminars. He also chose his assignments judiciously,
consciously avoiding being sidetracked into nontechnical
or support jobs. Throughout this period, he earned
the reputation for being an excellent performer, and he
gained the cooperation, respect, and sometimes the
friendship of whites who were initially either resistant or
hesitant to work with him. After seven years as an engineer,
Williams decided to pursue his MBA while continuing to work in engineering and design assignments. The
education facilitated his transition into management
when he was finally promoted two years later.
Once in middle management, Williams’s career took
off; he was charged with coordinating the engineering,
manufacturing, and field service for ensuring the quality
of what was to become a major product family. His success
in that position propelled him to a series of other
assignments, including a temporary one in strategic
planning, that eventually landed him a promotion to vice
president and general manager, with profit-and-loss
responsibility for a major business unit.
Williams’s experiences were typical of the minority
executives in my study, which tracked the various stages
of career development. Stage 1 covered entry level to
middle management. Stage 2 included middle management
to upper middle management. (A person in Stage 2
supervised other managers and had responsibility for a
functional department within a business unit—for
example, the director of marketing or a plant manager.)
And Stage 3 covered upper middle management to the
executive level. (A person in this stage became a corporate
officer or a direct report of a corporate officer, with
responsibility for an integrated business unit—a division
president, for instance—or leadership of a corporate
function—such as a vice president of purchasing.)
The most striking aspect of my findings was the consistency
of the data. (See the exhibit “Separate and
Unequal.”) White professionals who eventually became
executives—a group I’ll henceforth refer to simply as
“white executives”—usually entered a fast track in Stage
1, whereas both white and minority professionals who
later plateaued in middle management and minorities
who eventually became executives all inched along
during that period. In Stages 2 and 3, the careers of
minorities who ultimately became executives took off,
surpassing those of the plateaued managers. This stark
difference in the career trajectories of white and minority
executives suggests that companies implicitly have
two distinct tournaments for access to the top jobs. In
the tournament for whites, contenders are sorted early
on, and only those deemed most promising proceed to
future competition. In the tournament for minorities,
the screening process for the best jobs occurs much later.
This and other differences have important implications
for minority professionals—and for the people mentoring
them through the different stages.
Stage 1
According to my research, a pernicious result of the twotournament
system was that many high-potential
minorities became discouraged
when they
failed to be fast-tracked
early in their careers.
They became demotivated
—especially when
they saw their white colleagues
receive plum assignments and promotions—and
de-skilled. As a result, their performance fell to a level
that matched their modest rewards.
But some minorities—those who eventually became
executives—avoided that fate. What kept them motivated
and prepared to take advantage of opportunities
that arrived belatedly? A common thread among them
was their relationships with mentors. Even though the
minority executives were not on an obvious fast track,
influential mentors were investing in them as if they were,
which helped prevent them from either ratcheting down
their performance or simply leaving the organization.
This is not to say that the minorities in the study who
became executives didn’t experience their share of disappointments;
they did. But they evaluated themselves in
terms of personal growth, not external rewards. Committed
to excellence, they found the process of learning new
skills rewarding. Like Williams, many of them went to
graduate school or took training courses to enhance
their knowledge. In general, minority executives made
early career choices that placed them at the leading edge
of the work they liked. They were more enthusiastic
about the work itself and less concerned with how
quickly—or slowly—they were climbing the corporate
ladder. In fact, two minority executives in the study actually
took demotions to transfer from staff jobs into operations,
where they saw a better match for their skills and
a greater opportunity for professional growth. Stage 1
was thus a time for minority executives to gain the three
C’s: confidence, competence, and credibility.
In contrast, minority professionals who subsequently
plateaued in middle management tended to make their
decisions based on perceived fast-track career opportunities,
not on the actual work. They were more prone to
take salary and title promotions that offered little
increase in management responsibility.
Consider the career of Roosevelt James, a minority
electrical engineer at the same company as Stephen
Williams. While Williams was focused on engineering
and design early in his career, James was motivated more
by the prospect of getting into management. He took one
transfer after another, accepting nominal promotions,
believing they were stepping stones to a larger goal.
Before reaching middle management, he had had a total
of 12 different assignments (nearly all lateral moves) in
seven different functional areas, including those in facilities
management and affirmative action. Ironically, to
fulfill their ambitions for upward mobility, professionals
like James sometimes left the path that might have led to
the executive suite.
Interestingly, minority executives were promoted to
middle management only slightly faster than minority
plateaued managers, but with much greater job continuity.
They were much less likely to have changed depart-
ments, made lateral moves, or transferred away from
core positions. Surprisingly, they even received, on average,
fewer promotions within a given level than did
minorities who failed to make it past middle management.
A close inspection of the data, however, revealed
that the promotions of minority managers like James
offered little real expansion of responsibilities, as compared
with the promotions of minority executives like
Williams.
Minority executives attributed much of their later
success to their immediate bosses, other superiors, and
peers who helped them develop professionally. Of course,
such developmental relationships are important for
everybody climbing the corporate ladder, regardless of
race, but what distinguished minority executives from
white executives and plateaued managers was that they
had many more such relationships and with a broader
range of people, especially in the early years of their
careers. Within the first three years at the organization,
minority executives had established at least one developmental
relationship, usually with a boss or a boss’s boss.
These mentors provided critical support in five ways.
First, the relationships opened the door to challenging
assignments that allowed the minority executives to gain
professional competence. Second, by putting the future
executives in high-trust positions, the mentors sent a
message to the rest of the organization that these people
were high performers, thus helping them to gain confi-
dence and establish their credibility. Third, the mentors
provided crucial career advice and counsel that prevented
their proteges from getting sidetracked from the
path leading to the executive level. Fourth, the mentors
often became powerful sponsors later in the minority
executives’ careers, recruiting them repeatedly to new
positions. Fifth, the mentors often protected their proteges
by confronting subordinates or peers who leveled
unfair criticism, especially if it had racial undertones. For
example, a superior-performing African-American in the
study had a laid-back style that detractors said was an
indication of his slacking off, playing on the stereotype
that blacks are lazy. The mentor directly challenged the
detractors by pointing out that his protege was the leading
salesperson in the division.
Such rich mentoring relationships enabled minority
executives to build on the three C’s, despite temptations
to become discouraged. It took Williams, for instance,
nine years to reach middle management, whereas it took
his white counterparts roughly five. In contrast, professionals
of color who plateaued in middle management
tended to have circumscribed relationships with their
mentors, often limited to work-related issues.
In summary, in Stage 1, the winners in the white tournament
earned fast promotions into middle management.
In the minority tournament, the signals sent to
winners were more subtle, taking the form of rich mentoring
relationships, challenging assignments, and
expanded responsibilities, which showed the rest of the
organization that these people merited future investment.
(Winners of the white tournament also received
those benefits, but the most obvious prizes in that contest
were fast promotions.)
Stage 2
Once minority executives entered middle management,
they typically had to wait another ten to 15 years before
reaching the executive level. But Stage 2 was usually
where their careers took off. And without exception, the
minority executives in the study vividly recalled that
their initial middle-management jobs were critical to
their eventual success. Interestingly, few of the white
executives felt that way, perhaps because they didn’t
regard their jobs in early Stage 2 as big opportunities to
prove themselves in the same way that their minority
counterparts did.
In Stage 2, minority executives continued to increase
their functional knowledge, allowing them to deepen and
broaden their foundation of the three C’s. When leading
others, the sheer technical or functional competence
they had acquired in Stage 1 often enabled them to influence
subordinates who might otherwise have been resistant.
Through that process, they were able to enhance
their managerial skills and judgment.
Stage 2 was also an important period for the minority
executives to apply their existing skills to complex situations,
which then helped them to demonstrate their
potential and extend their credibility within the larger
organization. Because of that, they were able to expand
their network of relationships, including those with
mentors and sponsors, beyond the boundaries of their
original functional groups. Williams, for example,
received several assignments in Stage 2 that required
him to develop working relationships with key people in
other functional areas. By the end of Stage 2, every
minority executive in the study had at least one influential
executive as a mentor, and many were highly
regarded by several executives who acted as sponsors.
The split between minority executives and plateaued
managers became more pronounced in Stage 2. Minority
executives still received fewer promotions than minority
plateaued managers, but they reached upper middle
management in less time because their promotions were
bigger and more significant. The assignment patterns of
the minority managers continued to be unfocused: they
had more job changes—
either by department, location,
or function (especially
changes from line to staff
jobs)—and they tended to
serve in fix-it roles involving
the same kind of challenges over and over, with no
opportunity to acquire new skills.
The career of Carlos Amado, one of the managers
studied, is a case in point. By the end of Stage 1, Amado
had acquired a deep expertise in manufacturing. He had
also earned a reputation for turning around problem
groups and making them into stars. But in Stage 2, he
failed to learn other important skills, such as developing
the supervisors who reported to him and delegating
work, and his career subsequently stagnated. A lack of
savvy mentoring probably contributed to Amado’s
incomplete understanding that he was being boxed into
a limited role.
Stage 2 was also when the careers of minority and
white executives began to converge—their experiences,
assignments, and pace of advancement became increasingly
similar. There were still, however, some notable
differences. Compared with their white counterparts,
minority executives were twice as likely to change
functions, twice as likely to take on special projects or
task force assignments, three times as likely to take
a turnaround assignment, almost twice as likely to
change locations, and four times as likely to report a
big success. In many ways, these differences are a reversal
of what occurred in Stage 1, where white executives
had markedly more opportunities to prove themselves
than minority executives did. For that reason, Stage 2
can be thought of as a catching-up and breaking-out
period for minority executives.
Interestingly, although minority and white executives
had a similar number of developmental relationships in
Stage 2, minority executives were far more likely to have
powerful corporate-level executives as sponsors and
mentors. In reviewing their careers, minority executives
usually described a senior person who had been watching
their progress during this period without their full
awareness.
Stage 3
The climb from upper middle management to the executive
level required a broad base of experience—well
beyond a functional expertise. In Stage 3, people took on
issues specific to working across functional boundaries,
and that change encouraged them to think and act more
strategically and politically.
To distinguish oneself as executive-level material in
Stage 3, an individual needed highly visible successes
that were directly related to the company’s core strategy.
For Stephen Williams, it was his critical role in developing
and launching a product line that helped to reposition
his company in the marketplace.
Minority executives in Stage 3 continued developing
their network of highly placed mentors and sponsors. An
individual’s relationship with his executive boss, in particular,
became crucial; it played a central role in helping
each minority executive break through to the highest
level. Furthermore, in Stage 3 the minority executives
reported developing at least two new relationships with
other executives. In contrast, most of the minority
plateaued managers did not establish any new developmental
relationships during that time.
The networks of minority executives were also much
more diverse than those of the minority managers. For
example, African-American managers who plateaued
either relied almost exclusively on members of their own
racial group for key developmental support or they relied
predominantly on whites. In contrast, those who reached
the executive level, especially the most successful among
them, had built genuine, personal long-term relationships
with both whites and African-Americans.
The careers of minority and white executives continued
to converge in Stage 3, especially with regard to developmental
relationships. Clearly, it was impossible to
make it to the executive level, regardless of race, without
the active advocacy of an immediate boss and at least one
other key sponsor or mentor. Nevertheless, as was the
case in Stage 2, minority executives tended to have a
higher proportion of their developmental relationships
with the corporate elite than did white executives.
In summary, during Stages 2 and 3, the careers of
minority executives became clearly differentiated from
that of plateaued managers, and in Stage 3, the career
trajectories and experiences of minority and white executives
finally converged. |
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