The following is an excerpt from Mass Career
Customization: Aligning the Workplace
With Today’s Nontraditional Workforce
(Harvard Business School Press) by Deloitte
Consulting’s Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg.
FROM LADDER TO LATTICE
Scaling the corporate ladder has been the enduring gold standard for personal success since organizational hierarchy was invented. But organizational hierarchy is not what it used to be.
Neither is the corporate ladder—nor the corporate workforce.
A confluence of market and demographic forces over the past
20 years has compressed hierarchies, shortened the ladder, and
reduced the pool of high-potential employees to climb it. Another set of business and societal influences has reshaped the American
workforce in gender mix, diversity,
and expectations. These changes
have caused tensions rooted in the
misalignment between the traditional workplace and the nontraditional workforce in an economy
dominated increasingly by knowl-edge-driven services.
The urgent question, then, is how
should business leaders realign their
workplace norms and practices with
the realities of today’s nontraditional workforce? The answer, in
short, is by adopting the framework
of mass career customization
(MCC).
MCC is centered on the powerful
insight that, in the knowledge-driven economy, careers will increasingly look like a sine wave of
sorts, an undulating wave of climbing and falling phases of engagement over time.
As the working population
shrinks, maintaining industry advantage will depend largely on
keeping people engaged in and connected to the workplace.
MCC offers a framework for organizational adaptability that
will do just that.
MCC provides a structure, systematic approach, and corporate lexicon that allows organizations to correlate employees’
talents, career aspirations, and evolving life circumstances over
time in ways that match up with the enterprise’s evolving marketplace strategies and commensurate need for talent. Equally
important, MCC recognizes, validates, and embraces the changing tempos of today’s knowledge workers, offering a scalable
solution to the enervating dilemmas in their search for work-life
integration.
In this way, MCC does for careers what mass product cus-
tomization (MPC) has done for the consumer products industry:
replace a one-size-fits-all approach with a bevy of customized
product offerings.
The New Workforce Imperative
The traditional, one-size-fits-all, continuously full-time model
of career progression represented by the corporate ladder no
longer fits the needs of the nontraditional workforce. This career model
is already evolving toward a more
adaptive model that we term the
corporate lattice.
In mathematics, a lattice allows
one to move in many directions, is
not limited to upward or downward
progress, and can be repeated infinitely at any scale. In the real world,
lattices are living platforms for
growth, with upward momentum
visible along many paths.
Why Here and Why Now
So why is now the time to acknowledge, even accelerate, the transformation of the corporate structure
from ladder to lattice? One reason is
the growing strategic significance of
sweeping dislocations in workforce
composition, attitudes, and capabilities presented by the convergence of
six key trends. Although some of
these trends have been observable for
decades, their momentum is accelerating and compounding in
part because other offsetting factors, such as high immigration
rates, are now waning.
We have reached an inflection point for managing the enterprise workplace. The time has come for these antiquated standards to change.
Mass Career Customization:
The Emerging Standard
MCC presents a structured response to the demise of the corporate ladder and provides a transparent, scalable framework
for customizing careers within the corporate lattice. The MCC
framework is the emerging standard for aligning current and
