The news keeps telling us that employment is becoming a more-temporary
state, with job changes both the result of footloose employees and of firms
treating their workers as easily replaced, downsized, and upsized as needed.
Not to mention that many now work as contractors, not employees, like Uber
drivers. In these stories, the managers are typically cast as the bad guys
treating everyone else as expendables. There is some truth to that, but there
is a flip side: managers are also temporary. They are quickly moved around or
even fired, and they also try to use job changes to move up faster than they could
by staying in place.
How can managers be temps? Not only are managers credible to
their subordinates only if they are expected to stick around for a while, but
their chances of being promoted depend—ironically—on being able to signal that
they are in it for the long run, even in a firm that habitually lets managers
go. Well, for every problem that can’t be solved, there is a business school
claiming to solve it. Research in Administrative Science Quarterly by Gianpiero Petriglieri, Jennifer Petriglieri, and Jack Denfeld Wood looked at how the
participants in an MBA program used their education to make themselves more
portable across firms and jobs. They were learning to turn themselves into
managerial temps and use it to benefit their careers.
Like any education, business school is a journey, and the
path and destination are unique for everyone. But there were clear patterns
that tell us a lot about careers, and about management, in the current labor
market. One path was to use the education to adapt both skills and identity to
how firms now treat their workers, including managers. This is an instrumental
pathway, where the idea is to understand the rules of the game and play it
well. The other path was to use the pathway to explore one’s own preferred role
in this world, and shape an identity that matches this discovery. This is a
humanistic pathway, where the idea is to understand the parts available in the
play and audition for the one that is the best fit.
These paths cannot easily be taken while working, because
the everyday demands of actually managing make the learning process difficult,
and changing identity isn’t possible either because everyone looks for and
values constancy. So education acts as a valuable hiding place—a bubble, or a
deep dive—where changes can happen and it is possible to emerge fully formed,
or at least nearly so.
The next question is of course what the manager temps will
do when they manage worker temps. Will work get easier when both manager and
managed understand that they are not in the firm to stay, and the most stable
part of their identity is its portability? To know that we have to wait for
more research.
