Managers, managers everywhere – but do people really want such jobs?

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Rob Csernyik is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and a 2022 Michener-Deacon fellow.

Fifteen years ago, I worked with a low-level manager I particularly admired. She was hard working, intelligent and unusually fun for a superior in retail. I knew she could rise as far up the managerial ladder as she desired, yet her junior position was only one level above mine.

Still relatively green to the postuniversity working world, I assumed everybody wanted to race up the corporate ladder. It confused me why she was still in this position. One day I asked why she hadn’t moved up.

The answer: Her length of service meant she earned similar pay to the next management rung, and she avoided the additional stress. Little did I know such tactical thinking would become commonplace for job seekers years later, though workplaces haven’t quite caught up.

This paper recently reported that more than 500,000 new management jobs have been created in Canada since early 2021, making it one of the hottest categories for job seekers. Yet several recent surveys from North America and beyond suggest at least a third of workers don’t want to be managers.

I imagine this applies to my former colleague, too. Being a manager itself is rarely a worker’s dream. Instead, those are made of the trappings that traditionally come with management titles, such as authority, better compensation, deference from co-workers and the potential to keep ascending to higher roles such as executive suites.

This mismatch – between surging management numbers and the lack of interest among workers – suggests employers need to stop expanding this category and focus instead on designing positions that don’t repel large swaths of workers.

Here’s why workers don’t want to be managers: When it was more common for workers to stay at a company their entire career, moving into management roles was the natural progression. Yet now, expectations of a job for life are hazy. Without this, employees often look out instead of up.

A survey from human-resources consulting firm Robert Half suggested about 42 per cent of Canadian workers were looking or planning to look for new jobs in the first half of 2024. Nearly half of those surveyed said a higher salary was the goal, making it the No. 1 reason to leave.

When workers look out instead of up, they don’t see the extra pay from being managers worth the extra responsibilities such as administration, coaching people or overseeing projects or teams. This should give employers pause.

Meanwhile, the lack of enthusiasm for management is running up against another phenomenon: title inflation, where some new managers are in name only, their titles offering limited influence or used as a retention-improving tool or to mollify employees who don’t feel recognized.

This is a bad combination. When employee desires and corporate practices differ, dysfunction ensues.

When handed out indiscriminately, manager titles may not go to those with the skills to fulfill the role. These workers may also find a mismatch between the authority they perceive and what they actually have.

Having worked on management teams with too many titled colleagues, I know how fruitless such overexpansion is. Instead of satisfying more workers, it stripped away individual power and led to arguments, confusion and roadblocks in everything from day-to-day operations, solving problems and strategizing new initiatives. Fellow managers ignored or undid my decisions.

This fruitlessness was a significant source of job dissatisfaction for me, but employers are more likely to notice – and to care – about how it affects their bottom line. Ranks full of managers create more bureaucracy, inefficiencies and waste that can have a material impact. Uncoupling from this glut of managers is necessary, but it’s not as simple as opening a thesaurus.

Instead, it requires considering what workers want and don’t from managerial roles – as though they are filling plates at a buffet. Workers don’t want to have their job consumed by bureaucracy and stress, simply for trying to find more involvement and fulfilment in their role. Instead, employers can offer employees more freedom to collaborate on projects that interest them, which may not be directly in their role, or have them become a go-to resource on areas in which they have deep expertise. In some circles these are called individual contributor career paths. They focus on the worker’s hands-on contributions and skill development, rather than queueing them up to lead people or projects.

It’s not that nobody wants to be a manager, but there’s a need to stop pretending that creating more of them is the solution to solve motivation and retention concerns. Employers who figure this out will run better businesses and create positions that people value and are keen to apply for.