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Monday, March 14, 2005
Night Manager: What young executives should know
By Kiko Antonio
Night Manager
SHAPERS OF LEADERS. We all know the importance of mentors and other early career experiences in shaping the kind of leaders we ultimately become. But how important to that development are the particular companies we work for?
Companies leave an imprint of their worldview on young executives through such things as the firm’s structure, strategy and culture. Understanding these factors, chief executive officers can analyze their own companies and how they create next-generation executives. And executives early in their work lives should use this information to think long and hard about the first companies they join.
Understanding the conditions that enhance the strength of an organization’s career imprint, such as a strong corporate culture, should help individuals better evaluate future employers and recognize the ways in which that first career experience may shape not simply the skills they acquire, but also their assumptions about how to lead and manage a firm over the long run.
Career imprints are associated with particular organizations; they derive from patterns in the career experiences that people share as a result of working at that organization.
Many of us can relate to this and think about times in our lives in which we worked for a company and picked up certain capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognition or ways of thinking about the world.
Since career imprints derive from shared career experiences, it is more likely to occur when people do indeed have very similar kinds of career experiences at a particular employer. If people are engaged in entirely different kinds of tasks, rendering very few patterns in the kinds of experiences they have, then it would be tough to decipher an organization’s career imprint.
STRONG IMPRINTS. That being said, just as all organizations have corporate cultures, all organizations cultivate career imprints. The question is simply, what makes some organizational career imprints stronger than others?
The strength of career imprinting depends upon both the people a firm hires as well as an organization’s environment (factors having to do with people and place). Regarding place, for example, organizations with a strong corporate culture that hire in cohorts are more likely to have strong organizational career imprints.
These two factors socially reinforce the kinds of capabilities, connections, confidence and cognition that people pick up; they enhance the commonality among people’s experiences and so, strengthen an organization’s career imprint.
(kiko_antonio(at)yahoo(dot)com)
(March 14, 2005 issue)
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