Traversing the corporate lattice

Being an English major, I suffer from chronic metaphoritis, a wonderful affliction that often involves thinking visually. So I latched right on to the concept of “lattice” as presented in a recent business article in the New York Times. Up the Ladder? How Dated, How Linear by Cathy Benko, chief talent officer for Deloitte LLP and author of Mass Career Customization, offers yet another perspective on how working life is evolving.

She says, of corporate career structure:

…organizational hierarchy isn’t what it used to be. That is because, in two short generations, the face of the corporate work force has been transformed, partly by the presence of more women and aging baby boomers in the work force, the arrival of Generation Y and workers’ changing attitudes.

She goes onto describe “Corporate Lattice,” a concept created and implemented by her company. The idea is that growth in one’s career no longer needs to embrace the old ladder metaphor with the goal being to climb up, up, up (or else be stepped on by those more ambitious). Lattice appeals to workers whose vision goes beyond the succeed-at-any-cost model, one in which hours designated for friends, family, and interests outside of work took a backseat. Benko explains:

While a so-called plateau or lateral move, or a move downward, was once viewed as the end of the line, today’s employees are more apt to reach a comfortable level of responsibility and compensation and stay there for a while to balance work and life demands. Later, many resume their upward climb — or not.

Benko packs a lot of food for thought into her piece, including both statistical and empirical proof. I like what she has to say because it lends some corporate weight to an idea often relegated to Style sections of newspapers or feel-better-about-yourself women’s magazines. That is, it’s part of a growing body of information examining how the yearning for life/work balance is not merely the dream stuff of hippies and slackers. Plenty of “normal” 9-to-5ers — and those they work for — seem to be getting the hang of the notion that there’s more to life than work.

This is heartening. It’s heartening on the coworking front because at the heart of the coworking movement is an inherent understanding of the future of work, and how that future is going to include plenty of variations on a theme that for a very long time was overly structured by the clock and overly managed by uptight managers. It’s also heartening in a more general way. We are lucky to be at a place in history that’s like that moment in a time-lapse movie they showed us in fifth grade. The moment when the flower suddenly blooms, the tipping point.

Sure the changes didn’t happen overnight and there’s still a long way to go before 9 to 5 and cubicles become antiquated, laughable moments of the past. But we’re getting there, and right now is a lovely growth spurt moving at a rate we can clearly see as it occurs.

The arrival of Lattice illustrates this point. As Benko says:

This approach provides a framework for organizations and their people to know their options, make choices and agree on trade-offs in four career dimensions — pace, workload, location/schedule and role — ensuring that value is created for both employer and employee. It acknowledges that workers’ priorities change over time.