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Best Career Advancement: Bottoms Up

How some companies boost their employees' careers by growing them in the jobs they already have.

BEST CAREER ADVANCEMENT
Boosting careers is not about corporate ladders or organizational charts; it's about paying attention to how people can grow in the jobs they already have

Chances are, Prospect Associates Ltd. won't ever offer Drew Melton a corner office and his pick of the company art collection; he started out as a copy-machine operator three years ago, and that's exactly what he is today.

A dead-end job? In a different company, maybe. Two weeks after he was hired at the Rockville, Md., health-communications-policy consultancy, Melton went to its president, Laura Henderson, and told her how he could run document production better and faster. "I think in terms of efficiency," says Melton. So does Henderson, who gave Melton carte blanche to do things his way. "They're listening to my ideas, and that's where I'm making changes and contributing to the company," says Melton. Today he runs a virtual Xerox fiefdom, dispensing advice to Prospect's harried consultants, who rely on his painstaking attention to detail to give their proposals a professional look.

Has Melton advanced? You bet. He hasn't climbed a corporate ladder, but he has increased his contribution to the company by honing his skills and expanding the scope of his job. His salary has increased by more than 40%, he's respected by the company's professional staff, and there's no pressure on him to "move up."

Melton's experience reflects a growing trend in the restructuring of corporate hierarchies. Flatter organizational structures now open up many more horizontal career paths. At big companies, that restructuring often occurs because of downsizing. But at companies like Prospect, creating career paths for the Drew Meltons of the world just makes good sense. "A lot of people love what they do," notes Henderson. "And upward mobility in the traditional sense is sometimes not the way to go."

Like most "best company" CEOs, Henderson took into account the nature of her business and the needs of her employees and created a system of "advancement" that makes sense for both. As a player in the highly competitive government-consulting business, Prospect relies on all employees not only to generate ideas but to market them, too. Marisa Arbona, for example, has been given the freedom to parlay her special interest -- communications about Native American health issues -- into new business for Prospect, something she wasn't allowed to do by her former employer. "As long as I can present my ideas and make them work, I don't think there are any limitations for me here," says Arbona, who won a National Cancer Institute Recognition Award last year. "That was very fulfilling," she says. "It wouldn't have come if I hadn't been working at Prospect."

Just as it does at Prospect, employee advancement plays a major role in the overall growth strategy at Fitcorp Inc., in Boston, where 80% of all employees started out as student interns and 13 of the company's 14 center directors are homegrown. Take Janet Barros, who's been with Fitcorp only four years and has progressed from exercise-physiologist intern to program supervisor to center director to district manager. Two years ago CEO Gary Klencheski asked her to open a new on-site fitness center at nearby Ziff Publishing Corp. "They could have chosen someone who had experience doing that," said Barros, who was only 25 at the time. "Instead, they took a chance on me." It paid off. Last year Ziff won a merit award from the Association for Worksite Health Promotion, based on the program Barros created.

But Klencheski and his management team realize that not all exercise physiologists want to be (or will succeed as) managers, so they've added a career track that allows employees to stay on the business's program side and still get ahead. Case in point: senior exercise physiologist John Furey, who has been with Fitcorp for five years and professes no desire to go into management, has expanded his role to include advising the industry's trade association; he also conducts health seminars at corporations.

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Nowhere are the opportunities for advancement as dramatic as in fast-growing companies. "There's no ladder to climb," says Jon Goodman, director of the Entrepreneur Program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "They're building the ladder as they grow." So the challenge is to hire the kinds of employees that will help build the ladder. "You don't want to advance -- you want to enlarge," adds Goodman. "Your technical skills become greater; you build your rÉsumÉ in terms of span of control and responsibility."

Such is the case at Stonyfield Farm Inc., in Londonderry, N.H., which has seen annual sales growth average over 60% for the past three years. "A year ago we had 9 supervisors," says Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg. "Now we have 22, and only 3 of those were new hires." In other words, 10 Stonyfield employees have been promoted to supervisor level. That's what happened to former limo driver Edward Souza, who knew nothing about the dairy business when he applied for a job at Stonyfield, five years ago. "But they emphasized that there was plenty of room to advance for people willing to learn as much as they could," he says. Souza started as a yogurt checker but soon learned how to clean equipment and process milk. A year later he became head processor, and six months after that he was promoted to production supervisor and then to production manager. Souza, who now supervises 40 people, has helped grow production capacity from 9,000 to 60,000 cases a week in only three and a half years.

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Donna Fenn

Inc. contributing editor Donna Fenn is the author of Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit From Their Success (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Both this blog and the book examine the ways in which GenY is changing the entrepreneurial landscape with new approaches to starting, growing, and managing their companies. Learn more at http://www.upstartsrock.com/.

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