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This is the first of two pieces summarizing our view of the changing nature of work in developed societies. Workers in such societies live in a world we describe as short job tenure-elongated middle age. One consequence is that most employees will have to simultaneously manage two separate careers. One career is called the full-time “job.” We call it W-2 work after the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax form you fill out. The second career is called consulting, interim work, freelance, etc. We call it 1099 work after the IRS tax form you fill out.
Many people we work with think 1099 and W-2 work will occur sequentially. You begin your career as a W-2 and remain as a W-2 until you retire or move into 1099 work. After 1099 work you retire. This assumption sets leaders up for failure.
And we will discuss why in this article.
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We work with some senior executives who readily tell us that their veneer of success masks profound despair. There are two variations of this despair:
“My college roommate was able to retire at 58. I can’t afford to retire at all. I feel like such a failure. What did I do wrong?”
And:
“I am looking for employment but can't find full-time work. My neighbor flits from full time job to full time job. The recruiters are always calling this neighbor. But the recruiters don't return my calls. The only opportunities I get are for interim assignments. I must be a failure. What did I do wrong?”
This article is based on interviews with fifty senior executives who have been successful in managing their careers during recent times. Success meant the painful process of unlearning old career frames of reference while learning an unfamiliar one. Before articulating our understanding of this new career frame of reference we will first describe the existing frame of reference that must be unlearned.
Short Job Tenure and Long Middle Age.
The individual complaints with which we began this piece are but symptoms of two larger, well-known, health and economic trends impacting all who work in developed countries. The first trend is a shortening of traditional job tenure in line with the collapsing time frame for product life cycles, and corporate life cycles.
Technology has been a driver behind the "speeding up" of business cycles. What economists call “creative destruction” is taking place at a faster pace and conscientious, qualified employees are often its victims. In other words, job tenure within jobs and tenure within companies is decreasing.
Short job tenure plays havoc on retirement savings. The foundation of retirement savings is based on slow and consistant constributions to a retirement plan. But short job tenure explodes that assumption.
At the same time, however, life span is increasing. You can thank the same technological thinking that has also contributed to the lowering of your job tenure. The average life span within industrial societies has increased 12 years since social security was adopted.
It is important, however, to remember that this additional 12 years is not an additional 12 years of old age. It is an elongation of middle age. Middle age middle class employees fear that they cannot retire in "traditional" ways because they may run out of money before they run out of life.
The old career model was based on long job tenure and death within 10-15 years of retirement. The new career model is based on short job tenure and death within 25 years of retirement.
Implication: do not be critical of yourself if you do not have enough saved for a retirement that will support you for 25 years. You are a member of a non exclusive club.
The Free Agent Model: valid for the few sometimes.
In the last ten years of the 20th century, economists like Robert Reich and popular business magazines like BUSINESS 2.0 began to write about the Free Agent Nation: Under the free agent framework, executives have careers that resemble professional sports stars. Free Agents smoothly shifting from one major league team to another major league team through the work of third parties.
In the sports and entertainment sectors, these third parties are called agents. Movie stars and successful novelists have agents. Why not you?
In the world of business, agents are often called retained search executives. Free Agency is a cognitive frame that dominates the thinking of senior executives: some recruiter will call me and offer me a great job because of my reputation within my sector.
The Free Agent Model is Both True and False.
Professional sports players represent an elite segment of the general population. Within this elite group, only the top 10-15% can count on the Free Agent model to work effectively for them.
What happens to the other 85 percent? When their contracts with a major league team are not renewed, it is the beginning of the end of their professional sports careers.
Even for the elite 10-15%, Free Agency will cease to be valid as athletes age or become injured. Free Agency as a model for professional athletes is valid for a few athletes some of the time and for no athlete all of the time.
Free Agent Models in Business:
Free Agency says that winners smoothly move from full time job to full time job with the help of recruiters. Senior Executives are an elite group within the business world. But within this world, Executive Recruiters prefer to work with what they call “A Players.” This is the elite within the elite. “A Players” have performance records, public reputations, and chronological ages highly desired by hiring authorities.
Free Agency works for a small group of leaders some of the time. And it works for all leaders none of them time since all of us will not be “A Players” forever.
You doom yourself to individual feelings of failure of you buy into Free Agency as a model. Moving from a “good” corporate job to “Temporary Help” as a consultant or an interim executive can make you feel humiliated.
The Case of Jack:
The reality we see in our work is a constant traversing from full-time assignments or W-2 relationships to project assignments or 1099 relationships. And then back again! Failure to grasp the realities of the traversing can make a complex professional life even more painful. Consider the case of Jack:
Jack was CFO of a company in a declining industry. A larger player acquired Jack’s company and he received a one-year severance agreement as part of his exit package. Jack spent the first nine months aggressively networking for a full-time CFO job in his geographic area, while making it clear that an interim or project oriented role was beneath him. By month ten, Jack became concerned about his family cash flow situation. He began looking for interim assignments. Jack found his network unresponsive and the reason was obvious: he had clearly signaled early in his job search that interim assignments were second choice. Jack is now approaching month 24 without either employment assignments or project assignments.
Jack’s story is both unhappy and common. It need not have ended this way.
Jack needed to understand and accept that his career may have begun as an employee but it would most certainly end as a consultant.
Should I Go Into Freelance Work?
We tell our clients the question should not be “should I go into consulting?” The question should be “When I go into consulting, will I make enough money?”
Think of today’s leaders as managing two distinct professional lives. One life focuses on full-time employment and the other life focuses on project assignments, also known as interim free lance, or consulting assignments.
In a world of short job tenure, even full time jobs need to be thought of as “assignments” rather than long term career slots you will occupy.
Your mission in managing your career is to manage these two professional lives so that you will be successful in both since you will be careening from one to the other over a period of years.
In the next section we will address the old career notion about “climbing the ladder” of success with the new model for the 21st Century. And we will suggest techniques you can use so you will be successful in the two different careers of your professional life: project based work and full time employment in a corporate setting.
