When Ann Garcia was given a team to manage, she looked forward to a more strategic role at her tech company and a chance to ditch the less appealing aspects of her job. Boy, was she wrong, she says. "You just get a different kind of grunt work."
It wasn't just the incessant whiners, or the obvious apple-polishers, or having to cover up for the occasional bad staffer that drove her nuts, she says. In particular, it was the hiring. "Does it sound awful to say there are just a lot of dumb people out there?" she asks. "Like the girl who interviewed for a sales job and ate a piece of licorice on the way in and spent the interview picking it from her teeth."
Ms. Garcia's view is that good managers push decision making down, spread the kudos and take the blame. "I'm just not a big enough person all the time to want to do that," she says. As a result, she stopped being a manager and became a management recruiter. "Many of us realize that we don't want the career path that corporate America has to offer," she says.
But many others don't realize that soon enough. Conditioned all their lives to play their cards right, they aspire ever upward, unaware that the less appealing aspects of a low-level job (navigating expense reports and the sharp shoals of the HR and legal departments) are greatly amplified if they hit the big time. It's only later that many managers discover that the office with their name on it is private primarily to help them concentrate on budget items, overdue performance reviews and the menus for going-away parties.
No wonder the boss is a crank. It's as if the higher salaries that managers get are an effort to "compensate these people for the misery," says Claes Fornell, a professor of business at the University of Michigan. "There are so many things that are bureaucratic in nature that have little to do with the business they're trying to manage."
It's a tad heretical in corporate America to admit that once you're admitted to the managerial club, membership isn't always worth the bureaucratic dues or aftertax salary bump. That may be why, despite the overevolved management consulting industry, there isn't much research on managerial satisfaction. After all, who really wants to hear that moving up can be a downer.
But a survey commissioned last year by the Concours Group, an executive education, research and consulting firm, comes close to disclosing the secret. It found that only 62% of managers strongly or moderately agree that "I really care about the fate of this organization," and only half were glad they chose to work at their company over another. Moreover, only 35% of managers said their organization inspired the best in them. Tammy Erickson, an executive officer of the Concours Group, calls the results "enough to make you cry." She says she's dismayed "that the very people you're counting on to engage other people are themselves feeling so disenchanted with what they're doing."
Part of the problem may be that the old requirements of management -- to plan, organize, direct and control -- have given way to a newer model that is often more clerical. "It's to provide support to the team doing what the team needs to do," says Len Greenhalgh, professor of management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. Not even status, the pixie dust that distracts many newly minted managers, is as alluring as it once was. "It's status among other managers and people who don't know any better," says Prof. Greenhalgh.
Blinded by the brass ring, Keith Brown has held a series of managerial roles. He couldn't bear having to track his staffers' activities. He couldn't stand having to listen to staffers argue about why others in their department got to use mechanical pencils and they didn't. And it drove him nuts to deal with the bureaucracy's silly rules. If a staffer went over the $25 dinner limit, he'd have to argue with accounting to "for God's sake, pay the $42."
In addition, he says, there was the interdepartmental warfare, the travel to the point where "I didn't know my kids" and the meetings. Oh, the meetings. "Going to the restroom required a meeting to determine how you were going to get there," says Mr. Brown.
When Ray Sarnacki became a manager at an aerospace company, he thought he would get more influence at work and more control over his work and home life. But "the higher I moved up in the organization," he says, "the less control I seemed to have over anything, including my own life." He traveled incessantly, attended meetings, and fed management's seemingly bottomless hunger for PowerPoint presentations. He had so much staffing paperwork -- what he calls "administrivia" -- that he felt he was getting little accomplished.
So in 1999, he bailed out and headed for a small venture-capital firm that has become a kind of "halfway house" for refugee technology executives. He later started his own consultancy and began lecturing on management at Saint Joseph's University, earning about one-fifth of what he made at his peak. Despite the pay cut, he now describes himself as " extremely happy."