The "Grey Ceiling"

Folks, the problem is that there just aren't enough good jobs to go
around. Aging people want to keep the few jobs they have, and young
people wonder why *they* can't have them.

Noel
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Are you stuck in middle management hell?
A generation of workers can't get ahead - because aging boomers above
them won't budge. Here's how to break through the gray ceiling.

FORTUNE Magazine
By Anne Fisher, Fortune senior writer
August 15 2006: 9:49 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- Jon Ciampi had always thought of himself as a
rising star. A portfolio analyst for Wells Fargo in San Francisco, he
had a solid job at a big company, pulled down an enviable salary, and
scored top marks on his performance reviews.
Are boomers holding you back? Tell us what you think.

Sure, he was stuck doing some grunt work, and, yeah, working till after
midnight wasn't unusual. But he was only 29! He was doing everything
his bosses asked him to! How long could it be before he'd be running
the place?

Jon Ciampi, 33, VP of Marketing, SumTotal Systems, Mountain View,
Calif. His take: "If you want to get a bigger job, you have to go where
the growth is."

Ngina Mclean, 31, Systems Engineering Manager, Lockheed Martin,
Greenbelt, MD. Her take: If you find an employer that puts an "emphasis
on learning," stay put.

Kurt Knackstedt, 34, Senior Director, Worldwide Travel, Cendant,
London. His take: Pull up stakes for an overseas job - and convince
your employer that this "isn't just a notch in your belt."

Ryan Bristol and Brett Voris, founders of PropPoint.com, Santa Monica.
Their take: Ditch the corporate ladder entirely and "get away from all
the corporate politics," says Voris.

Have you bumped your head on the Gray Ceiling? Are you a boomer feeling
pressure from ambitious youngsters?

Then he started doing the math. The head of his division was 50, easily
a decade or more away from retirement. The six managers who reported to
the division head were all in their mid-40s and had settled into their
jobs for the long haul.

Below them was Ciampi's boss: an ambitious thirtysomething MBA who,
even by Ciampi's standards, put in incredible hours. But even though he
and his boss were killing themselves, neither seemed to be on a
promotion track. There was simply nowhere to promote them to.

Then came the final straw: Wells Fargo (Charts) installed another
fifty-something at his boss's level, who, Ciampi says, didn't know a
thing about the business. "It really ticked me off," he says. "I
realized I'm not going to move up until the people above me do."

How long would it be before Ciampi's star actually rose? "It looked
like it was going to be never," he says.

He was far from alone. At Bank of America (Charts), Ryan Bristol, 30,
was spinning his wheels. Though his boss praised his work for the
company's private-banking group, it drove Bristol nuts that every move
he made still had to be signed off on by an army of superiors.

"The people above me were all ages 45 to 65 and weren't about to leave.
It was clear to me I wouldn't get promoted no matter how good I was."

On Madison Avenue, Brett Voris was similarly demoralized. As an account
manager at TBWA\Chiat\Day, he and the other thirty-something's were
coming up with the best ideas, and they were the ones fielding
late-night client emergencies. Yet they had zero authority to make
decisions on their own.

"In advertising - and I saw this at more than one agency - youthfulness
is valued because it's seen as with-it and relevant, but it's a
paradox," he says. "The senior managers in their 40s and 50s are
paranoid about keeping their own jobs, so they do everything they can
to keep you down."

The same goes for the media business. One 36-year-old finance manager
at a broadcasting company got her last promotion four years ago. "Since
then, I've just been stuck, and so has everyone else my age," she says.
The next level up is vice president, and the six current VPs aren't
retiring. "I'm under so much pressure here, but the rewards just aren't
coming," she says. "I have to get out."

Twenty-, thirty-, and even forty-something managers are in trouble.
Fifteen-hour days have become the norm. Un tethering oneself from one's
BlackBerry is, in many fields, considered high treason.

And weekends? Those are for catching up on e-mail, right?

Stymied

All this might not be so terrible if that big promotion - the one that
catapults an up-and-comer out of middle-management hell and into the
senior ranks - were around the corner.

But increasingly, younger workers are finding that no matter how many
hours they put in or how much their bosses rave about their work,
they're just plain stuck. An entire generation is bumping against
something no amount of youthful vigor can match. Call it the Gray
Ceiling.

The Gray Ceiling is purely a function of mathematics. Jon Ciampi, for
example, was born in 1973, when the birthrate hit a quarter-century
low. Just ahead of him and his peers is the anomaly known as the baby
boom, the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964.

Just behind him are the boomers' children, known as Gen Y, who form a
second bulge. And sandwiched in between is the baby bust, or Generation
X. Known variously as the laziest generation and the most
entrepreneurial, they are unambiguously the smallest generation since
the Great Depression.

Though that worked to the benefit of Gen Xers when it came to slots in
elite schools - and will once again work to their benefit when the
boomers finally leave the workforce - right now it's holding them back.

For starters, the workplace makeup has changed dramatically from just a
decade ago. In 1996 there were 64 million U.S. workers between the ages
of 30 and 39 and only 43 million ages 40 to 59. Now the situation has
reversed. As of June 2006 there were only 40 million ages 30 to 39 and
69 million workers 40 to 59, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.

Nobody is suggesting that all boomers have it easy.

For one thing, as Fortune reported last year in "50 and Fired," those
tossed out the door in the latest recession are having a tough time
getting back in. That problem and the Gray Ceiling - a term that has
been associated with age discrimination in the past but is taking on a
new meaning - share a common cause: In today's leaner companies,
executive jobs are fewer, and boomers who have hung on to them are in
no hurry to let go.

When Korn/Ferry surveyed 2,000 senior-level managers at global
companies recently, they found that 44% said they plan to keep working
past 64.

Consider the legal profession: In 1998 associates took an average of
seven years to make partner, according to Vault.com's annual survey of
19,000 attorneys. By 2003 the average was 8½ years. Now it's 9½. "The
reason is simple" says Vault.com co-president Sam Hamadeh. "Partners
aren't retiring."

Generation X, it would seem, is in danger of turning into the Prince
Charles of the American workforce: perpetual heirs apparent awaiting
the keys to the kingdom.
Why we work longer

And that, oddly enough, is exactly what employers had in mind when they
helped build the Gray Ceiling during the late '90s. Though at that time
your 19-year-old neighbor was a dot-com entrepreneur and anyone over 35
was considered a dinosaur, forward-looking companies were starting to
panic about the "brain drain" that could result if the boomers retired
en masse.

So began the campaign to keep older workers kicking around. The Society
for Human Resource Management reports that more than half (55%) of big
U.S. companies are "giving managers the tools to increase retention of
baby-boomers," including flexible or reduced schedules and retention
bonuses.

Other factors are coming into play too. Thanks to federal and state
laws against age discrimination enacted during the past 20 years,
mandatory retirement has all but disappeared (airline pilots and CEOs
are about the only employees who can still be compelled to stop
working).

Then there's the financial squeeze: The age at which seniors can
receive full Social Security is inching north (it's now 66) at the same
time that employer retirement benefits are heading south.

Finally - as the squash-playing, real-teeth-possessing sixty-something
down the hall can attest - having six or seven decades under your belt
doesn't always seem that old.

But can't you just wait it out? After all, boomers have to retire
eventually, right? Right?

"I'm not ever planning to retire," says Janelle Shubert, a professor of
management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., who is turning 60
this October. "My little joke is, 'I'll try not to die in the classroom
because it might upset the students.' "

Shubert is also the associate director for Babson's Center for Women's
Business Leadership, and in that capacity she does wonder how the
boomer logjam will affect younger generations.

"The glass ceiling is being replaced by a Gray Ceiling of
baby-boomers," she says. "Those of us who've spent decades paying our
dues are finally reaping the rewards, both psychological and financial,
and we don't see any reason to step aside now." Result: "We're now the
ceiling that our young colleagues are going to have to break through."

What's so wrong with that, boomers might ask? Quite a bit, actually, at
least for companies that are thinking long term. Bosses who aren't
focused on how to keep Gen Xers happy will inevitably find that
somebody else is. So much for the "future of the firm."

Unlike the glass ceiling and other forms of discrimination, the Gray
Ceiling has no obvious legal or legislative remedy. You cannot sue
boomers for being too numerous.
Breaking through

But during interviews with several dozen managers, Fortune zeroed in on
companies that are making a sustained effort to fast-track the careers
of Gen Xers, as well as half-a-dozen strategies that employees can use
to crack through the Gray Ceiling on their own.

"You'll never get ahead just by being really good at what you already
do," says Michelle Peluso, who is now the CEO of Travelocity. "Top
management will look at you and say, 'Hmmm, okay, just keep doing it.'
" Peluso, Ciampi, Bristol, Voris, and others all managed to get out
from under the ceiling, and what they've learned can help anyone who
feels trapped.

Demography, it turns out, isn't destiny.

In a gray-walled conference room in Ridgefield, Conn., 26 employees of
Boehringer Ingleheim, a German pharmaceutical firm, are sitting through
a new type of diversity training. They're about evenly divided between
boomers and Gen Xers, and the moderator, Yael Sivi of the FutureWork
Institute, has asked for a list of adjectives that describe the younger
set.

"Arrogant," one boomer offers.

Sivi bravely tries to turn the discussion in a more productive
direction. "Let's say you're a Gen X manager, and you think your boss
is totally incompetent," she says. "Are you going to respect him or her
just based on a title alone? No. Is this different from your parents
and grandparents? Yes." She looks around the room. "Anybody here who
was a latchkey kid growing up?" A 30-ish man in khakis and a green polo
shirt raises his hand.

"Okay, latchkey kid, what was your life like? What did you do when you
came home from school?" He replies that he hung around the house
waiting for his parents to come home from work.

"So you structured your own time," says Sivi. "Doing your homework,
maybe making yourself a snack? Maybe you even started dinner?" She
gestures to the group. "Fast-forward 20 years. How does this guy want
to be managed? He doesn't want to be micromanaged. Hands off! Because
he's been managing himself since he was 10 or 12 years old."

The fact that the Gray Ceiling even exists is news to many boomers,
says Margaret Regan, who runs the FutureWork Institute and works with
clients that include American Express (Charts), Citibank (Charts),
PepsiCo (Charts), Pfizer (Charts), and Kraft Foods (Charts).

Gen Xers "don't talk to their boomer bosses about it," she says.
"Instead, they just quit." Even boomers who have hit the acceptance
stage aren't exactly eager to publicize it.

Says one HR chief, who asked to remain nameless: "Admitting to
outsiders that you have lots of boomers taking up all the great senior
jobs is like hanging out a sign that says, DON'T COME TO WORK HERE.
YOU'LL NEVER GET PROMOTED."

Or if you do get a promotion, it might not mean anything. Title
inflation, Xers say, is a strange new outgrowth of this era. For this
story, Fortune asked Korn/Ferry International to poll its executive
network. Among Gen Xers ages 30 to 42, the findings were telling.

More than half (51%) have been given a fancier title in the past two
years. Yet almost half of those (47%) say they're still doing the same
job. New job titles ranged from Chief Spiritual Officer to Process
Change Manager to - our personal favorite - General Manager Reporting
to the General Manager.

The addition of the word "special" or "specialist" to a title is
particularly in vogue. "The title Special Projects Specialist," wrote
one executive, "actually means, 'Keep the person in the fridge.'"

Gen Xers, whose career expectations were shaped during the '90s boom,
are not, however, a patient bunch. That's why more and more employers
are adopting "unsiloing" as their newest HR buzzword.

Following the lead of GE, UPS, Exxon Mobil, and others, more companies
are rotating young talent throughout the organization: A Sibson
Consulting survey shows that more than half of Fortune 500 companies
say they've begun shuffling potential leaders around to give them broad
experience.

Some companies have gone even further. Several years ago an internal
Lockheed Martin survey showed that 70% of its workers were boomers or
older. So the company began a four-pronged Gen X retention drive.

They developed a program to rotate promising employees (about 800 at a
time) through six functions over two years. High-potential young
managers now get to tackle a new challenge at least once every three
years.

Lockheed made its tuition-reimbursement program so generous that many
employees have earned multiple degrees on the company's tab. And the
company made every boomer manager take on a Gen Xer to mentor and help
with working out a career plan.

It's working. Since 2001 annual turnover has averaged 2.5% - far below
the norm in the industries where the company competes. "Recruiters try
to woo you by offering you more money, but it's really about a
combination of things this company does, especially the emphasis on
learning," says Ngina McLean, a 31-year-old systems engineering manager
in Greenbelt, Md. "It's the only place I've worked where I can see
spending my whole career."

Of course, developing younger workers is expensive, and what if they
leave anyway? Many companies just choose not to do it, as Gen Xers
trapped under the Gray Ceiling well know. In that case the only way
through the Gray Ceiling is to bust through it yourself.

"My father was a loyal corporate soldier who worked at the same company
for 32 years," says Ryan Bristol. "But my generation is more interested
in opportunities for fast growth than in security." On the day we're
talking, he's speaking from his airy, glass-and-brushed-aluminum office
building near the beach in Santa Monica. Oh, and his new title is CEO.
It's a far cry from his old gig toiling for Bank of America.

The fastest way out from under the Gray Ceiling, he realized, was to
ditch the corporate ladder entirely. He met Brett Voris, the refugee
from TBWA\Chiat\Day, in the MBA program at UCLA's Anderson School, and
earlier this year they started PropPoint, a real estate investment
firm.

Their first investor was an acquaintance of Bristol's - they met at a
Little League game where Bristol was coaching. He in turn brought in a
friend who runs a venture capital fund. "It's great to get away from
all the corporate politics," says Voris, even if "mistakes don't get
absorbed, the way they do when you work for a big company."

Perhaps the easiest thing has been finding talented young hires: One of
their first employees is a 26-year-old financial whiz from Bank of
America who had also hit the Gray Ceiling there.

Not everybody has the stomach for a startup. Even so, sometimes
opportunity is lurking much closer than you imagine. A few years ago,
Denise Prince was just one of many thirtysomething senior vice
presidents at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania.

She thought Geisinger's state-of-the-art system for electronic
record-keeping of patient data could radically change the way new drugs
are developed and tested. She also saw a market for a new kind of
quick, convenient medical care for minor injuries that could be
delivered by nurse practitioners working out of retail stores.

"I had a lot of informal contact with our CEO, and I gradually talked
him into letting me do it," she says. With her boss's blessing, she
started a new venture capital unit called Geisinger Ventures and has so
far launched two businesses, with several more on the drawing board.
Prince, 43, is Geisinger Ventures' CEO.

Another strategy is to find a really big mess. "If you really want to
move up, you have to get out of your comfort zone," says Michelle
Peluso, 34, from her office near Dallas, where the roaming gnome from
Travelocity's TV commercials looks down on her desk from a high shelf.

A dot-com vet whose Site59 was acquired by Travelocity in 2002, Peluso
joined the company but was eager to expand her role from senior vice
president of product strategy. So she dug into the hotel-booking
business, which "was such a big mess that no one else wanted to touch
it."

First she found out what hoteliers hated about the way travel sites
were run. Then she built a new, hotel-friendly system to address their
gripes. "Think about what keeps your boss awake at night. Is there
something you can do to help?" she says.

Her strategy worked so well that she got promoted to chief operating
officer within a year, and then to CEO. "When I'm deciding whom to
promote, I look for people who see the company as if they were wearing
my hat," Peluso says.

It may not sound strategic, but other Gen Xers have found that the
route to the top sometimes heads, well, sideways. In 2003, Kurt
Knackstedt, now 34, was working for a Philadelphia travel-services
provider.

In casual chats with people at Cendant, Knackstedt learned that the
company wanted to hire someone to move to Hong Kong and pull together a
scattered collection of Asian marketing efforts and new-product
launches. He recommended himself for the job. Cendant hired him with
his old title - "a lateral move in that sense," he says - but with a
staff three times bigger and a budget five times the size.

From there, it took Knackstedt just under two years to be promoted to
his present job as senior director of corporate travel services
worldwide, based at Cendant's headquarters in London.

If you're jockeying for a job overseas, Knackstedt and others say it
helps enormously to be willing to go as a so-called local hire. Rather
than ask for a contract that guarantees you can come home in, say, two
years, be ready to pull up stakes and assume you'll be living abroad
indefinitely. The open-ended approach can help persuade higher-ups that
"this isn't just a notch in your belt," says Knackstedt.

Finally, being brutally honest about your industry is vital too.
Remember Jon Ciampi, the guy who was trapped under a veritable boomer
army at Wells Fargo?

Once he decided to start job hunting, he quickly realized he was
looking in the wrong industry. He had to make a leap. Ciampi had just
enough computer experience to get hired by Oracle, and now he works for
SumTotal Systems, which makes online-learning software for clients
including Microsoft and American Airlines.

Although he's had to scramble to develop new skills (he once took
Harvard Business School's online course on new-product launches "two
days before we were going to market"), he has scored four promotions
and is now SumTotal's vice president of marketing. "If you want to get
a bigger job," he says, "you have to go where the growth is."

Each of these strategies - be it jumping into a different industry or a
foreign market or starting a new venture - takes an appetite for risk.
But here's what many people forget: Staying put in a going-nowhere job
may be an even bigger gamble.

Think about it. Before long, Gen Xers will be competing for promotions
with a whole new batch of fresh faces - 70 million of them, in fact.
Generation Y, after all, is growing up fast.

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