The Corporate Ladder vs. The Lattice Culture

Surely, you've heard the term "the corporate ladder." To succeed in a career you have to climb up the well-defined rungs of a ladder: up, up, up, until — nope, just up.

The corporate ladder is a wonderfully clear visual — it's also the epitome of inflexibility. There are really only two directions you can go on a ladder: up or down. There's little room for sidesteps or pauses, let alone for backtracks.

Getting Off the Ladder: From Inflexibility to Flexibility

We might be okay with the inflexibility of the ladder model if we were guaranteed stability in exchange. That was the deal in past decades: workers were often rewarded with a stable career and a gold watch at the end of a lifetime of loyal employment. But the working world we enter now looks very different from the one our parents entered then. The rungs of the ladder are not given; the ladder may in fact end, abruptly, after years of dedicated investment.

What's more, the ladder career works for only a tiny fraction of the workforce — the ever-elusive "ideal worker." The ideal worker can work all the time, year-round, and has few responsibilities outside of work.

Guess what? The ideal worker is a man — a man with a stay-at-home wife to take care of everything else. Perhaps our readers snicker at such a dated idea, but when you look at the corporate ladder world, it's not set up for individuals to deal with family and personal responsibilities — things like taking care of a sick parent or picking up your kids from school or even having kids for that matter! Never mind that the ideal worker model is a recipe for a heart attack. Never mind that in the past 30 years there has been a momentous increase in dual-earner households and single-parent families. Never mind that today the majority of college graduates are women.


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The majority of employers still expect their employees to act as though they have no other responsibilities outside the office. It's downright taboo to use a family commitment as an excuse in a work setting.

The best antidote to the inflexible ladder culture we've found is embracing and pushing for a whole new culture: a lattice culture.

What is a Lattice Culture?

A lattice looks like several ladders combined into a sort of web. On a lattice, the possible path is not simply up or down like it is on a ladder. You can choose to move up, down, diagonally, or sideways. A lattice allows you to pause, to slow down, to switch jobs and fields more freely than a ladder does. The lattice is the model for a career track characterized by flexibility. And, ultimately, it is a model that takes into account the reality of modern workers. It means you wouldn't have to completely get off track to fulfill your personal commitments or adventures.

Sounds great. But how do we get there?

The truth is that it's going to take serious changes to our current ladder culture, especially to the way we as a society think about work and career building, for a lattice lifestyle to be possible for a significant chunk of people. We're not there yet. Not even close.

In Europe, especially in Scandinavia, whole societies are increasingly working together to make a lattice culture possible. The government guarantees generous leaves and employers support these leaves with their own, internal policies. In France, freelancers pay into an unemployment fund, so that when they experience gaps in employment they too have a safety net.

Leaving the Gold Watch Behind: Employment Reform

The Corporate Ladder vs. The Lattice CultureIn the US, we're still scrambling. We still live in a ladder world. But in a society where gold watches and 40 years in one company are rarities rather than norms, where people jump from job to job, and perhaps from field to field, where innovation and risk-taking are key to success, the ladder is outdated. The lattice is the present and future.

Without a doubt, the US needs employment reform: universal health care, paid parental leave, sick leave and vacation policies would be a good start. But until our society gets its act together and offers workers and families those basic building blocks of a lattice lifestyle, individuals are going to have to make it work themselves. There is no blueprint for this. But after researching the hell out of these questions, and interviewing students as well as young and seasoned professionals, we've come up with some basic advice.

How To Get on the Lattice

  1. Become educated about the realities of the workplace and the career you would like for yourself. Research the hours and conditions required of the particular career you're interested in and weigh that against what you want for your personal life. Talk to people you admire. Ask them about the challenges; ask them about how they balance their work and family lives practically and emotionally.

  2. Decide what is really important to you — whether it's being geographically mobile, working in the outdoors, having control over your time, being in a position of power, being a very present part of your children's lives or living lavishly. Make sure you know what it is you want so that you don't find yourself, ten years down the line, with a life that doesn't fit you.

  3. Talk openly with your partner early on about all the tricky stuff — what you expect from one another, who's going to do what and earn what. Love may not be enough if you find out, too far down the line, that your spouse has wildly different expectations when it comes to division of responsibilities at home.

  4. Don't be afraid to ask. Do your research, make a good case, and you may be surprised how much your employer will be willing to accommodate. You create value, and employers really are loath to lose a solid worker. Workplace culture can change. But it will take a critical mass of employees demanding more flexibility.

This article was originally published (in its entirety) on Shareable.net

©2012 CommonSource.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
New Society Publishers. http://newsociety.com


This article was adapted with permission from the book:

Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis
edited by Malcolm Harris, Neal Gorenflo.

Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis edited by Malcolm Harris, Neal Gorenflo.As a call-to-action, "share or die" refers to finding the common sense ideas and practices needed to not only merely survive, but to build a place where it's worth living. From urban Detroit to central Amsterdam, and from worker co-operatives to nomadic communities, an astonishing variety of recent graduates and twenty-something experimenters are finding (and sharing) their own answers to negotiating the new economic order. Their visions of a shared future include: * Collaborative consumption networks instead of private ownership * Replacing the corporate ladder with a "lattice lifestyle" * Do-it-yourself higher education.

Click here for more info and/or to order this book.


About the Authors

Liz Kofman and Astri Von Arbin AhlanderLiz Kofman and Astri Von Arbin Ahlander are two twenty-somethings who joined the real world armed with diplomas worth a combined half million dollars from Middlebury College — only to find out that they didn’t have a clue. No one prepared them for the inflexibility of the whole workplace set-up. No one warned them that the Mommies were at War, or that employers still assumed men were okay seeing their kids every other week, or that the U.S. doesn’t guarantee paid parental leave, vacation, or sick leave. In 2007, they started a non-profit called The Lattice Group, which aims to bring awareness about work-life issues to young people.

Astri von Arbin Ahlander is a writer and translator whose most recent work includes translating the Swedish bestseller “Easy Money” (“Snabba Cash”) into English. She’s finishing an M.F.A. at Columbia University, where she teaches creative writing. She also runs The Days of Yore, a website that interviews successful artists about the time before their breakthrough.

Yelizavetta Kofman (Liz) is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Sociology at UCLA. She graduated from Middlebury College with a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology.