We Reap What We Sow

One of the most painful long-term effects of the recession has been the difficulty for young people to find the right job early in their career. This is certainly a profound problem in places like Spain and Greece, but is very much an issue in the United States as well.

Think back to your first “real” job(s) after school. Likely you found yourself learning more in a shorter period of time then you did in school. Probably you came into contact with older people who had been very successful in your chosen field, and you picked up on their habits.

In short, those first jobs formed a deep imprint on your career.

In my career of working with financial institutions, I can confidently say that the regulatory burden on banks today is unprecedented. I do not want to write about why that is, or whether the banks had it coming, or if it is fair or not. What I want to think about is this: how will this hyper-compliance culture impact our workforce, and our industries, in the future?

Consider the following:

• Young workers are finding it difficult to landing a professionally-enriching and challenging first job.
• Banks are increasingly hiring for a heavy-regulatory world. As a matter of fact, JPMC, a bank that is under regulatory onslaught and has thousands of workers consumed with compliance already, recently announced plans to spend an additional $4B and commit 5,000 extra employees to work on risk and compliance issues. Consider that number. 5,000 extra employees being hired to answer questions posed by a number of different regulatory agencies.
• History will generally show that once you impose regulatory oversight, it rarely goes away.

I’m using banks as an example here, but few of us are unaffected by increased regulation in our industries.

Many of us have built our careers upon the risk takers and innovators who came before us. We took their gifts, built upon them with our own efforts, and were surrounded by a spirit of building, a spirit of growth.

Young job seekers today will flock to where the jobs are, and increasingly the jobs are about enforcing regulation or assuring compliance.

How will these first career-forming jobs affect workers once they are in the middle years of their careers? Will we have a generation of builders, or a generation of box-checkers? Will companies reward people who say yes, or reward people who say no? As the “no” people ascend in their respective hierarchies, will they hire risk-takers, or risk-avoiders? How will this impact companies? Industries? Countries?

These are all important questions. Since I’m an optimist, I think the innovators and creators will always succeed, but as leaders we need to be aware of how the culture is changing, and make sure we continue to set our own paths.