Opening Keynote - The No Club: How Dead-End Work Derails Careers and Ways to Fix That

Laurie Weingart - Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University

Organizations strive to ensure that all employees have access to challenging and rewarding work. However, less attention is paid to how less-challenging work is distributed amongst the workforce. These non-promotable tasks – tasks that help the organization, but do not advance an employee’s career – are crucial to organizational effectiveness but place a burden on those who perform them. Research shows that women, more than men, bear a disproportionate burden of NPTs across jobs and industries, leading to work/work imbalance and career stagnation, and to work overload and burnout. At the same time, organizations suffer because they are not effectively leveraging the skills of their entire workforce.

While it’s easy to blame women for the problem (“women need to learn to say no”), fix-the-women solutions are not the answer. The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work provides ample evidence that organizational and cultural norms drive the imbalance – both in terms of the tendency to ask women to perform this work and expecting them to say yes. And recognizing this root cause points us to implementable managerial solutions that will help to correct the imbalance.

Dr. Weingart, coauthor of The No Club and a professor of organizational behavior, will describe this problem that is hiding in plain sight, discuss what women can do to bring their NPT workload into balance, and present ways leaders and managers can move their organizations towards greater equity in the distribution of NPTs.

Learning Objectives

  1. Recognize characteristics of non-promotable tasks (NPT).
  2. Articulate benefits to an organization when NPT distribution is changed.
  3. Develop ways to create change in the way your organization assigns NPTs.

CPE Available

  • 1 Credit: Personnel/Human Resources