Most People Don’t Want to Be Managers: But if you're young, gay, black, or a man, the odds are higher that you do; Harvard Business Review, 9/18/14

Nicole Torres, Harvard Business Review; Most People Don’t Want to Be Managers: But if you're young, gay, black, or a man, the odds are higher that you do:

"Of the thousands surveyed, only about one-third of workers (34%) said they aspire to leadership positions – and just 7% strive for C-level management (the rest said they aspire to middle-management or department-head roles). Broken down further, the results show that more men (40%) hope to have a leadership role than women (29%), and that African Americans (39%) and LGBT workers (44%) are more likely to want to climb the corporate ladder than the national average.

The online survey polled a nationwide sample of 3,625 full-time workers in government and the private sector, across salary levels, industries, and company sizes. It’s the first time CareerBuilder has asked about leadership aspirations in a worker survey (they now plan to track it semi-annually or annually), so we don’t know if these numbers signal an increase in people who don’t want to be leaders. But past research shows this sentiment is nothing new. Many people don’t want their boss’s job – for reasons that range from generational differences to being happy in their current positions to concerns about responsibility and work-life balance.

And even without these issues, leading others is – and has always been – just really, really hard. Managers have the inherently alienating task of balancing conflicting interests of the worker and the corporation, as a young Warren Bennis summed up in 1961. So it’s no wonder there are more people who dislike being in charge than people who like it."