Not long ago, thousands of workers in the US were asked if they fancied the idea of being promoted to the rank of manager. You might have thought they would mostly have said yes. After all, the US is supposed to be the land of opportunity and the entirety of corporate life is founded on the principle that it is better to be on a higher rung of the ladder than on a lower one.

Only they did not say yes at all. A mere third of the workers canvassed by CareerBuilder said being a manager appealed to them. The remaining two-thirds said no thanks, I’d rather stick with the lowly job I have.

Within the numbers were some depressingly predictable variations. For instance, 40 per cent of men wanted to be promoted, against only 29 per cent of women. Less predictably, gays and lesbians turned out to be more ambitious than most, with 44 per cent of LGBT workers wanting to be leaders. I’ve no idea what this proves, except perhaps that having had some success in rolling back homophobia, they are in an optimistic mood.

So why don’t most people want to be managers? More than half of them explained they liked the job they had and therefore saw no reason to change it. This strikes me as an excellent reason. Given that the pyramid is at its widest at the bottom, it is good if lots of people are happy to keep on keeping on. It is only a shame that we are so hooked on the idea of progress, we place so little value on lives spent like this.

About a third of the sample said what put them off were the long hours and the responsibility that went with being a manager – which is also fair enough.

A smaller minority did not want to put themselves up for promotion because they did not have the qualifications. This is the only bad reason given – it is a shame and a waste. There are lots of things that stop people from becoming great managers, but the lack of formal qualifications is hardly ever one of them.

Implicit in all this is a truth that companies try to keep quiet about. Being a middle manager is the most thankless job ever invented. Workers are not idiots – they look at what the people above them are doing, and think: no way.

If anyone still clings to the fantasy that it is going to be nice to be a middle manager, a big study written up last week on the Harvard Business Review website, puts the record straight. It looked at companies that together employ 320,000 workers, and examined the profile of the least happy 5 per cent of them.

The researchers expected to find that these 16,000 miserable workers were mostly downtrodden foot soldiers, or misunderstood cranky geniuses, or the hopelessly incompetent who could be sacked at any minute.

Instead they found the typical profile of the terminally miserable was rather different. They were mostly middle performing, middle managers. They were the ones who were doing perfectly fine and had been working in the company for five to 10 years. In other words, they ought to have been the salt of the earth, or at least the glue that holds the company together.

These managers gave a litany of reasons for their misery: they felt under-appreciated, overworked, not listened to, stuck and full of a sense of meaninglessness. But most of all they complained that the people above them were not up to much.

So what can be done? The authors of the survey blandly conclude that it is all a matter of leadership.

“Every employee deserves a good leader,” they say.

Well yes, but everyone deserves all sorts of things in life that they often do not get, including good health, freedom of speech and three meals a day.

Most of us are not going to get good leadership and, even if we did, it would not help those in the middle very much. Almost all companies are necessarily dysfunctional, and the place that dysfunction hurts most is half way up.

译文仅供参考

不久前，美国数千名企业员工被问到一个问题：他们是否有过希望被提升到经理级别的想法？你可能会认为他们大多应该会回答是。毕竟，美国被认为是机遇之地，而且职场中的一大原则就是，处于阶梯高层比在低层好。

但结果很多人都没有回答是。在凯业必达(CareerBuilder)的调查对象中，仅三分之一的人说，当一名经理对他们有吸引力。其余三分之二的人说：不，我宁愿继续做我的低级别工作。

调查结果显示了一些意料中的差异，令人泄气。例如，40%的男性希望被提拔，而女性中仅29%有此想法。出人意料的是，同性恋者其实比大多数人都更有雄心，44%的LGBT（同性恋、双性恋及变性者）想要成为领导。我不知道这能证明什么，除了或许可以在一定程度上化解对同性恋的恐惧症，因为他们拥有乐观的心态。

那么，为什么大多数人不想成为经理呢？超过一半的人解释说，他们喜欢现在的工作，因此没有理由去换。我认为这是一个极好的理由。鉴于金字塔的底部才是最宽的，如果许多人都乐于继续留在底部，那这是一件好事。只有当我们过于着迷升职，而又认为这种生活没有多少价值的时候，才应感到羞愧。

大约三分之一的受访者说，他们不想升职的原因是当经理工作时间长、责任又大——这也有道理。

有极少一部分人因为没有相关资格而不想为升职做准备。这是唯一糟糕的理由——是一种耻辱和浪费。阻止人们成为伟大的管理者的因素很多，但缺少正规学历永远不是其中之一。

这些数字背后隐含着一个所有公司都尽量避而不谈的事实。担任中层经理是人类有史以来发明的最吃力不讨好的工作。员工们都不是傻瓜——他们看着自己上面的人都在做些什么，心里想：没门儿。

如果还有人继续幻想做一名中层经理是一件很美好的事情，那么近日哈佛商业评论(Harvard Business Review)网站上刊发的一项大型研究报告可以帮助弄清真相。该研究跟踪了总共拥有32万名雇员的多家公司，并剖析这些雇员中最不快乐的5%人群的特征。

研究人员本来以为会发现这1.6万名悲惨工人大都是受压迫的步兵，或是没有得到理解的古怪天才，或是随时会被解雇的无望的无能力者。

相反，他们发现这些特别不快乐的员工的典型特征与想象的迥然不同。他们大多是业绩中等的中层管理人员。他们工作表现很好，并已为公司工作5至10年。换言之，他们理应是公司的中坚力量，或者至少是能使公司上下团结的粘合剂。

这些经理给出了让他们苦恼的一系列原因：他们认为自己的能力被低估，工作过度劳累，意见没有被听取，职业发展停滞以及感觉工作毫无意义。尤其是，他们抱怨自己的上级也不怎么样。

那么，我们能做些什么呢？该调查的作者冷静地得出结论：这完全是领导的问题。

“每个员工都应该有一位好领导，”他们说。

嗯，是的，但每个人也都应该得到生活中各种各样的事物，包括身体健康、言论自由和一日三餐，但常常无法如愿。

我们大多数人都没有好的领导，即使有了，对那些中层管理者来说也不会有多大帮助。几乎所有的企业都会存在功能失灵问题，而受功能失灵伤害最大的就是中层经理。

我所知道的那些最讨厌自己工作的人，全都被卡在这个位置。他们的工作就是执行他人做出的糟糕决定。他们还要为不是自己的过错承担责任。他们既无法升职，也退不下来。他们比任何人都更多地遭受办公室政治风暴的冲击。这不是好事情。
真正的问题不是在顶层，而是在底部。问题在于如何说服勤奋出色的员工：争取升职是值得尝试的。鉴于升职的过程是那么的糟糕，看到那些踏上这条路并走到顶层的人经常大发雷霆就不足为怪了。此外，一些人如果身处顶层可能会做得更好，但他们依旧呆在底层，他们只是明智地拒绝向上爬而已。