Higgins: Some organizations create much stronger imprints than others.

Photo by Tracy Powell

How the early years on the job make a lasting imprint Associate Professor Monica Higgins’s interest in the relational context in which careers are shaped led to her study of the career paths of over 3,000 executives who took biotech firms public between 1979 and 1996. Her new book, Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry (Jossey-Bass), analyzes and draws lessons from the factors that made one company — Baxter International — a standout in producing young managers who would go on to shape the burgeoning U.S. biotech industry.

At HBS, Higgins currently teaches Self-Assessment and Career Development in the MBA curriculum and Strategic Human Resource Management in the Executive Education Program.

What is a career imprint?

Organizational career imprinting refers to a particular set of capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognition that individuals acquire or cultivate by virtue of working at a company during a particular period of time. It’s organization-specific as well as time-specific.

Do all organizations leave an imprint?

They probably do, but some are much stronger than others. Certain conditions favor imprinting. Consider companies that have the following characteristics: distinctive corporate cultures, strategies, and structures, with large cohorts of young managers who are hired at roughly the same time and who subsequently share similar work experiences. Firms like that leave strong career imprints.

Your book contrasts the organizational factors that influenced young managers who worked at Baxter and Abbott in the 1970s and ’80s. What were some key differences?

Both companies hired relatively large numbers of young MBAs, but their initial work experiences were very different.

Baxter people worked first as assistants to senior managers and then were put into project-based assignments where they learned about different parts of the company. Within a couple of years, they were given responsibility for running their own operations all over the world — almost like mini-CEOs. They became skilled at watching the bottom line, managing scarce resources, and forming relationships with government and business organizations outside the company.

At Abbott, young MBAs most often were placed in sales. As a result, they developed deep functional expertise and excelled at selling and at creating relationships with customers. They developed expertise-based efficacy around the company’s product.

How did those imprints influence the careers of these young managers?

When people left those companies, they were likely to select or be selected for very different types of assignments. In the 1980s, biotechnology was a fledgling field. The scientists who were making breakthroughs and their venture capitalists needed businesspeople who were entrepreneurial and who could piece together an organization without a lot of resources. Those were the Baxter people. The Abbott managers had lots of experience with sales, but at that stage, many of the biotech companies didn’t even have a product.

So as the industry evolved, Baxter alumni were disproportionately represented in top leadership positions. Almost a quarter of the biotech firms that went public between 1979 and 1996 had someone on their IPO team who once worked at Baxter. Abbott people were in management, but, on average, it took them longer to get to the top, in part because they didn’t have as much prior general management experience.

Are some managers more susceptible to imprinting than others?

Yes, although it’s more related to age and career stage than personality. There’s lots of research on the psychological importance of beginnings. Your early career is where you really prove yourself. When you start out at a new organization, that first year or two is incredibly important. You are totally engaged. Your personal accountability is laid on the line, and the anxiety level is likely to be quite high, as is the amount of social reinforcement for doing well.

How much of imprinting can be attributed to the relationships that are formed with colleagues?

Organizational imprinting is more likely to be strong when there is a lot of social reinforcement and a strong corporate culture, which was certainly the case at Baxter, as well as at many other kinds of companies today that hire large cohorts of young MBAs. If you’re new to your job and you see your colleagues using a certain complement of skills — and getting rewarded for it — then you are likely to want to get to know them better and to learn from their success. Those lessons and relationships are likely to stick with you and be influential throughout your career.

Do you think most managers know that they carry an organizational imprint?

When I talk to people about this, there usually is an immediate recognition that certain organizational experiences — especially during early career — have shaped them. Understanding what, exactly, that career imprint is takes further reflection.

How should managers use this idea?

It depends on where you are in your career. One consideration, which I talk about with the students in my Self-Assessment and Career Development course, has to do with choosing the first company you work for. You might know you want a job in marketing, but similar job titles in Company A and Company B could leave you with a very different set of competencies, connections, and ways of thinking about management. You need to look beyond functional areas and try to discern companies’ managerial practices and patterns, as well as how they are viewed by others in their industry. That can have a huge impact on how you will be judged when you are ready to move on.

Are there lessons for more seasoned managers?

There are certainly implications for hiring. Bringing in a lot of people with the same organizational career imprint makes it more likely that they will all speak the same corporate language and share similar approaches to problem solving. That can be useful, but the downside is that you probably won’t get the kind of cognitive flexibility you need to build an effective top management team.

For senior executives, it is also important to recognize that they bring career imprints with them when they join a new organization. Further, they have the power to shape that new organization’s career imprint. So executives need to be alert as to whether it is constructive to impose an old career imprint on a new organization.

— Deborah Blagg