Macy’s is a company with two executive problems and one solution. On one hand, the company has spent the last ten years recruiting talented, aspiring, young executives from colleges and universities with the promise of providing an environment for them to grow and advance their careers. On the other hand, the company has a large number of tenured executives in their late forties to early sixties who have spent their careers working for the company. Normally this would be an ideal mix of experienced executives to mentor those in the early and middle stages of their development.
What happens when the company stops growing and begins closing stores and downsizing? When an organization begins to focus on cost cutting and expense savings instead of top line growth? Opportunities for advancement begin to disappear, unless you can create them artificially by moving away from performance based evaluations and measures of success and moving towards reviews and expectations predicated on subjective feedback and supervisor opinion. This allows the company to target older executives with subjective goals and metrics like leadership, creativity, and innovation regardless of their actual contributions in more traditional measures of success like sales and profit.
Over the course of the last two years, the number of executives in their late forties and early fifties who have been targeted to “retire” well before retirement age has increased exponentially. The company avoids the possible legal repercussions of this innovative approach to ensuring that younger executives continue to have opportunities, by targeting tenured executives and offering them just enough in the way of severance to get them to sign agreements which prohibit them from seeking legal recourse before they realize how they have been discriminated against. As many recently “retired” executives are learning, it is taking far longer than anticipated for experienced executives to find level appropriate positions at another company.
Given the ongoing cultural changes (at least in the Northwest), if you are a senior or mid-level executive over forty and work at Macy’s you should consider starting to look for other opportunities while you still have a job. Don’t wait for the ax to fall, there is no longer even a guarantee of a job until the first week of January. We are living in a new world and those who don’t adapt to the new climate at Macy’s will face the consequences.