What Students Can Learn From Workplace Hierarchies

Students at the California State University Maritime Academy and the Culinary Institute of America learn in a highly unusual environment that is both hierarchical and structured.

They wear uniforms — white coats and tall chef’s hats at CIA, khaki shirts and trousers at Cal Maritime — and they must follow strict grooming standards. The students are stratified according to ability and experience, sometimes with titles denoting their ranks in teams. And when told to do something by an instructor or higher-ranking colleague, they often respond with deference: “Yes, captain,” they might say, or “Yes, chef.”

All of that is strikingly different from norms in most of higher education, where students are allowed — even encouraged — to dress how they want, say what they want, and openly question and criticize authority figures.

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After writing recently about Cal-Maritime and CIA for The Chronicle, I was curious about how hierarchical and nonhierarchical learning environments translate to the work world. Do students at such institutions get better training in how to interact with managers and bosses at their subsequent jobs? Or does a hierarchical learning environment stifle free thinking and creativity, now considered valuable attributes in the work force?

Those are particularly relevant questions for the latest generation of graduates. It’s not uncommon to hear managers paint younger workers with unflattering stereotypes — that they buck against authority, demand unusual work arrangements, and want a corner office before they really deserve it.

It’s a complicated topic because hierarchy doesn’t take one form in the job market. Some companies are highly stratified, while others have adopted some of the latest trends in management, like “flat” or “egalitarian” structures, which do away with middle managers and have more-fluid interactions between executives and employees.

A Ruse

Some scholars argue that a hierarchical environment at, say, a culinary school is more of a true reflection of how companies really work. Dan Charnas, a journalism professor at New York University who has written extensively about the management style of chefs, says the new egalitarian approaches in corporations are trying to imitate the free-form exchange of ideas that you find in an academic environment.

But that’s a bit of a ruse. “There’s a lot of bull, malarkey, going on in corporate America when we try to pretend that we’re equals,” he says. Think of the boss who asks his employees for input on an idea or direction but, in the end, goes ahead with the plan that he wanted to execute all along. “We’re all friends here, right?” says Mr. Charnas sarcastically. In saying “Yes, chef,” a cook acknowledges the hierarchy: “No, we work for you, boss.”

The Culinary Institute and the Maritime Academy, he says, are just more honest about the structure, which is helpful for both accountability and the division of labor.

If you visit a restaurant kitchen, Mr. Charnas points out, you’ll often see a chef standing at a counter, expediting orders among his line cooks. That chef is managing the flow of work, making sure no cook is overwhelmed. He has earned that position through his mastery of the craft of cooking, but he is also ultimately responsible if the kitchen falls into disarray. The buck stops with the chef, the boss.

“That is something that is lost in academe currently, where you do your own thing and everyone’s equal,” Mr. Charnas says. Colleges don’t spend enough time teaching students to respond to a hierarchy or to manage time or resources. “Those things are taught on Day 1 at CIA,” he says, but at other colleges it’s “not taught because it’s almost assumed, in our upper-middle-class or middle-class world, that people already know it.”

To some degree, says Joe C. Magee, an associate professor of management and organizations at NYU, we’re all wired to respond to hierarchy at a basic level.

“Human beings are kind of built to be pretty hierarchical creatures,” a likely artifact of evolution and the pecking orders of the animal world, he says. “Even if you try to suppress it in the workplace, interpersonally and within groups, hierarchies still take shape.”

Different Hierarchies

But as organizations try to adopt more-flattened structures, he says, it’s helpful to understand the different kinds of hierarchies out there, and their value to organizations. One type of hierarchy, he points out, is a “status hierarchy": Workers give leadership to someone who has shown mastery of a field. At a place like the Culinary Institute, the chef-instructors command respect because of their vast experience, but students also create hierarchies based on hard work.

“We all know where everyone stands,” says Daisy Yoo, a CIA student, while taking a lunch break after leading a group of students in a class on appetizers one morning. Ms. Yoo declares herself the second-best student over all in her class — and talented students, she notes, naturally rise to leadership positions. “When you come here, we don’t look at your age, your experience, or where you come from. It’s how good you are in the kitchen, and that determines where you stand.”

However, says Mr. Magee, hierarchies can be “dominance hierarchies,” based on fear and intimidation. The prominence of hotheaded celebrity chefs is no illusion of reality TV; those hierarchies exist in the culinary world as well.

But hierarchies can also be fluid and nuanced. Some take different forms, depending on the size of the organization or its goals. And hierarchies in an organization can assume different shapes as tasks change, says Adam Galinsky, a professor and chair of management at Columbia University’s business school.

A strict hierarchy will be a poor match for work that requires creativity because the best ideas might be squelched. But a more-rigid hierarchy can be suited to work that proceeds in stages, where the tasks are more interdependent.

A design firm like IDEO has very little hierarchy in the idea-generation stage, Mr. Galinsky says, then more hierarchy as the firm takes those ideas to market. Smaller firms and nonprofit organizations tend to be less hierarchical, while bigger companies and for-profit corporations tend to be more stratified.

Some firms, he points out, have tried to dispense with hierarchy, with disastrous results. Four years ago, Zappos, the online shoe retailer, shifted to an organizational style called “holacracy,” in which employees work in self-selected “circles” rather than managed teams.

Some employees found the new structure liberating for devising ideas, but many others complained that it was chaotic and cumbersome. Although managers’ powers were de-emphasized under holacracy, some employees complained that it left a vacuum in which managers maneuvered to cement power. Nearly a third of the company’s staff quit under the new management structure.

From Boredom to Panic

All of which may highlight a paradox in human nature: We complain about hierarchies, about bureaucracy, bosses, and titles. But deep down we like order.

At Cal Maritime, students quickly learn that running a ship on the ocean is a complex, interconnected process in which a sudden emergency can take a sailor from boredom to panic in moments. In times like those, you want a clear chain of command, says John Berg, a 32-year-old who is pursuing a degree in marine transportation — that is, how to pilot a ship — as a second career and his second bachelor’s degree.

His first career was selling surgical equipment after earning a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, but the lessons at Cal Maritime are more practical: Timeliness, he has been taught, is next to godliness. “The ships are not going to wait for you,” he says. The uniform, he says, is an extension of his commitment to professionalism — and, in the case of gear like steel-toed boots, a commitment to safety. In this profession, he says, “people die every year, usually because of human error.”

But he notes that he has also been taught about the maritime world’s escape valves in a hierarchical system: Anyone, from the captain down to the lowliest seaman, can order everyone else to stop work if something’s amiss — the diesel generator is about to blow, say, or the pilot is drunk — without fearing reprimand.

Mr. Magee and Mr. Galinsky both say that students, including those outside management and business programs, could use nuanced lessons about what hierarchy is, how it works in an organization, and how students can navigate a path up the ladder in their first jobs.

“Colleges,” Mr. Galinsky says, “need to do a better job of helping their students prepare for a work force that is going to be more hierarchical than their college experience.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.