The Decaying Orbit

My last post suggested that careers follow a natural curve of maturity, decline, and renewal rather than follow a linearly progressive curve, which is the more common conceit. The linear growth progression is an artificial construct we superimpose on the natural rhythms of human development.

Closely tied to this is an idea that as a person navigates his or her progression up the career ladder, management skills become increasingly important. This is of a piece with the idea of linear progression: the higher up you go, the more time a person spends controlling and directing others, and increasingly less time is spent making an individual contribution. I disagree on both counts.

Consider an individual's growth as a human being, starting from the first days in the cradle. We all start life completely focused on the self. An infant only focuses on objects outside himself so that he can meet his own basic needs: influencing a care giver to feed him, keep him comfortable, touch and hold him. With time, he differentiates between the people most important to him (the people who meet his needs daily) and everyone else. He strives to control the environment around him, primarily by influencing those people who can help him control it. By school-age, the individual is learning self-control, and how to influence people outside his family so that he can control his environment. Eventually, the individual expands his world to care about those he does not know personally. Over time, the individual's world expands outward by degrees, and in this process affects his relationship and responsibility to the world in concentric circles around him. Graphically, it looks something like this:


But imagine if you will that each of these circles is actually a 3-dimensional sphere comprising a world relative to the individual, who is the point at the center of it all. Of course, each sphere or world can exist without that individual; this is simply the view from the individual, looking out beyond himself. Only the world of self is entirely dependent on that individual.

A person can manage himself, because that world begins and ends with him. He and only he can direct and control his actions. Although we like to think we can manage others, we can really only influence them; they control their muscles and thoughts, ultimately. Although parents are advised to control or manage their children, in reality parenting consists of setting limits to keep a child within the sphere in which the child can control herself. That's what a time out is all about: remove the child from the sphere where she is acting out, returning her to the sphere of her self so that she is able to regain control of herself. As the child matures, the time out evolves into being grounded. These are similar methods to assist a child to learn self-management, which is essential for becoming socialized.

Self-management is also important in the workplace. It becomes less significant as responsibilities increase, but only because the individual must be highly competent in self-management in order to gain additional responsibilities. As a person is promoted to a position in which she is responsible for the work of others, we call that person a manager. However, the most important role that person plays is to influence others, less than to manage them (if manage means control and direct). Someone who has hundreds or thousands of employees underneath him on an organizational chart can't be said to manage that many people. I can only be puzzled by resumes that claim "250 direct reports" -- just what does that mean? But even with a smaller number of direct reports: what does it mean to 'manage' them? If manage means to control and direct their actions: how is this possible?

I recall a discussion with an employee a number of years ago. He was a senior manager who led a technology team, and I knew he was unhappy. I sought the meeting to learn what was amiss. I explained to him that his success was important to me, and asked how I could be a better support for him. After a bit of talking around it, he finally blurted out, "What kind of manager are you? You aren't managing me!" Whatever I expected to hear, that was not it. This was a professional whose job description gave him significant latitude in directing his team and creating their product line. I had assumed he enjoyed that latitude. Although he didn't want me to boss him around, he was put off by my not even attempting to. We finally agreed upon some structural changes in our relationship, but I couldn't agree to do what only he could do: manage himself. I did learn, however, that the influencing skills that were working well with others in the division were less effective in working with him. I had stepped into a sphere I hadn't understood, and stumbled because I didn't recognize the difference. I had to become a novice again, with this employee, to gain a firmer footing so that I could support his success.

Influence is not a single skill or set of skills. It is less about you, and more about the sphere you are trying to influence. As one's career progresses, the spheres you encounter change in size and in kind. They change with the culture of the population within the sphere -- both the corporate culture and the varied cultures employees bring to their jobs. The sphere is impacted by changes in markets and economies. Therefore, you can never feel that you have finally achieved the skill of influence; this learning is continual.

As one's career progresses and an individual is increasingly more responsible for company outcomes, a couple of things happen. Influence becomes significantly more important, if only because the populations to be influenced become more varied and disparate. At the same time, one has an increasing opportunity to influence in an individualistic way. Although we talk about individual contributors as either professionals or non-management employees, no one is more an individual contributor than the top executive of an organization. That person has a unique opportunity to shape the culture, relationships, and outcomes for employees and customers so that they are entirely aligned with his or her personal vision. Paradoxically, as an individual's influence increases, that influence is both more personal and more outward-focused. Learning how to balance both ends of this paradox is extremely difficult: too much of one or the other can result in executives who are, in the extremes, either self-absorbed bullies or hollow shills.

So, if we superimpose these two concepts together, what do we have?




Each ring of the concentric circles indicates a new sphere of influence. It can be a different population -- assuming leadership of a new group, for instance -- but it can also be a population that has changed. Leading a company in the midst of a great recession is different from leading during a boom period, for instance. With time comes change, and although some behaviors will continue to be successful, others will not. It is at this point that the maturity of your skill set will start to show its limitations, and if you anticipate the cycle, you can start to understand what the spheres you have entered into require of you that was different. Your orbit is decaying; you will need to re-launch.

This is, I think, a more naturalistic perspective on career development. As a metaphor, it more closely reflects the human dynamics of learning and leading than do the popular notions of management and career progression. Most importantly, it is inclusive rather than exclusive: it suggests but does not proscribe. It is a metaphor of possibility that embraces failure because it enables learning and innovation. It is forgiving (don't expect yourself to be perfect all the time) and yet it is demanding (don't rest on your laurels...).

In my next post, I will move from the theoretical to the practical: so what does this look like in real life, and how could it make a difference?

Up the Down Career Ladder

A young professional recently spoke to me about the unexpected turns his career had taken. Like many, he expected in his early 20s to be able to plot a course and follow that path. It’s easy to see how this happens. Career counseling often inspires young people to assume that planning a career is similar to working out a degree plan. Sign up for the courses, do the work, you get the degree. It’s sometimes a shock to learn life isn’t quite like that.

Once in the work force, young ambitious professionals can grow accustomed to being promoted fairly frequently. They can begin to assume that staying in the same job is equivalent to stagnation, which can derail your career plan. This colleague recognized that despite the fact that he was well off the path he previously thought he his career would take, he recognized this change of course had allowed him to acquire new levels of technical proficiency and develop professionally. But, the fact that he was off-road from the career path of his 20-year old self was nagging at him.

The metaphors we use to frame our life stories can limit or expand our lives. The popular metaphor of a career ladder is particularly limiting. In this frame, one’s career is supposed to look like this:

Each new position moves the individual upward toward the pinnacle, at which point one retires at the top of one’s game. During his work life, when an individual is offered a new position he must consider if that offer is incrementally higher than the last position. A lateral move – much less a ‘backward’ move – can be troubling: how will it look on the resume? For business people, the resume has become the repository of one’s life story, and by every (unwritten) business rule book, that story needs to approximate the plotted line above.

However, this is at odds with the way businesses view their own life cycles. Businesses really don’t expect their products or companies to follow that same linear progression. Rather, the received wisdom is that products and companies follow a maturity curve that looks kind of like this:

What the business does at the point in the shaded area, when it has reached maturity, is critical. This stage requires innovation or reinvention, since the current model is unsustainable. As the company embarks on innovation, it will continue its downward slope until the new model gains legs and the growth curve is restarted. Failure to recognize the maturity decline can be terminal. Although re-invention is risky, it’s less so than the status quo.

Businesses not only accept this life cycle model; the better-run businesses keep watch for signs of maturity in the market or their products, so that they are able to start the renewal cycle as early in the decline as possible.

And yet, professional development is in reality no more linear: it has a natural growth and maturity curve. Young managers typically hit the first ‘decline’ upon assuming their first real management roles. Promoted for technical competency, the new manager must now achieve results through others. First-time managers find that being ‘hands on’ and modeling the behaviors they seek from their employees don’t suffice to change others’ behaviors. The manager’s skills as an individual producer, now in their maturity, begin to drag on the upward curve of the manager’s development. The individual’s career will continue to decline unless the manager learns new skills, becoming a novice once again. Soft skills are generally harder to learn than technical skills, especially if you’re expected to learn these on your own. The manager, who previously had been proud of his accomplishments, can start to feel frustrated, as he’s expected to know how to do things for which he has no preparation. Failing to perceive the inevitable maturity decline is just as risky for the individual as for a business: it can result not in the expected plateau, but rather a downward spiral.

First-time managers are not unique in experiencing this curve; it recurs through an individual’s professional life, and the stakes grow larger over time as the safety nets grow weaker. Many businesses recognize the risk to their entry-level managers and provide them with supervisory training (minimally) and targeted development programs (optimally). But senior executives are expected to be on top of their game – how much tolerance is given for a maturity decline in professional growth to these individuals? Much money is spent on executive coaching, to be sure, within the context of fine-tuning the executive’s skills, not the wholesale reinvention of the executive’s skills. The life cycle maturity curve demands not just tweaking but reinvention. The horse-and-carriage industry didn’t need a tweaked buggy whip when Henry Ford was increasing production; they needed to get into the auto parts business.

Considering one’s own life work within the context of maturity life cycles, we should expect to experience many reinventions over the span of a career, however desparately we pretend to manifest the classic ladder-like career progression. I’ve read a lot of resumes over the years, and inevitably those life stories with obvious reinventions are shoehorned into something that can pass for a linear progression. I imagine what it might be like to read a resume like this:

2001 – 2003: Assistant Manager, Acme Corp.

Oversaw double-digit production and revenue increases by implementing a management by objectives (MBO) program.

2003 – 2004: Manager, Acme Corp

Soon after my promotion, I realized that year-on-year increases were not sustainable, particularly when we lost several key producers due to over-leveraging the MBO program. After two quarters of losses, I accepted the fact that the division needed me to be a different leader. After listening to the 360 feedback from my production team, I undertook a year of rebuilding my leadership and our team’s foundations. The year ended in a slight loss from prior year. This investment led to a phenomenal 2005 fiscal year, as measured not only by the P&L but also in employee retention and engagement.

Unfortunately, the same person’s resume is more likely to look like this:

2001 – 2003: Assistant Manager, Acme Corp.

Oversaw double-digit production and revenue increases by implementing a management by objectives program.

2003 – 2005: Manager, Acme Corp

Under my management, Acme’s production division drove unprecedented profits and revenue.

Typical wisdom is that the resume should market an individual, and therefore it is no place to acknowledge awareness of limitations or failures. For some reason, businesses think it’s in their best interest to hire only people who best convince them of their infallibility – those who exemplify the linearly progressing career. Following this logic, Barings Bank would have considered itself fortunate in 1989 to hire Nicholas Leeson, whose lessons in failure ended up costing Barings over £200 million. Barings’ loss was of course a spectacular debacle played out on the world wide stage. Yet a simple truth connects that experience to one that is universal: everything in the natural world exhibits inevitable patterns of decay and renewal. Don’t expect an artificial pattern from natural elements.

In my next post, I’ll explore an alternative that allows us to view progression in a more rewarding framework. I invite your comments.

Introducing SPC (and Relationships) into Health Care

The Sunday NY Times Magazine's cover story ("Dr James Will Make It Better", by David Leonhardt) was a fascinating look at something called 'evidence based care.' Dr. Brent James has introduced measurement into the hospital system where he works, and it sounds much like statistical process control (SPC), which has been the foundation for continuous, radical improvements in manufacturing and service industries for decades. Although I've read of other hospital systems that have used lean principles to reduce error and costs, this article implies that it's revolutionary for doctors to change the way they administer medicine based on data-based protocols. Although as a patient you may respect your doctor because of his scientific expertise, apparently many doctors have a deeply held belief that their greatest value derives from intuition. One doctor put it this way:

“I thought there wasn’t anybody better in the world at twiddling the knobs than I was,” Jim Orme, a critical-care doctor, told me later, “so I was skeptical that any protocol generated by a group of people could do better.”

This kind of thinking led to extreme variation in ventilator settings, which had less than optimal outcomes for patients. A group of doctors used data to establish a protocol that James introduced as 'defaults' to the doctors in his hospitals. The soft approach worked:

The crucial thing about the protocol was that it reduced the variation in what the doctors did. That, in turn, allowed Morris and James to isolate the aspects of treatment that made a difference. There was no way to do that when the doctors were treating patients in dozens of different ways. James has a provocative way of describing his method to doctors: “Guys, it’s more important that you do it the same way than what you think is the right way.”

Although I found myself troubled by the revelation that doctors often make their most critical decisions for a patient (what medicine, when, and how much) based on SWAG, I suppose I am to admire scientists such as Dr. James applying well-established process improvement techniques to remove variability and improve patient outcomes (often called 'life'). This reminds me of the insights I discovered in the book "Sway" (Brafman and Brafman): humans tend to go to their gut instincts especially when the risks are high, rather than use facts and logic to guide them.

As I contemplate where 'evidence based care' might take us (robotized treatment centers?), I am reminded of an interesting viewpoint from a doctor who approaches her job dramatically differently from the 'doc in a box' industry. The Nov 2009 issue of The Sun Magazine offers an interview with Dr. Pamela Wible of Oregon (see print version for complete text). She found the 'assembly line' practice in a clinic dehumanizing to her and to her patients, and so she went solo, and reshaped her job to support a strong relationship with each of her patients. She treats the person, not simply the part of the person that needs healing. She says, "I've reduced costs by humanizing the experience. People want to be cared for, which doesn't necessarily require lab work or MRIs." How she defines her work is this: "The most important therapy I deliver is a human relationship. I'm not doing anything controversial or woo-woo. I never thought of myself as practicing alternative medicine until a colleague pointed out that spending time with patients is now "alternative."'

I think it's possible to provide evidence-based care within the context of human relationships. The fact that Dr. James introduced data-based protocols initially as 'defaults' implies that he understood the importance of relationships in gaining buy-in and necessary feedback to improve the process and therefore the patient outcomes. He needed doctors like Jim Orme to enroll themselves in the process for the protocols to be used and tested. He couldn't achieve that without understanding the impacts on his relationship with these doctors.

Dr. Wible conducted eight community forums before opening her practice. She heard from her community what they needed from their health care provider. She used this data to design her practice. The three priorities for her community were: human respect; simplification; payment. I don't think her community is much different from most; these seem both basic and intuitive. The disconnect between customers and the health care industry on what customers value is wide and deep: consider the ubiquitous drug and hospital advertising that focuses on technology, complexity, and consumption.

I'm encouraged to hear different perspectives on how to transform health care and produce better results for more people. Neither viewpoint is comprehensive: yes, evidence based care is preferable to gut instinct, but doctors must care for people, not statistics. Yes, it's helpful for the doctor to listen to her patient and inquire into the patient's nutrition and home life, but science must also be applied to extend healing beyond what a lay person can do on her own. Business has long believed that the only way to reduce costs is to mass-produce and cheapen the product. These two stories illustrate that higher quality and personalization are not only preferable, but can also reduce costs and improve lives.