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.