Sooner or later every manager is asked the question “Where do I go from here?” The employee wants to grow. He wants to earn more money, to gain more prestige. He is bored, underutilized, deserves more responsibility. Whatever his reasons, the employee wants to move up and wants you to help.
What should you tell him? Should you help him get promoted? Should you tell him to talk to Human Resources? Should you say that all you can do is put in a good word for him? What is the right answer?
There is no right answer—any one of these answers might be the right one, depending on the situation. However, there is a right way to approach this question—namely, help each person find the right fit. Help each person find roles that ask him to do more and more of what he is naturally wired to do. Help each person find roles where her unique combination of strengths—her skills, knowledge and talents— match the distinct demands of the role.
For one employee, this might mean promotion to a supervisor role. For another employee, this might mean termination. For another, it might mean encouraging him to grow within his current role. For yet another, it might mean moving her back into her previous role. These are very different answers, some of which might be decidedly unpopular with the employee. Nonetheless, no matter how bitter the pill, great managers stick to their goal: Regardless of what the employee wants, the manager’s responsibility is to steer the employee toward roles where the employee has the greatest chance of success.
On paper this sounds straightforward; but as you can imagine, it proves to be a great deal more challenging in the real world. This is primarily because, in the real world, conventional wisdom persuades most of us that the right answer to the question “Where do I go from here?” is “Up.”
Careers, conventional wisdom advises, should follow a prescribed path: You begin in a lowly individual contributor role. You gain some expertise and so are promoted to a slightly more stretching, slightly less menial individual contributor role. Next you are promoted to supervise other individual contributors. Then, blessed with good performance, good fortune, and good contacts, you climb up and up, until you can barely remember what the individual contributors do at all.
Laurence Peter warned us that if we followed this path without question, we would wind up promoting each person to his level of incompetence. It was true then. It is true now. Unfortunately, in the intervening years we haven’t succeeded in changing very much. We still think that the most creative way to reward excellence in a role is to promote the person out of it. We still tie pay, perks, and titles to a rung on the ladder: the higher the rung, the greater the pay, the better the perks, the grander the title. Every signal we send tells the employee to look onward and upward. “Don’t stay in your current role for too long,” we advise. “It looks bad on the résumé. Keep pressing, pushing, stretching to take that next step. It’s the only way to get ahead. It’s the only way to get respect.”
These signals, although well intended, place every employee in an extremely precarious position. To earn respect, he knows he must climb. And as he takes each step, he sees that the company is burning the rungs behind him. He cannot retrace his steps, not without being tarred with the failure brush. So he continues his blind, breathless climb to the top, and sooner or later he overreaches. Sooner or later he steps into the wrong role. And there he is trapped. Unwilling to go back, unable to climb up, he clings to his rung until, finally, the company pushes him off.
A Rung too Far
Marc C. was pushed. He was pushed off, down, and out. Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, Marc gazed up at the White House and tried to piece together what had happened.
Two years earlier he had still been living out of his suitcase. As the leading foreign correspondent for a European television station, one week he would find himself in Zaire covering the fall of a dictator, and the next week he would turn up in Chechnya to record the retreat of rebel insurgents. Wherever he went, everyone acknowledged Marc as the master. Somehow he was able to find the center of all the anger and the confusion and extract some meaning from the madness. When armies shelled marketplaces, or snipers picked off civilians on their walk to work, Marc would be found at the scene explaining what happened, why it happened, and what it all meant. To his viewers he was a calming, authoritative presence. They trusted him. So no one was surprised when he was posted to Jerusalem.
On the foreign correspondents’ ladder, Washington is the top rung. It has the most prestige, the most money, and, important, the most airtime. It is the posting everyone wants. But if Washington is number one, then Jerusalem runs a close second. More interesting than the European parliament in Brussels, more important than post–cold war Moscow, Jerusalem is one of the few places where local clashes have such global significance. It is a foreign correspondent’s dream.
In Jerusalem Marc refined his talents. Israel is a small country, and Marc was able to report live from the scene no matter where the action erupted. Israeli settlers protesting the latest peace accords? Marc would be in their midst, marching with them, shouting his report over the noise of the crowd. Palestinian youths hurling paving stones at Israeli troops? Marc would be filmed in one of the narrow side streets, explaining the reasons for their anger simply and clearly. In the overheated climate of the Middle East, Marc became the cool voice of reason.
A year later his European managers offered him the top rung. They offered him the money, the prestige, and the exposure of Washington. Marc loved what he was doing, but there was no way he was going to turn this down. It was the plum job of all reporting assignments. He willingly unpacked his suitcases for the last time and settled in to become the newest, best Washington bureau chief. And very quickly things started to fall apart.
Outside of the occasional titillating scandal, not much happens in Washington—at least not during his tenure. Yes, there might be a presidential veto one week and a filibuster the next, but back in Europe few understand these events and even fewer care. Most of the action is dry and repetitious, important but uninteresting. The Washington bureau chief’s role is to take the tedious business of politics and inject it with heroes and villains, daring triumphs and crushing defeats. His job is to spice things up.
And Marc couldn’t do it. He was brilliant at giving real-life drama a political context. But he was terrible at giving politics the sheen of real- life drama. Marc was surefooted in the aftermath of a mortar attack. But in a town where a State of the Union address was big news, he didn’t know what to do. The stories went begging. His reporting became bland. He was lost.
Back in Europe, his audience turned away. His European managers couldn’t put their finger on it, but they noticed the difference. They stuck with him for a while—he deserved that much—and then they pulled the plug. In six months the hero of Jerusalem had shriveled into the embarrassment in Washington. He was removed.
Marc’s role might seem quite exotic, but his fate is commonplace. In his desire to grow and to please his managers, he kept climbing the ladder until, one day, he climbed one rung too far. Sadly, this happens all the time. In order to gain money, title, and respect, teachers must become administrators. Managers must reach for leadership. Nurses must aspire to be nurse supervisors. Craftsmen must yearn to be managers of other craftsmen. And reporters must yearn to be bureau chiefs. In most companies Marc’s fate awaits us all.
Laurence Peter was right. Most employees are promoted to their level of incompetence. It’s inevitable. It’s built into the system.
It doesn’t have to be this way
This system is flawed, for it is built on three false assumptions.
The first fallacy is that each rung on the ladder represents a slightly more complex version of the previous rung. Consequently, if a person excelled on one rung on the ladder, it is a sure sign that with just a little more training, he will be able to repeat his success on the rung above. The best managers reject this. They know that one rung doesn’t necessarily lead to another.
Second, the conventional career path is condemned to create conflict. By limiting prestige to those few rungs high up on the ladder, it tempts every employee, even the most self-aware, to try to clamber onto the next rung. Each rung is a competition, and since there are fewer rungs than there are employees, each competition generates many more losers than winners. Great managers have a better idea. Why not resolve the conflict by making prestige more available? Why not carve out alternative career paths by conveying meaningful prestige on every role performed at excellence? Why not create heroes in every role?
The third, and most devastating, flaw in the system is its assumption that varied experiences make the employee more attractive. This assumption focuses the employee on hunting for marketable skills and experiences. With these skills and experiences proudly displayed on his résumé, the employee then meekly waits—or aggressively lobbies—to be chosen for the next rung. In this scenario the employee is the supplicant. The manager is the gatekeeper, pushing back the hordes and selecting the attractive ones—the ones with the most skjk and the best experiences—for advancement. Great managers know that this whole scenario is awry. In their view the hunt for marketable skills and experiences should not be the force driving the employee’s career. They envision a different driving force. They have a new career in mind.
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