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, he
deserves more responsibility. Whatever his reasons, the employee
wants to move up and he 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 his unique combination of
strengths -- his skills, his knowledge and his 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 him back into his
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.
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. And 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.
In 1969, in his book, The Peter Principle, 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. But, 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 resume. 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 onto his rung until, finally, the company pushes him
off.
Other articles in this series: The Four Keys of Great
Management, How Great Managers Define Talent, Managing by Remote
Control, and Releasing Each Person's Potential.