Many organisations fail to support personal growth when you progress in your career. Instead, the path gets narrower until it becomes stifling. Something has to change.
As you progress in your career, your teams, budgets and responsibilities grow. You can make more decisions, have more access to different leaders and networks, can decide how you get work done and when, and can shape an organisational culture, and reap all benefits of personal growth.
Except that in many organisations, you can’t.
The reality is often that you end up spending most of your time and energy stuck in between various leadership battles, dealing with bosses and staff who all want to claim they hold budget lines and manage all staff themselves. You’re slapped on the fingers for trying to make changes, and shown your place when you thought you were entitled to make decisions, no matter how small.
You’re sometimes stuck in the void of middle management meaninglessness, and left only with the hope that if you make it even higher, you’ll finally get to make those decisions, have more freedoms, be able to shape the culture….
The triangle narrows at the top
Everyone knows that competition at the top levels is fierce. The air gets thinner, and there are simply not that many leadership jobs out there, for a large pool of people who’d like to have them.
But there’s very little out there that prepares you for what these leadership steps mean in practice. The triangle gets thinner in other ways too. You don’t have time and are no longer allowed to “do work”, because you become responsible for managing people who do this work. You then become responsible for the managers.
And at all levels, everyone wants to do things, wants to gain more responsibility, and wants to shape things. What’s left for you to do?
Too many leaders slip into excessive micro-management at this point. They crave to do what they did when they produced concrete outputs. They want to be part of the team. They want to discuss and decide budget details, statements, and visuals. They de facto want to be part of the bottom of the pyramid again, with the exception that they get ten-fold the pay, and can use the “boss card” whenever it suits them.
Why leaders need to be supported in seeing their progress in an inverse triangle
The image below on the left exemplifies this pull to revert back to what other people in a team should be doing. In such a situation, it quickly becomes clear that no-one is leading, and everyone is battling to do the “doing”.
The image on the right side is what should be happening. As your career progresses, your opportunities grow, and you progress, both in your responsibilities but also your personal growth. You allow those staff members who are expected to do things – well – to do those things, and don’t micro-manage. You lead and clear the way for people to get their jobs done well, and in a healthy working environment.
What needs to change
Careers that include not only more pay and fancier titles, but also growth, require a number of things.
Most importantly, the right people need to progress and take on leadership roles. If a manager or leader is only interested in nitty-gritty issues or doing all of the actual work, they shouldn’t be managing teams or leading organisations. Someone needs to manage and lead teams, and if a manager or leader is too busy in their comfort zone (left triangle), the result is usually competition and chaos.
Equally importantly, there needs to be clear division of responsibilities. Who prepares plans and decisions, who gives feedback on these, who makes a final decision? What issues get taken to the next hierarchy level, and what is only tackled at a higher hierarchy level? The larger the team and organisation, the less can keep going up and to the top, simply because that route will otherwise become a disastrous bottle neck.
Third, organisations need to allow space for their leaders to lead. Too many organisations keep rotating leadership levels as if managers and leaders were just cogs in a machine, all doing the same things, the same way. They stifle any freedom to suggest changes or improvements, or to do things in a different way. They are hugely risk averse, and treat managers and leaders as if they were work horses, not creative, intelligent, experienced people.
Final thoughts
Some leaders are not interested in growth, increasing their responsibility, or shaping organisational cultures. Some are there simply for higher pay, status, and ego.
But for everyone who is interested in a broader definition of career progress, give some thought to the above. Where have the above challenges been the norm, and felt disappointing and stifling as you have progressed in your career, or seen others progress? Where has a step upwards actually felt like progress, not like a disappointment?
There are, of course, also great organisations and leaders who know how to nurture careers and personal growth. They’ve understood that they need both the right people in management and at the top, and have understood that these people need more space. They work with an inverse triangle as their framework, and others should too.
Katri Bertram 