6 myths about career progression

by

Shane Rodgers

culled from:https://www.linkedin.com
If you look at a trend line on the performance of the Australian stock exchange since the 1950s, it shows a beautiful, steady ascension and a lot of people getting progressively wealthier as they sit on the verandah sipping Nespresso coffee and eating tofu.
However, if you put the full data that drives the trend line onto the same grid, you see a very different story. Underneath the steady line are wild fluctuations, occasional full-throttle crashes and a recipe for nervousness for those relying heavily on shares for their livelihoods.
Careers are a bit the same. When we are young, and particularly if we are ambitious, we tend to imagine a nice steady career line across our lives that culminates in a very senior role and finishes with a gold watch, a nice speech and, in the case of Prince Philip, an unexpected knighthood from a distant colonial outpost of the empire.
As you get older, you begin to realise that careers are seldom a measured climb up an undulating slope. They are more like a game of Super Mario Brothers - dodging pitfalls, moments of rapid acceleration followed by obstacles you can’t get past, wild creatures jumping out at you from unexpected places and occasionally running out of lives and having to start again. At some point you also tend to have a brain explosion and take up Donkey Kong and kail smoothies.
There is nothing wrong with this. It is part of the adventure of life. It only becomes a problem if we see the Super Mario experience as a fail or proof that we have not lived up to expectations.
So, from the “if I knew then what I know now” file, I offer the following myths on career progression.
Myth 1: Careers just keep advancing with time and experience
If the career progression line we imagined in our youth was accurate, our most senior roles would not come along until well into our 50s and we would retire from our most advanced roles. The reality is typically far different. Most research suggests the peak salary years for people is between the ages of 48 and 54.
In a fast-changing world, many people are reaching the most senior roles much earlier than that and the leadership landscape tends to be dominated by people in their 40s. In the technology world there are plenty of CEOs in their 30s and even 20s. All of this group have many decades still to work and there aren’t too many places left to advance to. They have a choice of a long flat line in a senior role or eventually finding a totally different approach to careers or prioritising bigger picture issues outside of the corporate world (think Bill Gates and Chuck Feeney).
There is also an issue of mathematics. The number of people who aspire to be CEOs and the number of CEO jobs available don’t add up. The stark reality is that not everybody who wants to get to the top can get there and career progression can be an accident of history and luck.
I personally came to the conclusion recently that I had actually achieved everything I set out to do in my career and still had at least 20 years of work ahead of me. I made the decision then to chase challenges and jobs that ticked the boxes on what I enjoyed doing rather than trying to work out where I am in a hierarchy. It is quite an empowering thing to do.
Myth 2: You should go into management to advance your career
One of the saddest things you see in corporations is miserable managers. These are typically people who loved their vocation, accepted a promotion into a management role because they wanted the money and status and then endured a working life of total misery.
One of the hardest truths for any ambitious person to face is that they are not cut out for management – they either dislike or get stressed by managing others or they just don’t have the emotional intelligence to deal with people. These people need to realise that being in senior management and success do not necessarily go hand in hand. The world is full of very successful lone wolfs or people who work for themselves rather than face the challenges of juggling the myriad of human foibles inherent in management.
Equally sad is watching people who get promoted a level past their competence point, or optimal work happiness point, and struggle along in misery because the annoying career voice in their head tells them that advancing up the ladder is the right thing to do. Many are also under pressure at home to keep dialing up the dollars. I think being honest about our optimal satisfaction level in the work chain is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves. Little good ever came from misery.
Myth 3. Changing jobs equates with rapid advancement
This is actually seldom true. Job changes that allow people to use their experience to take a logical next step in their career (and when they are blocked in a lane at their current organisation) have positive results. So do job changes that give you a lot of stretch and growth room rather than just replicating what you are already doing.
Beyond that, there is little evidence. In fact Jim Collins’ Good to Great research suggested the most successful company leaders were generally internal appointments with a very good knowledge of the business and its history. Another study a few years ago found that one of the key attributes of the most successful companies was having a management team who had worked together for many years and were very robust and adept at making decisions together – quickly and effectively.
There is nothing wrong with changing jobs. I’ve certainly done it lots of times. The danger is in changing jobs for the sake of it or based on a mistaken belief that it is the only path to success.
Myth 4 - There is a logic to what people get paid
You would generally expect in a marketplace that similar jobs get similar pay. In senior ranks in many companies it is not that simple. For example, very talented individuals with unique or special skills very often get paid more than the people who are managing them. I have personally been in roles where my deputy has been paid more than me. Companies rely on supply-demand discussions with non-award staff being secretive so the value placed on an individual does not have to follow a hierarchy logic. Just look at the internal furore caused when the salaries of senior ABC staff became public. You could pretty much guarantee the same thing would happen in every organisation if contracts were public knowledge.
Even between organisations there are vast differences. International firms will quite often pay more because they have equity in salaries across geographies. Others pay more simply because they increased the scale at some stage of their evolution to attract better people and that just locked in. There is little logic to it. It is basic supply and demand, accidents of history and ad-hoc negotiations around attracting or keeping individuals. I have personally done salary swings of up to 30% doing jobs of similar status. Ultimately you have to decide if you are chasing the challenge or chasing the money.
Myth 5 - Money is a measure of success
Last weekend I did an interview with outspoken (and wealthy) Australian politician and businessman Clive Palmer at his home. He offered the following wisdom:
“Once you’ve got five or 10 million dollars your lifestyle remains the same if you’ve got $1 billion or $5 billion. In 2009 BRW had me as the wealthiest person in Australia when I had $6 billion or so, the Chinese rich list currently has me at $2.7 billion, Forbes has taken me off at $700 million. It has made no difference to my lifestyle over that period.”
Clive operates on a different financial scale than most of us but the point is interesting. As a kid I was an avid reader of Mad Magazine (a teacher once told me that explained a lot – I don’t think it was a compliment). I remember reading a line in the magazine that said: “Money can’t buy happiness but it can make misery a lot more fun.”
I suspect that there is a threshold line with money, somewhere just above where you start to feel a bit comfortable and you don’t have to count every dollar, where you maximise your life-money bell curve. After that the extra money associated with more senior jobs probably doesn’t give you any extra happiness and may even put you in marginal happiness decline.
Typically as people move to better-paying jobs they implement what I call empty substitution. You start to pay for things you didn’t pay for before on the basis of saving time. Yet quite often the time you save goes into working longer rather than getting more recreation or family time.
Alternatively it doesn’t make your feel better. For example, in lower income days with small children we would always pack a picnic lunch to go to the beach. Now we just buy lunch. I kinda miss the picnics. Buying lunch saves a bit of time but it is an empty substitution.
I read some research a while ago that suggested, for most Australians, once they had a comfortable home they could afford, a reliable car, the ability to afford some entertainment on a fairly regular basis and enough for a holiday somewhere once a year, their life satisfaction (on a purely material basis) was optimised. Mansions, limousines and the French Rivera can actually be a soulless show for the benefit of others. There is nothing sadder than watching someone flog themselves purely to increase marginal wealth on the wrong side of the bell curve.
The majority of Australians actually live on quite low income but they still manage a comfortable life and free access to some of the world’s great beaches. A lot of them seem genuinely happy. We are a lucky country.
Myth 6 - You need to work for someone else
I sincerely hope this has changed now, but when I went through the education system, every career conversation was about working for somebody else. I never once heard anyone discuss the genuine career option of starting a business. When I look back at my cohorts, the only ones who went into business in their 20s and 30s came from families with a history of running businesses.
In a country dominated by small (even micro) businesses, learning the secrets of business and entrepreneurialism should be a key plank of the education system. Thankfully our immigrants have brought a strong enterprise culture to Australia but we are still miles behind other parts of the world in creating an ecosystem that encourages young people to back their ideas based on a solid understanding of strategy, markets and business principles.
Thankfully a lot of people opt to start businesses later in life or as a retirement wind-down strategy. Better late than never. There is still a dead zone in the peak working years when people want to start businesses but the risks are too great against the drain of mortgages and school fees. I remember reading in one of Paul Clitheroe’s early books that the secret of his business’s success in its early stages was an agreement that none of the directors would draw a salary for some time so the cash flow got a chance to grow before the costs mounted (they relied on working partners to pay the bills). This is not possible for everyone, but people running their own businesses on their own terms often seem to enjoy their success more than those just creating success for a faceless entity.
Final thoughts
I suspect ultimately the career hierarchy measures are the wrong ones to judge a working life. If we all measured success purely on a job satisfaction index, the rest would probably fall into place. Chris Leaver from Oxford University told the Brisbane Global Cafe last year that if you had enough food to eat you had many problems but if you had no food you only had one problem. The more complex our lives, the more demanding we are of ourselves and the more we create a financial beast that needs to be fed, the more we create pressure to climb the ladder. Sometimes it is better to get off the ladder and just turn around and admire the view. If you sit awhile you might just get used to it.
Comments in these posts are personal. Shane Rodgers is a business executive, writer and marketer with a keen interest in social change and what makes people tick. He is the author of Tall People Don’t Jump – the curious behaviour of human beings.