How to get ahead (without getting promoted). Take initiative, rather than waiting on others’ approval
The following contribution is from a meeting organised by the Financial Times and the people speaking are: Isabel Berwick Isabel Berwick is the host of the FT’s Working It podcast on the workplace and writes the weekly Working It newsletter.Sarah Ellis is co-founder of Amazing If, a company that helps people think practically about career development. Its mission is to make people understand that there is life beyond the career ladder and that climbing the ladder is not the only way to have a great working life.
Anjli Raval is the FT’s management editor. She covers the changing world of corporate leadership and will tell us how managers’ attitudes to career paths are changing.
Let’s get started.
Sarah Ellis
As we move forward, the likelihood of that progression equalling a promotion probably goes down, unless you want to be the CEO type. And so I think that’s almost a forcing function for people to think more laterally and more creatively about their progression.
Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to the Financial Times’ Working It. I’m Isabel Berwick. You’ve been chasing that promotion you’ve wanted for years, but you haven’t gotten it. What happens next? You could get a bit depressed, look for a new job and down tools, but that’s probably not the best strategy.
So what should you do? To find out, I’m talking to Sarah Ellis. Hi, Sarah.
Sarah Ellis
Hello, Isabel.
Isabel Berwick
Sarah is the co-founder of Amazing If, a company that helps people think practically about career development. Her mission is to make people understand that there is life beyond the career ladder and that climbing the rungs is not the only way to have a great working life.
I’m also joined by Anjli Raval. Hi, Anjli.
Anjli Raval
Hi.
Isabel Berwick
Anjli is the FT’s management editor. She covers the changing world of corporate leadership and she’s going to tell us how executives’ attitudes to career paths are changing. Let’s get started.
Sarah, I think I’m right in saying that you and your colleague Helen invented the concept of the winding career path.
Could you tell me a bit more about what it means?
Sarah Ellis
Yes. So we invented the concept of the winding career path. But really, I think what we did was give a name to what a lot of people already felt about their experiences and, in some ways, their aspirations in terms of their career and their work.
And when we say a winding career, what we’re trying to reflect is that this idea of climbing a career ladder as a framework or mental model for how we think about our careers now seems dated and out of touch, I think, with people’s work experiences. And what we were really trying to do was give people a framework that was much more reflective of what work feels like and what a career feels like.
Isabel Berwick
Thank you. And I’m going to bring Anjli in here. You’re the management editor of the FT. You talk to a lot of leaders. I mean, how do leaders feel about career paths these days?
Anjli Raval
It’s really interesting because I think, I don’t know, a decade ago, there was this sense that you just keep going up and up and up and up in this very traditional way, and you stay at the same company forever. And it’s just not the same now.
And I think a lot of senior leaders, even in companies they’ve been at for a long time, would say the same thing.
You know, they’ve made lateral moves, they’ve made moves that give them an additional skill set, even if it’s not an additional title or a promotion in a traditional sense, because maybe they’re building a portfolio of skills and other things that they may need for a great job in the future.
So the way we think about it has changed. And senior leaders I’ve met have told me that more recently.
Isabel Berwick
That’s encouraging to hear, but I think in this episode we wanted to focus on what happens when you don’t get a promotion.
So you’ve tried to get it, you thought you would get it, and you haven’t. What should be the first thing we should do when we don’t get the job we wanted? Apart from feeling really, I don’t know, I can feel really angry and a bit embarrassed, I think.
Sarah Ellis
Well, I think what you’ve described is actually the first thing we should do, which is name the emotions that we’re feeling, but probably not to someone we work with.
So I think it’s okay to give yourself a bit of breathing space, to pause, because you’re going to feel… You know, you’ve invested in this process and it hasn’t worked out the way you hoped.
So you might feel frustrated, you might feel scared of what that means for you in your career.
And what I probably found most helpful in that immediate moment is just a little bit of outside guidance, someone who can give you a fresh perspective, who has some distance from your situation.
Because in those moments, you know, your confidence can be a little bit low. And you usually need someone to help you rebuild your confidence and start asking yourself some questions about, well,
– what does this mean for me?
– what are the follow-up conversations that I want to have?
And yes, you can do this by yourself, but I think having a thought partner for this process is very helpful. And I think someone outside of the immediate situation often helps.
Isabel Berwick
Anjli, when we talk about executive positions, do headhunters serve that role? Do they give feedback? Can they be kind of a long-term partner to help guide people?
Anjli Raval
They can be. I think you have to start by figuring out why you didn’t get the job. And then you can direct those emotions in the right way, or it could be that you just didn’t have the skills or you weren’t the right person for X, Y, Z, and maybe that’s something you can work on.
Headhunters are people who can fill that role, but it’s more likely to be an internal person who knows the company really well and who can probably be of more help.
But again, it’s quite difficult, you know, if you’re at a senior level because you feel quite alone. There are few people that you can turn to and convey your truest emotions to, particularly if you feel particularly unfairly treated.
I mean, there are a lot of executives who get very nervous when they don’t get senior roles and they make it very clear.
Isabel Berwick
Good for their teams. Sarah, when you go into companies and talk to people about the concept of a winding career, is that something that people find difficult to accept at first or do you think they’re very open to it now?
Sarah Ellis
People always responded really well to the idea of winding careers because I think we were just labelling something where everyone recognises that no one has a straight line to success.
Everyone has some sort of winding moments along the way. I think organisations were a little bit slower to catch up. But if you think about the trends around how organisations are structured, they’re pretty much all flattening out.
Almost no organisation I know of is adding hierarchy, so progression has to mean much, much more than a promotion.
And if those two things are interdependent and intertwined, if everyone thinks, well, I’ll only progress if I get promoted, I think that creates a problem for people and organisations.
And those are the conversations we often have with companies. And this idea of replacing titles and levels with ones that are more talent- and direction-focused requires everyone to take a broader view of progression and a much more personal view.
The key for people is to think about what progress means to me, what skills I want to learn, what I want to improve, what gaps I have compared to my development being dependent on other people.
Sometimes everyone involved has to unlearn and relearn, and that’s what we help people with.
Isabel Berwick
And what sort of things can we think about doing to keep learning that aren’t just straight promotion?
Sarah Ellis
Well, I think one of the things we’re learning is to experiment, and we hear that word a lot more often in organisations now.
The great thing about experiments is that as soon as the word is used, the emphasis is on learning, so you only fail an experiment if you don’t learn, and that encourages everyone to think critically.
So one of the things I often recommend to teams is to think about what their pain points are or their frustrations are, known frustrations, and how they could experiment with something different, something that makes their life easier and better.
This encourages them to be critical, but also to measure as they go, because they only know if an experiment works, they have to know what good looks like and what the outcome is that they expect. So the more I think we can build that into the way we work, the more we learn along the way.
Isabel Berwick
I really like what you said, that, you know, we’ve talked about organizations flattening out, so there aren’t as many promotions available.
Anjli, do you think that’s something that’s already seeped into the consciousness of corporate life? Because I know that tech companies went through a massive flattening, right?
Anjli Raval
It’s one thing whether people are aware of it or not, but what they are very aware of is that people are probably leaving a lot more in ways that they didn’t before and they may start working for themselves or change organizations. I think that’s becoming a bit more acceptable.
You know, the vast number of friends I have have a salaried job for two days and they’re doing their own projects for three days a week.
This is happening more and more and it’s probably a response to the fact that there are fewer promotions available.
You see the amount of shifting and changing that there is in the legal profession because of this, you know, not everyone can become a partner. The same thing is true in professional services firms.
And you know, even among the physicians that I know, the number of physicians, physician friends who don’t do five days of salaried work, I mean, I find it really fascinating because they want to have more control over their time.
They want to have more control over the type of work that they do, where they do it, and how they do it. I think that’s happening in parallel to the fact that not everyone can have that senior position.
Isabel Berwick
That’s really interesting. So the cut in the number of promotions is having quite a profound impact on how we work and where we work. Sarah, is that something you’re finding out in the world?
Sarah Ellis
Yes. And I think the other interesting idea is that there’s probably a point in our careers where most of us don’t want to be promoted.
We might find it uncomfortable to admit or say it, but as we progress, the likelihood of that progression equating to a promotion probably goes down, unless we really want to be the CEO type.
And I think that’s almost a forcing function for people to think more laterally and more creatively about their progression, which I think is a good thing.
And it also gives people permission to have different kinds of conversations about their careers.
– Do you want to manage people?
– Do you want to lead them?
Because often that has happened to people almost by accident rather than by design, because they are very good at what they do and then they end up in positions of greater responsibility.
And then they may find that they miss what they used to do.
And in fact, in more than one organisation that I can think of, people are encouraged to think about more options and opportunities that reflect the things that they most enjoy, the things that they are most motivated to do.
And that progression can look and feel very different for everyone. And when I hear those examples, I am very reassured that this is how people are doing the work that they want to do and that is better for the individual, but also much better for the organisation.
Isabel Berwick
So you have to decouple promotion from management. But let’s say you’re a manager who hears this: how can you better manage your teams so that their careers are fluid, I guess, rather than this kind of endless pursuit of promotion?
And I’m thinking particularly about Gen Z because all I hear about people coming into the workplace is that they demand very rapid promotions and advancement. What would you say to that, Sarah? And I’ll go with you, Anjli.
Sarah Ellis
I would encourage people to develop skills and to gather experiences.
A mentor once told me that I should always filter jobs through the lens of what am I going to learn by doing this job and sort of anticipate learning along the way.
The more you learn, the more experiences you gain and the more skills you develop.
That will give you a lot of transferable talents and your organization and your jobs will always change. That’s kind of inevitable. But if you have those kinds of skills and experiences to draw on, you’ll always be able to get a job. People will want you on their teams and you’ll attract interesting opportunities and possibilities if you take that approach.
And I wish I had done that sooner. And as soon as I did that, A, I started doing jobs that interested me a lot more and I was a lot better at them. And I started to progress in a way that really motivated me in my career.
Isabel Berwick
Anjli, when you talk to leaders and they talk about Generation Z, is this issue of, you know, the desire to progress maybe too quickly and without taking into account the things that Sarah talked about, something important?
Anjli Raval
Yes, indeed it is. People are not as patient as they used to be, they are not as loyal and they don’t respect authority in the same way, largely because the trust factor is not really there as it was 30 years ago when you simply relied on your employer to look after you in every way for the rest of your career.
So I think managers, employers and senior leaders should try to foster that culture of trust while also offering skills and new experiences to all employees, not just the younger ones.
Isabel Berwick
Yes. I think women have always had an idea about winding careers. Many of us have had ups and downs in our careers. Do you think men are much more open to that now too, Sarah?
Sarah Ellis
Absolutely. I think the one thing we always want to make very clear is that winding careers are not anti-ambition or anti-progress.
I want everyone to be really ambitious about where their career can take them. And I think sometimes women feel like they have to apologize for their meandering careers because they’re more likely to be primary caregivers, maybe more likely to have taken a break or stopped working for a while for other reasons.
Instead, I think now, actually, because everyone recognizes this idea of the meandering career, there’s certainly not a gender divide.
In the organizations that we work with, men are as interested in what we say as they are committed to the actions, they’re really motivated by the idea. And I don’t see any kind of gender difference there.
And I think what I’m hearing more now is that people are trying to figure out, maybe even for the first time, what they want their career to look like. And maybe up until now, people have been a little bit more passive or let their career happen to them.
And now we’re seeing this transition to people saying, «Well, I’m going to create my own career. I really want to take charge of what I do.»
Going back to Anjli’s point, how do I spend my time. I still think we have a lot of work to do in certain areas, but I don’t spend time trying to convince people that a doodle career is a reality anymore.
What I spend all my time on is practical ideas, tools to help people with their doodle careers.
Isabel Berwick
Sarah, thank you so much for joining us.
How to Get Ahead Without a Promotion
The following contribution is from Michael Page’s portal, which defines itself as: Li
