In this three part series, I'm going to look at three important considerations that affect your choices for career growth: Do you actually want to move up the ladder? Why do companies promote people? How do I get promoted to the next level.

Introduction

Let's start by examining whether moving to the next level in your career is something you actually want to do. A steady drumbeat of studies show correlations between employees' perceived opportunity for career advancement and outcomes like job satisfaction, worker productivity, and employee retention. The fact that you are taking time to read this article suggests that you are considering what the next steps in your career look like. Career growth is typically framed in terms of promotion through the organizational hierarchy. While this series will give you advice on how to accomplish that goal, I hope to offer some alternative ways of thinking about career growth for those of you don't find climbing the company ladder appealing in future articles. Also, I've known plenty of people who had a high degree of life satisfaction without a lot of career progression by finding fulfillment from other parts of their lives.

The Benefits of Career Progression

Among the most frequently listed benefits of career progression are:

Increased Earning

Moving up in your career generally results in increased pay. However, this is not necessarily the case. I've known folks, especially in sales, who were high income individual contributors who took a pretty significant earnings hit in their first year in a sales leadership role. As a leader, you may have less direct control over your ability to increase your earnings.

Prestige

Some folks are very motivated by progression in title. Personally, I've always found this a bit silly. The people who matter most in your life don't care. My teenage son reminds me on a regular basis that he has no idea what I do. At the same time, it can have some practical benefits. At one point in my career I moved into a CTO role for a digital agency. I was influencing far less budget over fewer clients than in my previous big corporate job, but suddenly, people who would never have taken my call at my previous job were reaching out to me.

Power

In theory, as you move along the career ladder, you have more direct control over an increasing pool of resources (how your direct reports use their time, how you direct your budget, and so on). This should lead to you being able to make improvements more easily. In reality, your discretionary budget will likely be pretty small until you get to a C level position. Culturally, organizations tend to flatter than they were 50-75 years ago and workers are more empowered, so even if you are "the boss", you'll find that except in emergency situations, you spend more time persuading your direct reports than you do ordering them around.

Learning

With each promotion, you must master new skills to master in order to be effective. Some organizations have effective training programs to help workers develop these skills, either before promotion or in the months immediately following promotion. Most organizations don't. It's likely that you will have to take a lot of responsibility for your own development. That may sound more like a downside than an upside, but the rewards of becoming a more capable human being more than make up for it if you are the kind of person who gets a lot of intrinsic motivation from learning.

Impact

Those people who think they are motivated by power, but who aren't explicitly looking to be in charge of other people are more likely to have impact as a deeper motivation. Impact is your ability to make the world a better place. Different people aim for different kinds of impact: Some folks may want to create opportunities for disadvantaged groups, some may be motivated to bring more effective cancer treatment to market, others may just want to create a working environment that makes workers productive and happy.

Downsides of Career Progression

Moving up in your career does not come without costs. If you haven't approached your career plan thoughtfully, some of these can be a surprise.

Less time doing some aspects of your current role that you enjoy

I started my current career as a web developer, and I still enjoy spending time writing code. At least, I assume I would if I got to do it. The last time I was able to spend any serious amount of time building something was several months ago. Coding is a task that can be solitary and creative, and there is a somewhat linear relationship between active working time and the production of something that you can show someone else with a sense of satisfaction and pride.

Most career progression involves movement from an individual contributor role to a leadership and/or management role. Even if you are able to stay in an individual contributor role where your career progression is determined by the value you can create as a deeply skilled subject matter expert, there will be an informal leadership aspect to your later roles. It's not enough to be the expert, you also have to become capable of persuading others that your expertise is applicable to a problem and that the solution you propose should be chosen and enacted. For those who move into a formal management or leadership role, this is even more strongly the case. There are fields like music and medicine where practitioners maintain some degree of competence and direct engagement with the same skills they used at the beginning of their career, but for the most part, coaches don't play.

More meetings

Almost every promotion comes with more meetings. Unless you actively fight the encroachment of meetings and learn to delegate, your calendar will soon be dominated by meetings. Worse, most of them could have been an email.

More hours

Generally speaking, the higher people go in their career, the more hours they work in order to fulfill their responsibilities. To some degree, this is unavoidable if your career progression involves increasing geographic responsibility. In a global position, you will almost certainly have some very early meetings and some very late meetings. If you aren't careful to schedule your nonworking time, you'll work all the time in between your 7am meeting and your 9pm meeting. Similarly, as your responsibility grows, the number of people who believe they need to contact you directly about an urgent issue increases. All that said, most people who work crazy hours as their career progresses do so because they have not learned to delegate.

Less structure

Early in your career, you are mostly assigned tasks to do with somewhat clear parameters on what successful completion of the task looks like. As your career progresses, you get increased autonomy in terms of when you work, what you work on, and how you do the work. That has benefits, but it also makes it harder to know in any given moment whether you are doing what is expected of you and whether you are being effective in doing it.

More responsibility

Responsibility is the other side of the coin from power. Unfortunately, your responsibility will almost always exceed your authority. Folks higher up the chain will frequently expect you to accomplish things that require the cooperation of other groups over whom you have no direct control.

Where you do have direct control, you'll find yourself in far more conversations than you imagined because one of your direct reports said something that offended someone else. Or one of your direct reports was offended by something someone else said and believes that you should do something about it. Or someone else misinterpreted something one of your direct reports said. Or one of your direct reports too days longer to respond to an email than they should. In any organization, there are hygiene issues that have to be taken care of. The effort to do that takes away from pursuing the organizational mission, but if you don't take care of them, the organization falls apart.

Politics

Politics has an almost universally bad reputation, but no clear definition. To some, anything that involves interactions with more than two people is "politics". In a sense, that's not wrong. Where more than two people are involved, attempts to reach agreement are going to involve building coalitions to influence an outcome, regardless of whether the process is group consensus or an autocratic edict from the boss. As an individual contributor, you have some degree of flexibility about how much to participate in that process. Once you have a team that depends on you, you have an obligation to learn how to participate in the process so that you take care of your team. There are at least three common aspects of politics.

Reporting structure

Especially in organizations that tend to reorganize frequently, there is an almost constant effort by some actors to position their department differently in the organization to take advantage of improved access to the decision makers they believe will favor the department. I believe this is unproductive use of energy is largely a failure to understand how information flows and decision rights actually work in organizations, but that's another topic for another time. As someone thinking about career advancement, you just need to know that it's an annoyance that you will regularly experience.

Resource contention

Most functions in most organizations believe that they have insufficient resources to fulfill their mission. Consequently, there is a constant battle over how the budget pie will be divided. This is compounded by the fact that many budgeted expenses are relatively fixed either by contracts or organizational values. Consequently, they evolve slowly from year to year unless there is a crisis

Strategy

The higher you go in an organization, the more your job is likely to involve decisions about how the organization needs to adapt to respond to near term changes in market conditions and to achieve long term growth goals. Regardless of what skills and perspective you bring from your original individual contributor role, you'll have to become adept at translating that perspective into the common language of business (margin, liquidity, time value of money, and so on) in order to persuade your peers that your perspective on the right path for the business is correct.

Conclusion

Now that I've laid out the basic considerations for whether you should be trying to advance in your career, allow me to suggest a more specific process to think through the decision.

1. Before you set a career progression goal, make sure you understand exactly what you want out of it. Consider whether there might be alternative ways to get those benefits. If your primary consideration is increasing your income, you have a hot skill, and you can tolerate more uncertainty than the average person, you might be able to greatly increase your income by becoming a contractor or taking a job in a different organization, without dramatically changing what your workday looks like.
2. Identify the specific downsides and decide whether the upsides outweigh the downsides.
3. Then talk to others who have already made a similar move. Did they see the benefits they expected. Were there any unexpected downsides?
4. Determine how reversible the move would be. If you discover that you don't like the new role, it can be hard to move back to your old role. Most organizations don't really have a mechanism or a culture that supports reversing a promotion. Your decision to return to a previous role might be perceived by others around you as a failure on your part. If you adjusted your budget for increased income, you may find that there is no position you can move back to that won't require painful cuts to your budget. If you are in a field that is rapidly developing, your skills as an individual contributor start becoming stale with the first promotion that gets you entirely away from direct production work. If I wanted to return to a position as an individual contributor developer, it would take me 2-3 months to modernize my skills and become fully productive again.
5. Start developing the skills that you know are going to need further up the career ladder. Improving your time management, persuasion, and goal setting will be valuable even as an individual contributor. They're mandatory if you want to move into a management position.

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