Being a boss is not for everyone
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Susan is an employer's dream. She's got great analytical skills and a super work ethic. Her work as a marketing analyst was stellar. That's why her boss promoted her to team leader. At first, she was happy about it.
It took a day or so before the glow disappeared. "I didn't know I'd have all these people coming in and whining to me," she says. "Why can't they just do their jobs?"
Susan wasn't an employer's dream any more. She was a great individual contributor who'd been turned into an unhappy and unfit boss with a wave of the promotional wand.
It happens a lot. In far too many companies, the only way to move up is to become a boss. The only way to make significantly more money is to become a boss.
The result is that thousands of great individual contributors every year choose to become a boss without any thought about whether it's the right choice. They don't know if they want to do the work of a boss. They don't know if they'll be any good at it.
They do it because they see themselves with no other career options. The result is a lot of awful bosses.
Most of them make the choice to become a boss with very little knowledge about what the actual job is. Susan was like that.
Susan didn't understand that when she became a team leader her evaluation depended on how well the team members did their jobs. That made her very uncomfortable.
Susan didn't understand that part of her job as a team leader was to help the individual team members succeed. So when they came in "whining" she didn't see it as an opportunity to have a Supervisory Conversation about what could be done differently.
Susan didn't understand that part of her job was to talk to people about their behavior and performance. She was brought up to be very polite and indirect and she found it massively uncomfortable to confront someone about something as simple as coming in late.
Susan was a good decision maker. Once she made a decision, she followed through. But as a boss she found that she had to make decisions for others and then follow up to see if they were executing.
What happened to Susan happens to thousands of people every year. She chose to become a boss as a way of moving up in the company. It was an uninformed and bad choice.
It was uninformed because her company didn't review with her what her actual work would be. There was discussion of what goals needed to be met and what compensation would be, but not a word about what the work was going to be like every day.
It was a bad choice for Susan. She wound up in a job that she had neither aptitude nor appetite for.
It was a bad choice for her company. Instead of a highly productive individual contributor with high morale, they got an unhappy and ineffective team leader.
Fortunately for the company and for Susan, this all turned out OK. Susan went to her boss and laid out the situation. The boss understood that keeping Susan as a team leader was a bad idea.
So, Susan wound up back in her marketing analyst job where she continued to excel. About a year after the "promotion" incident, she moved up to a senior analyst position.
Susan was lucky. She was lucky because she worked for a boss who understood the wisdom of undoing a bad promotion decision. In many companies she would not have been allowed to return to the individual contributor ranks or if she did it would be a career ending move.
Susan was also lucky because she works for a company that has a full range of jobs that fit her skills. Many of them pay a lot more and carry impressive titles. It's not a formal career path, but it might as well be.
Susan was very lucky to find out that being a boss was not for her early in her career. Whenever she's tempted to become a boss, she can remember all those "whiners" coming in to her office. And she can keep on enthusiastically producing great work.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.
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Categories: Promotion,Career Development,Leadership,Career
Wally, great post. This is spot on. When interviewing for our book during 2006/07, we learned that most first-time leaders ended up in their roles accidentally. A majority of those surveyed agreed that they had very little context for the role of a leader and again, most felt like they were unsuccessful during this initial role. Three of 12 chapters in the book focus on helping the early career professional or aspiring leader develop a better understanding of the differences between a role as an individual contributor and one as a leader. Last comment. The most disturbing finding of all was how little coaching or mentoring these accidental leaders received. All in all, a formula for disaster. Thanks for the thought-provoking post today! -Art
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Thanks for stopping by, Art. Visitors here should know that the book you refer to is the one you and Rich Petro wrote called Practical Lessons in Leadership. In my review I called it "the best practical book on leadership that I've read in at least twenty years."
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"There's something unique and different that makes a leader, and it's not about creativity or courage or integrity," says Marcus Buckingham, author of The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success (Free Press).
As important as they are, you can have those attributes and still fail to be a great leader. A leader's job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can't help but change the present, because the present isn't good enough. They succeed only when they find a way to make people excited by and confident in what comes next.
"For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, people fear the future," says Buckingham. "The future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous. So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness. By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear -- to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear."
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Thanks for sharing that, John. Buckingham is insightful about many things and this is another one. Fact is that if you're not clear about where you want people to go, you're forcing them to guess and that's not usually a recipe for success.
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Wally, the situation and the outcome both provide direction for managers and those involved in defining who has management capability.
As you accurately point out, this is a scenario that is played out daily in companies everywhere.
The fact that she had the courage and honesty to speak with her both--who had the courage and discernment to "do the right thing"--speaks volumes for the organization.
As far back as 1983 I was involved in trying to set up a legitimate system to move and reward individual contributors in a Fortune 50 company. The issue was recognized: not everyone's value is as a manager, so "upward mobility" had to be redefined more accurately for all involved.
The outcome? It didn't happen because the HR compensation group couldn't develop what was considered a workable system to make it happen.
I check in every so often...it still hasn't happened.
Interestingly, that particular firm is suffering famously as a result of a lack of new products in the pipeline: the individual contributors who create those products aren't hanging around because they don't want to become a manager in order to increase their compensation. And it's the only path.
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Thanks for sharing that, Steve. There are very few organizations that have anything approaching a multi-track system. I have this hope that the generation now entering the workforce will change that.
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A good example of "the peter principle"
There's also a parallel to this story - the person who is a mediocre marketing analyst but would have been an excellent leader. This person likely got passed up in favor of Sarah, because they were not as prductive at non-managerial work.... It happens more often than you think.
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I think you're absolutely right, Chris. Thanks for reminding us.
This is an example of a "one-size-fits-all" approach to organization that has many victims, including the organizations that don't get the benefit of their people's strengths, and the people who wake up every morning to head for work that they hate.
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I think one of the morals here is that an organization's greatest assets aren't its managers at all, but the assets they manage. A great measure of that is expressed in the creativity, energy, and productive loyalty - and leadership - of its employees of all sorts and at all levels. The best managers don't necessarily express these traits themselves, but they create an environment where they can be productively expressed for the corporation by those of its members who do possess them. This is a powerful and important capability in its own right, but one not necessarily superior to the other capabilities it helps to unite in the pursuit of organizational goals.
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What a great insight, Jim. Thanks for stopping by to share it.
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Wally - excellent post! Given the sometimes forced path to management that many employee take as the only means to earn a greater income some organizations have experimented with a dual career ladder where employees (technical ones in particular) can progress along a career ladder that doesn't include management. Most likely to combat the talent drain that Steve Roessler describes in his comment from his experiences with a Fortune 50 company...
I wrote a blog post on this a while back... http://www.maximizepossibility.com/employee_retention/2008/02/the-right-way-t.html
However an organization approaches these issues it seems that the fatal flaw is always a failure to recognize an employee's natural talents and aptitudes and ensure that they are placed in a position that they are well fit for.
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This is such a good story. I have coached clients who find themselves in Susan's situation. One asked to go back to doing what she had been doing before . She talked about it being a "demotion" but in fact her wise employer found another way to ensure that she could maintain the grade and related salary by adding responsibilities in other areas that suited her better. I am so pleased that Susan had the strength and courage to raise this issue as too many people think that that would be a sign of weakness and that the extra pay and "prestige" should compensate somehow.
Jackie
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Thanks for the comment, Jackie. Many people get trapped in leadership jobs that they can't do joyfully or well. Many others stay stranded on what Shaun Kieran calls "
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Susan was lucky. But many more Susans out there are not as lucky as she is. Every job requires a particular quality. For Susan she did not have the appetite for helping others excel. She was always thinking about herself. Thinking about how to appeal her boss.
There are many people like this we see every day. These people hang on jobs that are not suitable for them. Job satisfaction and performance go missing when you select a job that is not suitable for you
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