Promotion: letting go of the comfort blanket.

There are transitions in the career of a technical specialist. In this posting, I’m suggesting a picture of those transitions, why they can cause problems, and why it’s worth thinking about them.

To my mind there are three major transitions in our work, regardless of scale. Each has different demands on the person and requires different competencies. I’ve sketched out the phases that sit either side of each of these transitions. By all means flesh out/colour in/challenge/or reject, but I’m suggesting they look like this:

- Doing. Doing the job that got you interested. eg programmer/analyst/designer
- Managing. Getting the job done. eg team leader/project manager/product manager
- Executive management. Fitting lots of different jobs together. eg programme manager/function manager/divisional manager/regional manager
- Enterprise management. Making sure it all works, meets the market, pays, and everybody stays on board. eg MD

OK these are broad categories, and the smaller the organisation, the greater the overlap, but you get the gist.

So here’s the next point. Every time we move from one of these phases or types of activity to the next, we lose stuff. We lose expertise, we lose a community, maybe we even lose a bit of credibility. And the harder we’ve worked to get these things in the first place, the less inclined we are (on average – yes, there are variations), the less inclined we are to leave them behind. In a sense, we are faced with the prospect of becoming someone else.

Now often we’re keen to make this transition. Move on. Move up. More money/status/control/prestige/autonomy whatever. Often we’re helped to develop the necessary skills in advance. But nobody told me, and nobody told anybody around me about losing identity. So we get two things: we get people clinging onto the comfort blanket of how they did things before (but what they did to make the last job work doesn’t fit and doesn’t work too well); and we get people losing touch with/starting to question what value they are adding. So then I meet people in their thirties and forties who can’t work out who, or what, they are professionally. Maybe it’s not the first transition, but the second or third that has hit them. For the first time in their working life, they’re no longer top of the class. And they can’t work out what that means to them. “That’s the way I’ve always done it,” they tell me, and, sure, it has always worked. Till now. (Suits me – I love working with these people – but it doesn’t have to happen.) So …

So what am I suggesting? Simply that people better prepare themselves for moving on. That they recognise that they are leaving some things behind and that they have to build something new: new skills, new approaches, new strategies. That they recognise they are making this choice and that they are prepared to enjoy the adventure. That they acknowledge they’re going somewhere else, somewhere unknown and that they are ready to let go.


More about those stages.
Doing – I am a programmer/analyst/designer
Qualities – knowledge and expertise
Core Challenges – seeing problems before they happen; consistency and rigour; problem-solving; intuition about logic.

Managing – I am a team leader/project manager/product manager
Qualities – technical lead; goal focus; communication; negotiation
Core Challenges – keeping focus on the end point; resolving the needs of different stakeholders; balancing technical, cost and delivery issues; intuition about technology.

Executive Management – I am a programme manager/function manager/divisional manager/regional manager
Qualities – rapid information processing/decision-making; building trust; alliances; influence.
Core Challenges – balancing flexibility and focus; demands and constraints; corporate and function; challenging people when they know more than you; intuition about people.

Enterprise Management – I’m keeping the whole ship together
Qualities – people, market, technology and finance.
Core Challenges – being ‘pre-active’ (reactive before the event).