Crossing Career Chasms
Career Chasms and leadership skills gaps
People get stuck at different points in their careers. It could be early in a career where they can’t influence a project’s direction or later in careers when they are not getting the promotions they seek. They get frustrated as they struggle to cross these career chasms. This frustration is amplified by watching other people with seemingly similar skills progress much faster in their careers. I have faced my own share of career chasms and had to figure out the path to cross them.
Through this experience I learned that the hard skills that we are taught in school and that we continue to focus on only help in landing early career jobs. But they don’t prepare us to grow in our careers. Growing in our careers requires working on and solving problems of increasing complexity by influencing the work of a large number of people. This requires a different set of leadership skills from a pyramid starting with mindset, self management, effective communication, emotional fitness and going all the way to presence, charisma, designing organizations and curating culture.
Leadership skills have compounding effects on career growth
When people have small amounts of leadership skills early in life, they tend to have hockey stick careers. On the other hand, people who don't have leadership skills fall into career chasms. They get frustrated and cynical believing that they are being treated unfairly, lose confidence and make social mistakes which puts them into deeper chasms. There is a compounding gap between the careers of people who have leadership skills early in life and others.
This compounding gap in careers is due to a phenomenon that sociologists call “accumulative advantage” where the successful are more likely to get special opportunities that lead to further success, the rich are likely to get the biggest tax breaks, and the best students are likely to get the best teaching and attention.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers demonstrates the quantitative long term impact on careers due to “accumulative advantage”. In Canadian ice hockey leagues, kids are grouped by calendar year when they are ten. The kids born in January are almost a full year older than kids in the same group who were born in December. Coaches confuse the physical size and maturity differences as talent differences. As a result, kids born earlier in the year get more playing time, get put in better leagues that play more games per year with stronger teammates, play against better competitors and receive much better coaching. All of this results in the gap compounding over time. Within elite groups in Canadian Ice Hockey (Junior hockey leagues, national hockey league etc), 40% of players will have been born between Jan and March, 30% between April and June, 20% between July and September and only 10% between October and December. These examples of quantitative long term impact exist in other sports like soccer and baseball as well as in US education.
This “accumulative advantage” applies to the impact of leadership skills on long term career growth, as well. The people with leadership skills receive the best projects, receive promotions, work at the best companies with the most talented peers, learn from the best managers, receive sponsorship from the best leaders, and receive additional leadership training. The “accumulative advantage” of leadership skills is the difference between having hockeystick careers and feeling stuck in career chasms.
Career Chasms are difficult to cross
When people get stuck in career chasms they struggle to get out of them for the following reasons:
Leadership skills are typically learned on the job: The most common way people develop leadership skills are through an apprentice model. In this model people get projects that they can lead and work with a group of peers. The project gives them the opportunity to deliberately practice leadership skills under the mentorship of their manager and organizational leaders. Since the managers work closely with them day to day they have a deep view into the strengths and growth areas of people. They suggest resources and training to help them close their gaps. The challenge with this model is that the people who are doing well get better opportunities and more coaching time from better/senior managers. This leaves the people who need to close gaps with fewer opportunities to learn and grow.
People don't know how to improve leadership skills: The second challenge people face is that people don't know what skills they lack and how to grow them. The feedback they get is typically vague and/or how people feel about their work rather than with the specific gaps in their work. Even when they know what the problem is, people then don't know how to go about fixing it. In addition they lean heavily on their manager to help them navigate their careers, which could be limiting.
Not a clear path/ route to developing skills: There are an incredible number of books that focus on specific areas and there are courses that are tremendously useful in building skills. But there is no easy way for people to figure out where to start and how to navigate their growth journey.
Leadership Skills Pyramid
The good news is that there is a pyramid of leadership skills that people need to develop to get further in their careers. There is a misconception that leadership skills are innate attributes, while in reality they are learned through deliberate practice. The ten themes for leadership skills are (i) Mindset (ii) Self Management (iii) Effective Communication (iv) Emotional Fitness (v) High Stakes Communication (vi) Career Navigation (v) Effective Management (viii) Presence & Charisma (ix) Organizational Dynamic & Power (x) Leading Teams & organizations. The details of each of these themes is represented in the leadership skills pyramid below.
Crossing Your Career Chasm
We all fall into career chasms at different life stages. Typically when we find ourselves in a career chasm, it is easy to think “I will work harder and do more to show that I need to get to the next level” but it only makes the problems worse. Instead, it is really important to take a step back and prioritize the time to develop the skills that are needed to uplevel ourselves. This may mean that our short term outcomes will take a small hit, but we will get step function gains in the long term.
Once you have decided to prioritize up-leveling yourself, you need to figure out the leadership skills that are needed to cross that specific chasm and take ownership of developing them. Six years ago I had found myself in a chasm where I needed to improve my emotional fitness. I wrote about my journey in this post on “Improving Emotional Intelligence”. Since then I have prioritized the next set of leadership skills to put myself back on the high growth trajectory and ensure that any gaps only result in speed bumps instead of feeling like a chasm. Over the last few years I have up-levelled my ability to “Influence Without Authority”. I have written a series of posts (Deep Alignment on Shared Vision, Lessons on Influencing Without Authority,Work Your Way up the Trust Hierarchy ) about this journey and will write the definitive playbook soon. My current focus is on finding the right balance between “Supporting People” and “Driving Organizational Output” to set the team on a healthy long term trajectory.
There are three things you can do to develop the skill gaps you have identified (1) Invest in yourself (2) Find Relevant Experiences / Roles and (3) Find the right mentors. Finally have patience and self compassion because these skills take time to develop.
Invest in yourself: There are a number of books that address these leadership topics. I buy 100s of books a year, even a small nugget from a book is totally worth the 20ish dollars that it costs. I have a library of 800 books and I serendipitously remember to go look at a book when I face a challenge at work or in life.There are a number of courses that provide experiential learnings that help you untangle your behavioral patterns and provide you with a toolkit to improve skills. Invest in them!. Finally, find coaches that are effective partners for you. They are worth their weight in gold. My coach helped me have self compassion for myself which was absolutely critical to getting out of the spiral I was in at that point.
Experiences: Seek opportunities that will help you practice the skills you want to develop. For example if you want to develop Influence without authority skills ask your manager for projects that cut across organizations and need your to influence a large set of people to align on a plan.
Mentors: Reach out to people who are a couple of steps ahead of you and recruit their help in charting a plan for your growth.
Resources to develop the leadership skills pyramid
Here are a list of great resources by topic:
Mindset: Growth mindset, Grit / Resilience, Deliberate Practice, Long term thinking, Courage, Flexiblity
Self Management: Intentional Living, Planning / Getting Things Done, Sleep, Exercise, Food, Mental Health, Strong Habits, Making & Keeping Commitments
Effective Communication: Listening Deeply, Speaking Precisely, Writing with extremely clarity, Project Management, Facilitating Meeting & Discussions
Emotional Fitness: Building Trustful Relationships, Emotional Intelligence, Positive Intelligence, Self Compassion, Self Reflection
High stakes Communication: Negotiation, Crucial Conversations, Collaboration, Influence Without Authority
Career navigation: Managing Up, Standing out, Finding Mentors / Sponsors, Creating Opportunities
Effective Management: Supporting People, Driving Organizational Output
Presence & Charisma: Executive Presence, Charisma, Story Telling, Public Speaking
Organizational Dynamics & Power: Organizational Savvy, Influence & Power
Leading Teams and Organizations: Decision Making Processes, Designing Organizations, Curating Culture
I care deeply about these topics and I will break down each of these skills to share playbooks to accelerate growth curves for others. If you are interested in getting updates please sign up for my newsletter.