Is career pathing…bullshit?
“Spot the comers on your staff, and plan their careers. Royal Dutch Shell has found that the most reliable criteria for selecting what they call Crown Princes are these: 1) The power of analysis. 2) Imagination. 3) A sense of reality. 4) The 'helicopter quality' – the ability to look at facts and problems from an overall viewpoint.” – David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising
David Ogilvy’s comment seems at first to be about the qualities you look at when trying to find early-in-career people who will go on to be very successful, but it also implies a dynamic that exists in many (most? all?) organizations — the Crown Prince.
There are people at your company who have done very well at your company, and the organization rewards them for it with raises, promotions, and new responsibilities. “Crown Prince” suggests a sort of holier-than-thou situation that isn’t what I want to imply; a fast-riser can rise because of their immense technical skills, their people management, their general competence, or their schmoozing, and this isn’t an inherently good or bad phenomenon.
But here’s my question for you. If you’re an executive at a company and you have someone you consistently crushes it, who’s a problem solver, who takes anything you give them and makes it better, who has a positive impact on the teams around them, and (hopefully) who people like working with, are you going to hold off on giving that person a promotion because they don’t perfectly to the letter check off the boxes in your “career pathing documentation,” which would be turning yellow and gathering dust (if that were possible for digital files), and which you may or may not have had a hand in creating?
At a huge Fortune 500? In healthcare, or other similarly structured industries? Maybe (but there’s probably more wiggle room than there seems to be on the face of it).
But I would argue that most official documentation of career pathing at companies doesn’t paint an accurate picture of how people in that company actually get promoted.
When you look around your company, don’t you see exceptions to the “career pathing” documents? And aren’t they kind of all over?
The first reason most organizations’ “career pathing” have the potential to be BS is that they have exceptions. Most career pathing docs are vague. You can’t use them to answer the question “is this person performing at [INSERT LEVEL, e.g. DIRECTOR] level” because they aren’t specific enough.
To an extent there’s always room for interpretation (and a system without any room could also have major problems), but let’s use these levels as an illustration.
Marketing Coordinator. Responsibilities include assisting with the coordination and execution of marketing campaigns, conducting research and analysis, assisting with content creation for various marketing channels, supporting the marketing team with administrative tasks.
Marketing Specialist. Responsibilities include developing and executing marketing campaigns and initiatives, conducting market research and analysis to inform marketing strategies, creating content for various marketing channels, supporting the marketing team with data analysis and reporting.
I’m exaggerating how barely different these are, but honestly not by much. Go farther up in seniority and you’ll find things like “organizing a team to develop strategies to reach KPIs” and similar dictionary salad. What does it mean? There are so many discrete behaviors that could be fit under the umbrella of that label.
As importantly, these docs tend to focus on responsibilities instead of results. If you, as a manager, have a team member who just crushes anything they work on, you’re going to want to promote them even if their skill set or years of experience doesn’t perfectly match the next step on your company’s career ladder.
Why is this a problem? I would argue that if you as a manager or leadership team present your company with instructions on how to get promoted — but those instructions are inaccurate — that’s not super fair, and it might wind up being especially unfair to people from underrepresented groups.
“Career pathing” also tends to imply some things about how promotions happen in general (in any career, not just your company) in a way that adds to their inaccuracy.
Bad career pathing leans into misconceptions about how careers are made
https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221?lang=en
At most companies, most people are not going to start in an entry level role, get promoted into management, then to senior management, then to company leadership. Most people, most of the time, will join a company at one level and then get promoted 0-1 times before leaving for another company in a moderately similar role.
But that’s not what a career pathing structure implies. Here are a few of the other problems.
Excessively linear. Some careers are linear, but they’re not that linear. Usually people have done a number of different things to get where they are. People with the same title and (stated) responsibilities can get there in radically different ways, and this is completely not accounted for in most career documentation.
False expectations about promotions. Most people in a company will either not get promoted or get promoted once in their time at that company. But presenting the entire career ladder comes with the implication that rising all the way through the ranks is the normal, default state. Sure, it happens. It’s just not typical, and most of these docs present it as though it is.
Super vague! If I’m an ambitious person wondering “what does it take to get promoted,” these docs don’t help at all. They just give HR and questionable managers wiggle room to make whatever decision they already wanted to make. That can wind up privileging some types of abilities over other (equally valuable but less noticeable) abilities, and can also disadvantage underrepresented groups.
I know a guy who was a VP-level marketer and now has decided to not manage and be an IC product marketer. I know someone else who had a number of senior IC (but not management) roles and decided to start an agency instead of climbing the ladder. I know lots of ICs for whom there was way more money and autonomy in freelancing or consulting than there was in staying in-house — where individual contributor salaries are often capped, and more promotions means management.
Some companies do have a level of rigidity to their promotion structure — which can look like benchmarking against a percentile of the industry/role salary, tying compensation to years of experience, requiring a certain amount of time within the company before getting promoted, etc. etc. These probably have the effect of pulling up super low salaries, but also probably have the effect of undercompensating top performers – who are the exact people able to find other, better paying jobs. Not great for anyone!
What should you do?
This isn’t an answer for your company, but it might be an answer for you
I won’t actually claim to be an HR expert and I know that there are reasons these types of career pathing guidelines exist. What I do want to do is point out the problems and suggest that you half-ignore whatever your company says about how to get promoted.
When I have been able to have a hand in career pathing docs, I have tried to take this approach:
Define roles by level rather than function, where level is connected to scope of influence. A “specialist” is probably spending their time heads down in their work, and their scope of influence is their work and maybe their immediate team. A “director” is probably spending more of their time coordinating the resources of their team with the resources of adjacent teams.
Within a level, give opportunities for promotion. I didn’t invent this idea, but give an individual contributor the opportunity to stay in the same role for more money if they do great work. I formalized this by having someone be a “specialist II” or “specialist III.” Not a new idea for software, but not always applied to non-engineering roles.
I think framing roles by scope of influence paints a more realistic picture of what it takes to get promoted. Instead of vaguely talking about responsibilities, it lets your reports imagine what it would actually be like to take a role of a different level — do they want to spend more time in meetings with other departments and set direction outside of their function, or do they just want to be paid more?
The reason I’m sharing this here is that if you want to get promoted, you should think about how you expand your scope of influence.
As I wrote in “how to get promoted when you’re overworked:”
You do not get promoted for doing a good job. You get promoted for doing a good job while also starting to do the stuff that people do in the next step up the career ladder. When you get a title change it’s not because your job is going to change — it’s because it has already changed, and your new title reflects the job you’re already doing.
You probably do have to do a good job at something to get promoted (even if that thing is schmoozing), but just doing a good job isn’t enough.
When you look at career pathing for yourself, I would advise:
(Mostly) ignore your company career pathing. Instead, look at what your company needs to do in order to be successful, and then do that thing.
Focus on building your skills and getting results. These are the backbone of a case for promotion.
As you notch results, expand your scope of influence in the company past your own role.
Make sure you’re at a company that has room for you to rise.
Great read, thanks Benyamin.