Stop thinking with your tool

Career growth means new skills, not just getting better at the old ones

“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” – literally everyone

A few weeks ago I spoke to a content marketing manager who’s trying to make the leap up to director. They said to me “I join communities, I take courses, I’m really trying to get better at content.” I think that’s great. I also think it won’t be what leads to a director position (and I said so).

People advance because they get good at specific skills, but after a certain point it takes different skills (not just better skill) to keep going. Becoming a really amazing content marketing manager will help you get a job as a content marketing manager, but becoming a director isn’t just the skill of a manager x2. 

In what’s your job, like, really? I wrote that:

In general, jobs exist to get a result for a company

When you want to climb in your career, a strange thing happens. You need to learn about all of the things that are not explicitly your job title. A promotion to director of content doesn’t come because you get better at the content marketing you’re already doing. It comes when you get a deeper understanding of how your work interacts with lifecycle marketing, customer marketing, sales enablement, and all the other various moving pieces of the business you’re in. It comes when you master the manager skills. And it comes when you look outside your team and department and start to study the performance of the business as a whole. 

I’ve spoken to many people who ask for advice because they’re struggling to get buy-in for their ideas. I see lots of advice on this topic, and it usually revolves around some sort of ROI calculation, proposing a test, asking at the right time, etc. etc.

All of which have their place. But the uncomfortable truth is that sometimes your ideas are the wrong ideas. 

Not bad ideas. The wrong ideas.

I’ve had plenty of wrong ideas, and there’s no shame in it. An idea is wrong but not “bad” when it is coherent, well thought out, clearly achievable, and doesn’t work towards the ultimate goal of the business.

If your ideas get shut down by your boss or you’re having trouble taking the jump to the next step of your career, it might be because you’re too focused on your area and not thinking about the success of the business as a whole. 

It should be a red flag if all of your ideas are specifically about why the thing you’re good at is important

“The first reason we miss insights is that we are gripped by a flawed belief.” – Cognitive researcher Gary Klein, writing in Seeing What Others Don’t

I remember sitting in an annual planning meeting and discussing as a group what to do next year. And as we went around the room and the list got longer and longer, each person added the things they wanted for their team. 

At first glance it’s not surprising that a team leader would list what they want their team to get done. At second glance, it’s fucking wild! A group of managers who all worked in marketing and talked to each other all the time had no ideas about what should be done for marketing as a whole.

This is why there’s a difference between the manager level and moving up. To move up means taking a broader view. It means not making decisions to solve your own pains or because they’re your decisions to make, and instead making decisions because they’re the best decisions. 

When you have ideas, do your ideas start from your discipline, or do they start from an understanding of how the business grows?

A person I spoke to said “when I came in I knew we absolutely needed a style guide, so I pushed really hard to get it done.” This same person is now having trouble getting the resources they want to do original research content. 

Maybe it’s good to have a style guide, but what’s the impact on the business? Maybe original research makes for good content, but what’s the impact on the business? That’s what this person’s director is thinking when they hear these ideas — along with thoughts like “the sales team is asking for case studies again” and “we really need to be better at testing creative for paid” and “how am I going to drive another 1000 MQLs this quarter?” 

This person will be much more likely to get what they want if they think less about content marketing and more about “how am I going to drive another 1000 MQLs.” 

To grow, you have to relax your grip on what you believe is important. You’ll hear truisms all the time — customer retention is everything, brand loyalty, style guides, community-led growth, product-led growth, etc. etc. — and there’s some truth there. But holding tightly to beliefs about what is true is what makes it hard to broaden your view and look at the literal truth of what’s in front of you.

In Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows argues that you should start by looking at history. Because if you don’t, you wind up with some very silly-sounding answers. What factors, for this business, are related to what other factors? What actually matters?

“Starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system's actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. (The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, we don't have enough salesmen. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town?).” – Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

When people ask, I give this advice: your most important piece of information is your answer to the question “how does this business grow.”

When you understand the factors affecting growth, you find opportunities to grow better or faster. Odds are that most of those opportunities aren’t best met by your favorite tool. 

But if you can choose the best tool for the job, you can make growth happen.