Ambitious Achievers
Being really good at a job does not mean it’s easy to scale to a bigger responsibility. Many excellent engineers who were “promoted” to management can confirm this. So can countless others who, given a new, bigger responsibility, start to fail very visibly and painfully.
The Peter Principle captures this, and is neatly summarised like so: everybody rises to the level of their own incompetence. Dawn Springett, in a piece on LinkedIn, covers the idea too, framing it as being about what she calls Ambitious Achievers. In her piece, she also expands on how the very skills that brought the Ambitious Achiever to this new place may easily turn into obstacles in the new context. Springett’s suggestions focus on the organisation: ensure that promotions are done for better reasons than technical skill alone, and that people skills are properly developed.
I agree with all of that, and would like to add a remark for the perspective of the Ambitious Achiever.
Those excellent skills are part of the reason that brought you to this new and much wider scope. You have developed them in a context that perhaps did not change much in nature: you’ve scaled them up. Now it’s time to build new skills. But that’s not it, the skills that brought you here don’t end here: you can scale them out. What do they look like “a level higher”? What will change if you impart some of them on people you work with?
The bigger your scope becomes, the more you need to build on relationships. Make sure you invest in those; make sure you work hard to understand the people in those relationships, and what their interests and constraints are.
Most importantly: the people who offered you this responsibility did so because they believe you can do it. So have courage.
Tags: work