Your permission to stop climbing the ladder
"There's just nowhere for me to grow here. I've climbed as far as I can in my type of position." ⬅️ This is what a client shared with me in our session last week.
It's something I've long wondered: If you don't aspire to be a senior leader in an organization, how do you grow?
In the linear view of our careers, "success" means climbing up the mountain through job titles and rank to the height of the company in a progression that looks something like this:
This model assumes that we all aspire to and are suited for senior leadership, removed from direct service in an administrative role. This is what's most valued and rewarded—it's the way to make a bigger impact and bigger bucks.
In reality, we each have our own sweet spots on the spectrum from direct to indirect service, execution to strategy, and self-leadership to organizational leadership.
In other words, we're not all climbing a mountain and headed for the same peak.
Let's look at it through another lens, one that throws the linear path out the window: our careers are not a trajectory of forward and up. They are a portfolio of varied work.
The career portfolio view allows us to think of growth differently: we can grow over, diagonal, and wide. Instead of following the path up the mountain, we have the freedom to explore in all directions.
In the linear view, a "lateral" move has a bad rap—it's a waste of time; it might as well be a step back as we race to climb the mountain.
In the portfolio view, a lateral move is choosing any direction besides up.
➡️ We can move sideways, growing by learning a new skill set that will enhance our work.
↗️ We can move diagonally, integrating a new perspective that advances how we see our work in relationship to other modalities.
↔️ We can seek out a new position that challenges us in new ways, and allows us to apply our talents in new settings.
If you feel like you've gone as high as you can go, stop climbing up and consider new directions to develop your portfolio career.
