Climbing the Corporate Ladder

I read a Harvard Business Review article a while back with a plot that made an impression on me. It was a plot of career success versus time. There were three curves plotted and all three started out with a nice linear increase in success with time that eventually began to flatten. After the flattening, one curve resumed its upward slope, one remained flat, and the other reversed its course and began decreasing with time.

The point of the accompanying article was that as people climb the proverbial corporate ladder, they inevitably get to a point where what they used to do no longer works for them. The ones that succeed after this point are the ones that can expand themselves and learn new techniques, approaches, and skills that they didn’t have before. The ones that get frustrated and refuse to change, believing that what has served them so well in the past must inevitably be good for them in the future, top out their ladder climb at this flat spot and often ultimately end up sliding back down.

When you’re stuck in a bind, you don’t get out of it by doing more of what you always do. Doing what you always do is what got you into that bind. You have to do something new.

The HBR take on the ladder climb was that if you refuse to change, you will fail. If, however, you open yourself up to change, and learn new ways, you can and will succeed through the next phase of the climb.

I’m reminded of this article because I’ve just finished reading, “First, Break all the Rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (a book I really enjoyed and recommend reading). In their book, Buckingham and Coffman make a separation between talents, which are our more-or-less hard-wired ways of thinking and being, and skills which are sets of knowledge and techniques which can be learned. They argue that new talents can not be learned. The best you can hope for is to become aware of the talents you don’t have and maybe work on them enough to make the behavior consciously possible, but never a natural part of who you are.

They used this concept to explain the “Peter Principle”, where traditional corporate culture promotes people up the corporate ladder to their point of incompetence, where they either remain, or begin their slide back down – in other words, the HBR plot. The reason for people’s eventual inability to succeed when blindly climbing the corporate ladder is that the skills, knowledge, and most importantly, talents that are needed on the next rung up the ladder may not be the same as those that are needed at the rung below. The talents necessary to build a good widget are not the same as those needed to manage or train others to build good widgets. A person may have both sets of talents, but that’s just chance – there is no reason to expect any given individual to have the talents needed for each rung on the ladder.

Whereas the HBR article talked about people needing to learn new skills and techniques to survive their career flat spot, Buckingham and Coffman say only people with the right built-in talents necessary for the post flat-spot phase of their career path will continue to excel. It is partially about learning new skills and techniques, but mostly about having the right talents to do the next job. It’s not about dedicating yourself and getting new training, although some of that can of course be helpful. Rather, it’s about having, then drawing upon, the new talents that your new role requires. Don’t climb to that next rung, the authors warn, unless you have the talents to succeed there.

So, what does this say about astronomy? Well, I think the issues here are pretty generic, but may be compounded in astronomy. Typically, there is only one career path into an astronomy career – a lengthy academic trek to obtain the necessary license-to-practice PhD. (A similar situation exists for other related technical fields in astronomy.) People who succeed in this path will undoubtedly share some certain talents – talents that helped them through classwork and allowed them to produce some meaningful bit of new science, resulting in their degree and first job, etc. Pretty much all astronomers, to have succeeded to this stage, will have these talents. They will have others as well, certainly, but these, they all will have in common.

In the “real” world, managers can arise from within an organization from several different paths – some trained as widget makers, some as widget designers, others in business and administration, for example. We don’t have that same kind of kind variety in astronomy; we pretty much have one entry path and therefore we have to do a better job of selecting our managers and leaders – finding, nurturing, and promoting those with not only the talents that allowed them to excel in their technical fields, but with the talents necessary for management as well. Sending an astronomer with no management experience, but innate management talents, to management training classes will give them some skills necessary to effectively use their management talents. Sending another without the proper talents to the same classes will be unlikely to produce an effective manager. Management training for some people will never result in making them excellent managers. Passable, maybe, but not excellent.

We like to think that we can teach ourselves to do anything if we try hard enough. Having achieved technical expertise in our fields, we often view ourselves and our colleagues as living proof of this theory. Yet, it isn’t at all obvious to me that the talents and inner drive we each drew upon to succeed through our academic and technical careers would have been equally sufficient at leading us each through management and corporate careers. Hard work may not always be enough.

The first step in providing better management in astronomy, I believe, is to recognize this situation: not only do many of us lack the skills and training for effective management, but we may also lack the required talents – something much harder to develop after the fact. Armed with this awareness, we can do a better job of recognizing, rewarding, and developing those with management talents the same way we do with those with specific technical talents, and provide an alternate career path in astronomy that rewards management talents as much as the traditional path rewards our technical and teaching talents.