15.08.2024

YOU WILL NOT BECOME A BOSS BY WAITING FOR THE BOSS SPOT

You have arranged an idyll in your head: your boss leaves or is promoted, and you rise to his place. You do not take a particular risk, because you know the work and the team perfectly, you are completely clear about the relations inside the company and with its partners outside. Sounds like an ideal career plan.

This is not a plan at all, but a big mistake, say personal and career development experts. Their arguments are ironclad, but first read a true story.

Nick Caldwell, CEO at Looker, recounts what he remembers hearing from a young man, "I'm going to take a management position until my boss leaves or another manager in the company resigns." You remembered the worst advice you received in your career.

In 2011, he worked at Microsoft and had accumulated 9 years of experience. At that time there were problems in the department. Nick started looking around and found a management position in another department of the software giant. But after 9 years in the same job in the same team, change seemed scary and risky to him.

He shared his intentions with his colleague Paul. "Stay here. There's going to be a power vacuum in the department and a number of open positions, so you'll be moving up the career ladder quickly," Paul advised. "His analysis sounded logical to me, and this option was certainly less risky for me. However, I kept asking myself if this was the way I wanted to move up. After a week of hard thought, I decided to try my luck Nick explains.

As the head of the other department, he had to work a lot, gather a team, give 150% of himself, but in the end he established himself in the position and took more steps up the hierarchy.

"Paul never left our old team. To this day he holds the same position he worked in. We keep in touch and in every conversation he always comes up with the topic of starting something new. He doesn't like the projects he's working on and he's not in a particularly good relationship with his colleagues. When I ask him why he continues in the same position, since nothing keeps him there anymore, Paul always answers me: "I'm waiting for the right opportunity. "You were lucky when you left. Sometimes I wonder what my career would have been like if I had ever followed his advice," says Nick Caldwell.

The first takeaway from this story is that you have to risk to win. "The biggest mistake you can make in your career is not making a decision you may later regret, but passing up multiple opportunities out of fear that you might fail," sums up Nick.

But not he, but Paul is the more interesting and instructive image.

And a good professional can turn out to be a career loser when he waits to take his boss's place. Especially when there are not enough real facts that indicate that this chief will soon vacate his chair for some reason.

It is completely short-sighted to base your career development plans on a coincidence and other people's decisions, experts point out. Even if you are certain that if and when these circumstances arise, you will be the one to be promoted, it is still unwise to sit and wait. Your professional success depends on your personal decisions, be proactive and look for different opportunities instead of imagining yourself in the shoes of your boss.

Waiting for someone to leave in order to ascend to the familiar betrays limited thinking. You'll likely find much better options if you look around with a desire to not just make a step up, but a change. This can put you on a fast track to an even higher and more lucrative position because you will be more creative. In the place of your boss, there is even a danger that you will end up unsuccessful, because you will do things the way you know, and this will not bring breakthrough success.

For this reason, don't be too sure that the wait is worth it, and you will definitely be put in the boss's place when he vacates it. No wonder your higher-ups decide they need someone with a new management style. Even if the company has a policy for the so-called reserves, it does not guarantee that being designated as a chief's reserve will make you the incumbent. Yes, one possible approach is to promote precisely an employee who has gone through all the steps in the hierarchy and is specially prepared for a higher position. But the other approach is to hire an outsider with a fresh view to bring new ideas, to give more speed to the work and to the team.

The plan to wait means you are afraid to step out of your professional comfort zone. It's good to be comfortable in your job, but if you want your career to be successful, you have to force yourself to step out of the comfort of the familiar more than once, personal and career development experts advise.

Especially if your ambitions don't stop at your current boss, but you want to go further, don't get into bad habits. If this is your strategy, after becoming the head of the department, how many more years will it take for the next position in the hierarchy to become vacant?! Patience is a great quality, but it can't be endless, because at some point it will still be time for you to retire.

True, an ancient Chinese wisdom says "If you stand long enough on the bank of the river, sooner or later you will see the corpses of your enemies flowing down the river". But in it, Sun Tzu does not say that you stand and do nothing. Perhaps the wisdom of Albert Einstein is clearer: "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you have to keep moving."

So inject some passion, make a long-term plan of what you want to achieve in your profession, don't be afraid to take on challenges and try every opportunity that opens up.

Leaping into the unknown can be a success, it can be a failure, there is always risk. But if you think it through and it's worth it, take it.

It is no less dangerous to wait - there is a chance that competition will suddenly appear. A colleague may come into your department, roughly at your level in experience and ability, who has taken the risk of starting at a new company. No wonder, in the sublime moment, he is judged to be more suitable than you for a boss, at least because he is more daring and ambitious.

As Abraham Lincoln said, "Good things come to those who wait, but only what is left of those who hurry."

--- The risk of leading the familiar ---

Success is often more certain if you accept a challenge to become the head of another department or company instead of where you worked in a lower position.

One of the pitfalls of familiarity is that you don't realize exactly what's happening to you. And that is that you have not just been promoted, but that you are already doing something completely different.

The step between executive and leader is huge because it implies a complete change in what you do - to think strategically, to set goals, to organize and inspire the team to fulfill them, to control their performance and the result.

You probably know all this in theory, you have the abilities and qualities, you are prepared to do it. In practice, it will be easier for you in a new place, because you will not be weighed down by habits from your previous existence as a rank-and-file employee.

You finally sit down in the boss's chair, but get bogged down in the so-called micromanaging. You take on some of your old duties alone, confident that you can do the job best. You're looking for an error in accounting documents or a bug in a software product, writing an article, or treating patients yourself instead of being the team leader your job requires.

If two positions could be combined into one, it is certain that the superiors would merge them. If they are not, you should focus on your new features and not confuse them with your old ones. Which is always easier in a new place than in an old one.

An advantage of becoming the head of another department or company is that you are not leading colleagues with whom you were equal yesterday. There is usually a slight discomfort from this. And it becomes even more difficult when there are one or two people in the team who do not understand (or pretend not to understand) the current position in the hierarchy and you have to remind them who is who.