I recently ran into a former student in a coffee shop. He was reading Stephen Covey’s classic; The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He shared that he is thinking about what’s next and wanting to be sure and remember the fundamentals going forward. To “try and not get distracted by shiny objects.”
He has a point. Many Millenials his age can attest to the high rate of professional change they experience, often having 5 or more jobs before they reach 30. Gone are the days where people start with one company right out of college and get promotions every 4-5 years, continually making linear steps up an organizational ladder.
Not all career stalls are bad. You may hit a plateau as you wait patiently (or not so patiently) for a promotion. Maybe your organization hits a rough economic stretch, with no new raises or positions expected for a while. Or perhaps you decide to stick with something because of the perks/tradeoffs of the situation- low salary but free lunches and snacks can mean a lot to a 20-something.
Women sometimes design plateaus into their careers for personal reasons. Getting a promotion when my oldest was 2 and I became pregnant with my youngest was definitely a full-plate season for me. Later, I was able to crank up my travel commitments along with my productivity and performance.
But most stalls aren’t normal or intentional. Some may creep up on you like a bad cold. At first, you notice not being included in meetings the way you used to be; a realization that comes on like a dull headache. Then, you begin to sense that your boss/colleagues aren’t talking to you as often. Fever. Finally, you can no longer avoid the fact that promotions and pay raises are passing you by: welcome, stomach-churning nausea.
Perhaps your story contains one or more of the three most common reasons careers stall:
You’re dying of boredom. I recently heard of a woman who passed up a six-figure job at a consulting firm to take a position with a child welfare agency because believed she’d be making a difference in the world. Instead, over time, she found herself paralyzed within an organization riddled with bureaucracy and byzantine warfare, her days spent deflecting memos and preparing reports no one would read. She could barely drag herself to work every day, and her constant refrain was: “Nothing I do makes a difference and I’ve lost all interest in trying.”
Such disengagement often leads to the second most common reason for a career stall; underperformance. Who shines on the job when she’s bored or distracted? But boredom isn’t the only reason performance suffers. Sometimes the new ways of doing things can make one feel obsolete. I’ve heard many variations on this theme: “Count me among the old dogs who cannot learn new tricks, but here I am at a certain age afraid to get excited about the new machine coming that I’m going to have to get trained on. Before it can make my job easier, I have to learn how to use it.”
Final common reason for career stalls: embedded reputation. A dynamic that ultimately blocks you from moving up in an organization because the powers that be will always see you as the lowly executive assistant they hired right out of college. Other embedded reputations can come from past errors. I once worked with a director who got stuck in a career rut because executives could not forget how she’d failed to delegate pieces of a multi-million dollar project. “Has a great heart but tries to do it all herself,” they said every time her name came up for a promotion. Unfortunately, it’s a rare organization that dares to break someone out of its own typecasting.
What do you if you are bored, performing poorly, with an embedded reputation as a whiner? Get. Out.
Start over, as soon as you possibly can. While it is possible to pull out of a stall, it requires nothing less than absolute personal reinvention. You must take full responsibility for what has happened to your career, relieving all others of blame. And at the same time, you must push your performance to new heights, delivering outsize results with an unrelenting, upbeat attitude.
All of this is made harder by the fact that the organization will likely not support you. In fact, the passive culture will be actively working against you at the same time. Your teammates won’t want to be associated with a person whose star is falling. And few bosses have the time or energy to take on the challenge of coaching an employee out of boredom or underperformance. Even fewer have the political capital to change an employee’s embedded reputation.
So, you’re off like a prom dress. Which of course will be difficult and emotional and doubt-ridden. But, I have yet to meet someone who left under these circumstances and didn’t eventually come to wonder why she didn’t get out sooner. Here’s a quote from one escapee: “I see that time now as if I were in a velvet coffin. I was so comfortable, I didn’t realize I was dead.”
The time is now to recognize your career stall for what it truly is, and take immediate action. Seize the opportunity to find new territory, plant your flag, and bloom again. *
Are You Leading The Life You Want?
*Adapted from article by Suzy Welch