A Career Without a Diagnosis

The popular view of careers offers two caricatures: only the unprincipled get to the top, or it’s enough to do good work and the system will reward the deserving on its own. A real career requires visibility, coalitions and negotiation, but it doesn’t require giving up your boundaries.

These skills are not the same thing as being unprincipled or a sociopath.

Without them a large system is hard to run. But with no moral limits they turn into intrigue, taking credit for other people’s work, and using people.

Advancement depends on more than the quality of the work. What matters:

• the visibility of the result;
• trust;
• relationships;
• the ability to negotiate;
• understanding the organisation’s interests;
• a willingness to take responsibility;
• being able to explain decisions;
• picking the right moment.

Someone who expects good work to be noticed automatically has outsourced their career to chance. Reporting your result is normal. Claiming someone else’s is not.

Politics in particular demands compromise. A compromise isn’t always a betrayal. If several groups have to live with one decision, nobody gets everything.

But there are limits past which a compromise destroys the reason for taking part at all. Better to define them in advance, while the job doesn’t yet depend on the next principle you give up.

The question to ask yourself is not:

Am I ruthless enough?

But:

Am I ready for exposure, conflict, coalitions, incomplete victories and responsibility for decisions that will hurt someone?

And also:

What will I not do even for a promotion?

A system really can push out decent people if success in it requires constantly violating their limits. But it won’t change if everyone with limits hands it over to the rest in advance.

Visibility of the result is not self-promotion but a question of what form the information reaches the decision-maker in. A manager with eight subordinates and three layers of bosses overhead knows exactly what he has been told about the work. Someone who quietly closed out a difficult project isn’t modest — he has simply left the description of his work to whoever tells the story first. Usually the first to tell it is the one who took part least.

The line between “reporting what you did” and “claiming what someone else did” is quite visible: in the second case the names disappear from the account. The first is hygiene, the second is theft, and confusing them benefits only those engaged in the second.