Road Not Taken
On Driving Down Your Career Path
This is not a normal Shelf Life. This is an abnormal Shelf Life. You can apply this Shelf Life to your career in writing, editing, or publishing; but so can it apply to your career in many other disciplines and industries. It’s not just about publishing.
A long time ago now, I reached the end of where I could advance in my role as a production editor at the place where I worked. The only way to continue to grow in my career at that company was to move up into management, so that’s what I did. The VP who promoted me into a management role said, “You will never lose more friends in one day than on the day you become a manager.” This turned out to be correct. I still have some friends from that workplace but mostly among people I never managed.
Over the years, I have considered whether I can find a position where I can move back into a functional role: Can I go back to being a production editor? The answer has been, consistently, no. I can’t make enough money in a functional editorial role. I always have a figure in mind that is the pay cut I’d be willing to take to return to a functional editorial role, but the pay cut I would have to take is always significantly more than that amount. The only roles I have been able to find for the last fifteen years that pay enough for me to consider have been management roles.
The issue I have with this is I do not see the personnel management skillset as inherently more valuable than the functional role skillset. I don’t really think others see it that way, either, if you ask them: All things considered, are managers more valuable than functional staff? And yet, organizations often—but not always—pay a premium for people managers.
My partner works in a federal government administration in an IT department. She has said to me more than once that I should apply for management roles in her organization. I don’t think I’d be good at that, because I don’t have an IT background. According to her, many of the managers in her organization do not—they’re expected to have just the personnel management skillset and need not have any background in the functional skillset of the people they manage. This is alien to me. I’ve always managed people who do the type of work I know how to do.
But I’m bring this up because, in her organization, there’s differentiation between manager role and functional role. They’re not different seniority levels of the same thing. A personnel manager isn’t necessarily a skilled IT worker who has come to the top of their step-and-grade payscale and “graduated” to management. Her office seeks people with different skills for the personnel management role.
The other organization I want to bring up is Amazon, where several of my friends work or have worked. Amazon was having an issue with “brain drain” for this reason. Their best engineers were reaching the top of their salary cap and, wanting to earn more, moving into management—leaving the pool of functional engineers and entering the pool of personnel managers. Amazon found it made more sense to create a growth path for those who wished to stay in the functional role rather than move into management. You can move up through your functional technical path or you can move up through a management path. It’s “either or,” not “first one then the other.”
Some of the skills that make a good engineer probably cross over and contribute to being a good personnel manager. Likewise, some of the skills that make a good editor can cross over and make a good manager. However, not every good editor will be a good manager. Just because someone is at the top of their game in a functional role does not mean that they will be an excellent manager.
The Peter Principle states that everyone in an organization ultimately rises to the level of their incompetence. In short, a person who is good at their job will be promoted to a higher-level position that requires additional skills. If they’re good at that job, the process will repeat—and will continue to repeat until the person is promoted to a job they’re not good at, and then they will not be promoted further.
A great way to “Peter Principle” somebody in the workplace is to promote them to management when they don’t have an aptitude for or an interest in management, simply because they were good in their functional role. The functional role often requires different—and sometimes vastly different—skills than the management role. When you promote someone thus, you’re gambling on whether they’ll be good at the skills required to be a manager. And if not—there they’ll stay, not doing right by the workers who report to them.
I’ve been in a situation with a boss who I believe was “Peter Principled” into her management role. She had been with the company a long time, and was personally well-liked, but hopelessly out of her depth in the leadership role into which she’d been shuffled. Her direct reports (including me) were also personnel managers, and she over-relied on us—on me at least—to bolster her management performance. Her oversights or failures with her own boss were shrugged off as a failure or oversight of one of the managers under her. Unsurprisingly, once I left, I found out she had been shuffled out of that role and into some other management role shortly after. She continued to be shuffled around the organization until her retirement.
But she had been a brilliant editor. Well-liked by her peers and the company’s client and extremely effective at her job. That glow of good performance followed her into her leadership role, which had executives scratching their heads. “She was so good, what happened?” Not everyone who is excellent in their functional role will be excellent in management.
I humbly think I’m pretty good at personnel management but where I have excelled the most is in workflow management and continuous process improvement, which is part of an editorial management role. I’m fortunate that moving into management allowed me to do the work I’m best at. If I had been offered the choice, twenty years ago, to continue as an editor in an increasingly responsible and increasingly well-compensated functional role versus moving into management to reengage my stalled career, I likely would have taken the first option. I might also still be with the company that had given me that option, two decades on.
But the good news about having migrated to a leadership role is, I’m in a position to make the business case for a career path that allows a functional role to grow and develop parallel to the management path. I have attempted this, with varying levels of success, everyplace I’ve worked since I worked for the Peter Principled boss.
If you find yourself in a position where your career is stalling and the only way to get it moving again seems to be a move up into management, ask yourself if you actually want to go into management or if you just want the opportunity for growth, development, and advancement. If the latter, ask your organization’s leadership what opportunities they can provide for you to continue to grow on the functional role path, rather than the management role path. Or look for an organization where this is a possibility for you.
Personnel management isn’t the pinnacle of every job. Don’t get shoehorned into it just because you’re good at whatever you do.
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