What does success mean to those employees who don't want to be a manager?
So many of us have believed that the natural progression from being an individual contributor to being a team manager and then being a people leader and then a department head was probably the only way to define success at work.
But what about those who find no joy in managing people? There are people who would give an arm and a leg to not be bothered by another’s deliverables. To many people, success is individualistic. In a team, success is collective. A manager is judged by how well the team is put together, not by how well they’ve performed their individual abilities.
In a team coaching session that I undertook sometime before the lockdown was put in place- I chanced upon yet another team leader- who was clearly struggling with the role.
You wanted a bug fixed, or an optimised line of code or the idea for a new app- Ria was your person. Like many rising stars, she was noticed and put on the fast track to promotion. Long story short, 3 years after being the best techie on the team, she was the worst manager the team could probably have. Suddenly friends and colleagues were becoming sour (no jealousy at play; simply her inability to function at a collective level).
However, herd logic says that if you suck at it, you should work harder. So she read up management books, attended sessions, got mentored- all with floundering self esteem. When we met, Ria was on the verge of quitting. She hated being a manager. She hated not having friends. And she didn’t want to listen to people telling her that it would get worse before it got better.
We define our organisational journeys all too often by another’s definition of success. Also being demoted back to her team member role would be a bit much for the ego and her morale. That would be the final nail in the coffin. I will leave you to ponder what Ria should/ would do.
This space is about how to prevent such situations. Why do we feel the need to take the hard way, even when there’s an easier way out?
Most of the time, organisations have a defined structure. There is hierarchy, a majority accepted promotion and raise sequence. As leaders we propagate it, forgetting that at any stage there are and will be many outliers (especially with multiple generations at work simultaneously).
In my interactions with leaders, I tell them to talk about the pulse of the team. By that I mean forget about the shoulds and imagine the what ifs. When the teams reveal their alternate scenarios, it lends a certain degree of fluidity and candour to the conversations. Every time you push people for something that doesn’t feel natural to them, you remember their what if stance.
Ria’s what if was - what if I had decided that I wanted that promotion but not as team manager, simply the raise. Was that possible?
She spoke to me in confidence. Of course it was too much to expose to the whole team. But this honesty sparked conversations in the management. Fluidity in conversations unravels the ‘not so obvious’. That’s what we are aiming for.
Success is the liberty to choose and to access resources to continue doing what one loves to do. True success empowers everyone in the surrounding and beyond and makes lives easy. Is your employee’s definition of success empowering them and the people around them?
