Addison is driven, dedicated and whip-smart. But Addison is and has always been either a frontline worker or an executive assistant, increasingly bothered as less gifted colleagues graduate into the glory of management, with all its attendant rewards and perks. What’s gone wrong?
If you, like Addison, are frustrated in your dream of moving from worker bee to boss, from decision-implementer to decision-maker, here are a few steps you need to take.
Let’s bear in mind that some people with boss status achieved that status because of natural factors, like temperament. If you’re one of those people, you don’t read articles and books about leadership. Instead, you naturally tell other people what to do and where to sit, and you eventually get the business card that says you’re Executive Director of Bossiness. (Here’s an example of a precocious four-year-old who models this.) Such people have a congenital taste for leadership and power.
The ability to develop six key traits can determine whether a worker bee moves to the executive ... [+]
There is another successful group, however, for whom leadership and power represent an acquired taste. These worker bees ultimately are able to get on the executive track while many of their peers—like Addison—don’t. Let’s look at some of the reasons they succeed:
1. They Learn to Jargonize with Conviction. Most people claim to hate jargon, but the fact is that those who speak it tend to get rewarded, because most professions rely on some opaque lingo to show that things are getting done. This can involve terms like deliverables or bandwidth or change management or best practices or core competency or customer experience-enhancement or ROI or SME or other BS.
Are you a no-nonsense worker bee who bristles at such talk? Maybe it’s time to stop bristling and add a jigger of such nonsense in your career, if you want to get on the management track. It probably won’t kill you. (And when in Rome . . . .)
2. They Learn to Push Past Their Doubts and Insecurities. Many bosses are often wrong but never in doubt. You don’t need to be quite so hubristic, but you do need to recognize the advantage of shutting down excessive internal chatter and quieting your own impostor syndrome. Remember, the folks in management have impostor syndrome too; you might as well at least get the fat paycheck they’re getting.
3. They Learn to Take Credit for the Sun Rising This Morning. Their annual self-evaluation notes that they in fact accomplished this feat 365 times since the last performance review. You may feel too humble to make such a claim, especially once you find out that someone else in the office is apparently responsible for raising Apollo each morning. But people who make it into the executive class tend to be more aggressive than others in making the case that the good things that happened on their watch weren’t a matter of chance.
4. They Learn Not to Be Overly Agreeable. As Noel Tichy of the University of Michigan Business School memorably put it, “To an extent, every good leader is an asshole.” Note that he referred specifically to good leaders. That’s because such leaders recognize that their dogged pursuit of an ambitious agenda is bound to irritate some subordinate or vendor who’d rather go home at 5 p.m. They don’t let that person veto their agenda, and they live with the nasty glares and snide back-stabbing.
5. They Angle for Advantageous, Resume-Building Titles. They leverage any value they have to their organization to lobby for the title of Coordinator rather than Assistant, and they ask to be listed as Manager or Director of Special Projects, whether or not they supervise other employees. They insist on being called Chief of Staff rather than Executive Assistant, even if the pay is unchanged. This maximizes the sense that they’re active decision-makers rather than reactive decision-implementers, and it reduces pigeon-holing and typecasting.
6. They Develop Their Internal Compass. People who naturally fall into assistant roles tend to have hyperactive radars that are always on alert for what others in the room feel or want or need. By contrast, natural leaders tend to have an internal gyrocompass that guides them to their true north (even if something or someone needs to be trampled along the way). If you don’t have a naturally strong internal gyrocompass, there are ways to develop a more robust one.
Finally, it’s time for a sober reality check: Leadership is hell. Being the boss can be a devil’s bargain that will rob you of peace, especially the higher you go up the organizational hierarchy. So at some point you have to ask yourself if you really want the job. Further, there’s great nobility in services roles, and you should never minimize the impact you can make there.
But if you do want the boss role and feel you’ll be good at it, and if you feel you’ll have wasted your career if you don’t get the opportunity, make sure you’re incorporating the above principles into your work.
