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Climbing the Corporate Ladder
Learn the Rules of Your Company's Game
by
Debra Lea Thorsen
If you enjoy your work but are not advancing in your company
or chosen field then you may need to brush up on the rules of
the game or change games.
Rarely do I see clients who are seeking help with how to do their
particular job better. Most people who seek my coaching expertise
are competent and proficient in their current jobs. They have
what I call technical competence. If you are technically competent,
then you do a good job with the tasks that are assigned to you.
What a lot of my clients are missing is political competence.
What does it take to be wildly successful in my current company?
How do I become a rising star in my company?
Most often, it is not the people who keep their nose to the grindstone
and are loyal worker bees who get promoted quickly up the corporate
ladder. Often it takes something else. You need to know the rules
of the game that you are playing. The rules of the corporate game
change from company to company and are often invisible. So, I'm
not talking about what is included in the employee handbook.
To protect the confidentiality of my coaching and corporate clients,
I will use my corporate experience before I became a coach to
illustrate my point.
I worked at a boutique strategy consulting firm for two and half
years. The partners of this firm prided themselves on charging
higher fees than McKinsey & Co. and being one of the most
quantitative consulting firms around. After working there a few
months, it became clear to me that in order to succeed and get
on the partner track you needed to play by a few invisible rules:
- Work long hours (and I mean long - I averaged 100 hours a
week for the first three months)
- Never, ever challenge a partner
- Charm the client but don't go native - we are definitely smarter
than the corporate lackeys
- Dress conservatively in khakis and polos
- There is one way to solve business problems - and it is a
quantitative, linear approach (i.e. if you can develop an extremely
complex financial model - do it immediately)
A woman that got hired a year after I started was fired after
just four months. She was told that she was not "quantitative"
enough to handle the rigorous problem solving demanded by our
clients. In other words, she did not have enough brain power.
The interesting thing was that she broke almost every invisible
rule that I mentioned above. She did not dress conservatively
- in fact she wore fashionable, funky outfits with wild shoes.
She respected the clients and tried to partner with them. And
she thought that most problems were best solved by a holistic
rather than linear approach.
After leaving this consulting firm, she went on to a dot com
start-up in Silicon Valley and was hired to analyze the traffic
to their web sites. She proceeded to develop some pretty complicated
models for revenue and profit analysis, grew her department to
10 people, and is generally known throughout this technology company
as one of the most quantitative people around. So, did this woman
and her abilities change from company to company? I don't think
so. But her fit with the corporate cultures did change. She is
a free spirit who needed a more open corporate culture - one that
would let her develop her own problem-solving approach and wear
funky shoes.
Is the consulting firm worse off without her? Not if she didn't
fit into the corporate culture. The problem is that the consulting
firm portrayed itself as entrepreneurial and free-spirited, when
in fact it is not. It is a classic case of leaders of a company
not walking their talk.
One way to tell what the invisible rules of the game are at your
company is to see who is promoted and what behavior is rewarded.
Do the most aggressive self-promoters get promoted? Do you need
to be similar in appearance and behavior to the CEO in order to
get ahead? What kind of diversity is welcomed in the leadership
ranks? Do you think you fit? If you don't fit, then it rarely
matters how good you are at your specific job description or tasks.
Your fit with the corporate culture will carry you as far and
sometimes further than your skills, experience, and aptitude.
Conversely, your lack of fit with the corporate culture can block
your path to success.
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