One of the first pieces of career advice I received was that my career growth potential was closely tied to the company’s growth rate. In other words, if I wanted to advance within the organization, I needed to make sure the company was growing quickly enough to generate those opportunities for personal advancement.
While that might seem obvious to readers later in their careers, this was mind-blowing as a green engineer getting started. I certainly wanted to develop my career, and that advice struck home.
I still think many people miss this when evaluating career prospects. But there is also a crucial leadership lesson here. All your top talents understand this basic idea, and you can use it to your advantage.
Let’s dive deeper into this so I can show you what I mean.
Growth Opportunities
I have written before about how companies grow, and there is an increased need for them to hire new people into middle management positions to support that growth. Ideally, when these positions are added, there is a pipeline of internal candidates ready to be promoted to them, alleviating the need to hire from the outside.
The larger the company, the more pressure it will feel to create new positions. Suppose the company wants to expand geographically into Europe, for example, launch a new product line, or even create a joint venture with another company. In that case, it will need people capable of filling leadership roles at all levels.
From an employee’s perspective, this is critically important because the more the company grows and creates new management positions, the more opportunities you will get to earn one of those promotions.
Dead in the Water
Now consider the inverse: What happens when a company or organization isn’t growing? Without that pressure to add new positions and promote people, stagnation takes hold. People, especially executives, may become content to just hang onto their positions for years, meaning younger, ambitious employees are forced to wait until someone leaves or retires. This is precisely what often happens in government bureaucracies, where people wait years for a promotion. You can see this when the average tenure in management positions increases, meaning people aren’t shifting jobs to take on more responsibilities.
While the performance of some A-players can earn them a promotion even under these conditions, it’s still a rare occurrence. That means employees are forced to wait–their careers essentially reach a standstill, like a sailboat caught in the middle of an ocean with no wind. Dead in the water.
Jumping Ship
Early in my career, I took my advice to heart. I had worked hard and earned several promotions. But I also started looking closely at my company’s five-year plan, and what I saw disappointed me. The CEO’s vision lacked any genuine aspiration for growth, which meant the company was happy to stay basically where it was. There was no plan for aggressive growth coming any time soon, which meant there were likely few promotions available to me in the coming years. Many managers had positions for years and were not trying to grow and expand their careers. The most potent creator of opportunity was the demise of others. That’s not a great environment.
That led me to the conclusion that it was time for me to jump ship and move to another company where I could continue to grow my career. And that’s precisely what I did. The business leaders’ lack of growth orientation lost them a high performer.
Leadership Lessons
The critical lesson for CEOs and leaders is that their plans will dictate to their employees–especially their star performers–whether they should stay.
As a leader, maintaining a talent pipeline will be critical to your success–or lack of it–over time. But you aren’t increasing opportunities for your people if you aren’t growing the company.
At the same time, it’s crucial for employees, especially those starting their careers, to avoid feeling entitled to promotions. If your company isn’t growing in a way that creates needs for new positions, you aren’t going to get the shot you think you deserve. Too many people miss this point. It isn’t impossible to grow your career in a stagnant company–people do it all the time–but it is much harder.
When it comes to thinking about how you can go about advancing your career or even how you can improve your recruiting and retention rate among employees, don’t overlook the correlation with your company’s growth rate. As the old saying goes, you die if you aren’t growing.