Some people are too useful to promote.
The most common thing I hear from people who are very good at their jobs is not that they are struggling. It is that they have become indispensable in a way that quietly turned into a ceiling.
They are the person you put on the hard account. The one pulled into the deal going sideways. The one whose name comes up when something technical has to land in front of a customer who is already annoyed. They have been that person for three years and the scope has not moved.
The mechanism is not unfair, which is part of what makes it hard to see. Work flows toward competence. If you are the safest pair of hands for a certain kind of problem, you will keep receiving that problem forever. You are not being punished. You are being used correctly. That is worse, in a way, because there is nobody to be angry at.
In the rooms where your next move gets decided, this produces one word. Execution. It is a compliment right up until somebody is choosing who moves into a role that requires judgment rather than delivery, and then nobody says it out loud, because saying it sounds ungrateful.
I spent 25 years in senior leadership at Adobe, Slack, and Salesforce. The conversation almost never went, she is not good enough. It went, she is fantastic where she is. That sounds like praise and functions like a wall.
The instinct, once you notice this, is to volunteer for something more strategic. That instinct is not wrong, but it is second. People who start there end up doing the strategic work on top of the tactical work, and they arrive exhausted and still read the same way.
The first move is smaller. Decide what you want to be known for, specifically enough that it excludes things, then go back through what you have already built and find the proof that was always there. A position that includes everything you are capable of is not a position. It is a list, and a list does not travel.
The full episode runs about five minutes.
Go to lauriejwetzel.com/start
Next Level Leadership Group | Laurie J. Wetzel | lauriejwetzel.com
