You’re Not Behind: 4 Steps for Getting Out of Career Stagnation

Episode #313 You’re Not Behind: 4 Steps for Getting Out of Career Stagnation

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE… REALLY!

We’ve all heard the stories of people who started entrepreneurial ventures quite late in life and found success at a mature age. If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that, no matter how many opportunities you think you may have missed, there will always be more in the pipeline if you are open to them.

Just to be clear, I’m not encouraging you to toss your job in to become an entrepreneur. That’s not a path for most people, and those of you who’ve gone to the dark side will know that it’s a lot harder than it looks.

But there’s a lot we can learn from those who’ve gone before us, if we choose to pay attention and apply those lessons to our own career growth and personal progression.

If you’ve been in the same place for some time and you’re questioning whether or not you’ve got what it takes to progress further, then remember this: there are some company cultures that you are a good fit for, and others that you are not – so it’s not necessarily just you!

In this newsletter, I take a look at the mid-career stagnation problem. I’ve seen it hit many leaders in my time, and a lot of them haven’t got the faintest idea of how they can get out of that rut.

I’ll start with some examples of people who got a late start in life, but still achieved amazing success. I’ll then examine some of the advantages that more mature leaders have, as well as some of the unique anchors that hold them back… and I’ll finish with four areas to focus on in order to break the pattern of stagnation and reignite your passion for progression.

SUCCESS IS READY WHEN YOU ARE!

Lots of people start late. I want to just remind you of a few examples which you may be familiar with.

Harland Sanders founded KFC at the ripe old age of 62. He realized that the only thing of value that he really had was his recipe for fried chicken, which was the cornerstone of the local restaurant that he and his wife owned.

In 1952, he took what he had and he franchised his fried chicken recipe for the first time. He eventually sold that business in 1964 for a relatively modest $2 million, which in today’s dollars is the equivalent of around 20 million. But hey, let’s face it – at age 73, for Harland Sanders, that was probably going to see him through for a comfortable retirement.

Then there’s Bernie Marcus, who shares my birthday of May 12th. He was almost 50 when he co-founded Home Depot. Interestingly, he originally wanted to be a doctor, and he was accepted into Harvard Medical School, so he’s no idiot – but he couldn’t afford the tuition.

After a career as a pharmacist, Marcus Co-founded Home Depot in 1978. Just as an aside, one of his co-founders, Arthur Blank, is the owner of the Atlanta Falcons NFL team. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the blank look on Blank’s face when the New England Patriots came back from a 28-3 deficit, deep in the third quarter to win Super Bowl LI. Each one of those 31 unanswered points must have hurt, and I bet Blank would’ve given away a sh!t-ton of his Home Depot stock to have a Lombardi trophy in his office.

But, I digress!

Then of course there’s Ray Kroc, probably the most famous example, who was 50 when he founded McDonald’s. He bought his first store in 1961 from the original founders, and he set it on the path to the global corporation it is today.

McDonald’s established new standards for consistency and quality. Now, love it or hate it, a Big Mac tastes the same whether you are in Sydney or Singapore or Seattle, and I reckon when I was younger, I put this theory to the test because I ate a Big Mac in over 50 different cities. They were all identical.

Except Shanghai… I don’t know why, but Shanghai tasted different for some reason.

So ubiquitous is the Big Mac that The Economist created the Big Mac Index. This is an economic model that compares purchasing power parity between countries, as a rough guide to work out if their currencies are undervalued or overvalued, all based on the local price of the humble Big Mac. “Burgernomics”, as it’s known, is alive and well.

And, even yours truly. I’ve always been a late starter. I didn’t really start to establish my corporate career until I was in my late thirties, and I was 56 years old when I left that behind to start this business with my daughter, Emma Green. It’s going okay so far, but I can’t wait to see where we are in 10 years’ time.

The moral of the story is that it’s never too late to improve, to grow, and to change your career trajectory. But first, you have to discard the beliefs that anchor you to your past.

YOU HAVE MORE ADVANTAGES THAN YOU REALIZE…

What is it about late bloomers that makes them successful?

Just be aware of the fact that it’s easy to cherry-pick the outliers, as I’ve just done, and present them as proof that anyone can do the same. We know that’s not the case.

I absolutely believe that it’s never too late to change anything. But, as you get older, there are things that work to your advantage and there are also things that are going to hold you back. As I said, I’m not here to encourage you to toss in your career and become an entrepreneur.

I want to talk directly to those of you who are what I would call mid-career leaders. You’re probably on the other side of 30 and you could be as old as 50; you’ll have been promoted a few times and you’ll have a good respectable middle management role; you’ll probably have a decent-sized team underneath you; and you’ll be making pretty good coin.

But there are likely to be a few things holding you back: you may not feel confident in your leadership, or you may have been passed over for promotion at some point and you’re not sure if you can make it to the next level; your results may be patchy and you’re not sure if you have the respect and trust of the people above you; you may know deep down that the way you are leading isn’t getting the job done, but you don’t really know what you might do differently.

Well, here’s the deal: there are some things that are going to hold you back, but there are also things that are a huge advantage to you if you can tap into them. Let’s start with a look at the advantages.

1. You have experience. The things you’ve learned so far in your career are valuable. Don’t underestimate that value. It’s easy to forget where you’ve come from, so don’t fall into the trap of undervaluing the things that have got you to where you are. You probably know more than you think, and you’ve likely forgotten many of the great things you’ve already done.

2. You have proof of your own performance. You never would’ve been promoted in the first place unless you were doing a bunch of things right, so this, in itself, should help you to lift your confidence. But confidence is a funny thing. It only takes one or two poor decisions (or bad hires or delayed projects) to dent your confidence. Just remember there’s a reason why you got to where you are in the first place. You must have achieved some decent outcomes and you must have done some stuff that caught the attention of the people above you. You just have to work out what the ingredients were that went into your initial success.

3. You’ve had a chance to try some stuff, so you’ve probably worked out that almost nothing is fatal. It might not always be pleasant… and it might not always work out the way you want… but you always have options. Making decisions with a level of confidence because you have a good handle on risk and reward is something that develops over time. Call it seasoned judgment, if you will.

Remember that you know a lot more than you did just even last year. The things that you did to get your previous promotions can be leveraged for your next promotion.

… BUT SOME THINGS WILL STILL HOLD YOU BACK

I reckon those are three pretty big advantages that come simply from the fact that you spent time in the saddle. But there are also some barriers that become increasingly immovable the older you get. The five most common barriers that I see are:

1. The older you get, the more set in your ways you become. This is an incredibly common problem, because everything you do serves to confirm what you already know, and it’s very, very easy to let your confirmation bias rule your ability to learn. The way I looked at life was I had to be constantly looking for ways to improve what I thought, my philosophical standpoint, and my worldview. If I could do that and I was open to the fact that I might be wrong, then I started to take in a lot more information.

So, instead of becoming more set in my ways, I managed to become even more open to things being different. This is super interesting, right? Because as I say sometimes, “The older I get, the less certain I am about practically everything”. To do this, you have to be very strong, very confident, and very open to new ways of doing things. If you can master that, you will overcome that first barrier.

2. You rely on your accumulated knowledge more than you rely on your capacity to learn. This is really where we talk about expert power. As you learn more and more about business, about your technical discipline, and about the world around you, you start to rely on that as your primary source of value. So the people around you see that you know more than they do, and it’s very seductive to use this as your power base.

3. You seek predictability and comfort at the expense of challenge and risk. This barrier is pretty easy to understand. It’s a DNA driver that we all have in us. It comes with our evolutionary being and our reptile brain, but if we’re not conscious of it, it’s going to hold us back.

4. The higher up you go, the more you have to lose… so you become more compliant and more conservative. I’m a huge fan of irony, so I find it ironic that when you are younger, you have a lot less knowledge, a lot less wisdom, and a lot lower likelihood that you’re going to be right – but you are more likely to push back because you haven’t got as much to lose.

As you go up through the ranks, you become more compliant. You want to please the people above you because you feel as though that’s the way that you may be able to move forward and conform to the game, but it’s not always the case, and that can be a barrier to progress.

5. You might have convinced yourself that you are typecast… even if you’re not. If you’re not familiar with the term typecast, we normally use it to describe actors who tend to turn up in exactly the same roles over and over again – there are certain actors who always appear as the villain, and there are other actors who always appear as the hero. You may have convinced yourself that you are only good in one particular setting, but that’s never the case.

BREAKING THE PATTERN OF STAGNATION

I want to look at the four focus areas that you can use to break the pattern. You want to get out of your rut, but you aren’t really sure how, and the longer time progresses, the more resigned you are to your fate.

I’m going to challenge you to put a line in the sand – not for me, but for yourself. If you still have ambition to create an amazing career, you can’t change what’s happened up to this moment. It’s gone. You can only change what happens from this moment on.

If you’re sitting there and you are 45 years old and you are thinking that this all sounds too hard? Well then, I’m sure it will be. But it’s just as easy to look at the possibility that’s within your reach. The whole point of me starting with the stories of mature-age founders was to demonstrate that age will only be a barrier if you want it to be. Let’s face it. It can be a good excuse as we wallow in our own victimhood.

If you want to reignite your career, you’re going to have to suck it up, cupcake!

1. Take an inventory of your capabilities. Remember that, even though you have some great experience and learning from your path so far, the job at every level is different. Do you have what you need to go to the next level?

Think about both behavioral and performance dimensions. Think about the hard business skills that are required to perform confidently at the next level up – this could potentially include your industry knowledge, your commercial acumen, your communication skill, your economic and financial literacy, your leadership ability.

Your experience is an advantage here. At the early stages of my career, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It was that simple. It was only with some perspective experience and a bunch of failure under my belt that I became a little less arrogant and a little more circumspect.

2. Think about what qualities you are demonstrating each day. Are they the qualities that earmark you as talent? When the people above you look at you, what do they see? Do they see someone with drive and energy and tenacity, or do they see someone who’s jaded by too much time in the job?

Real talent actually isn’t that hard to spot. A high-potential person is typically a self-starter – someone who doesn’t count the hours of the day because they’re focused on getting the best outcome. Someone who knows how to leverage the talent of the people around them, who’s constantly looking for ways to improve.

Real talent lies in the person who owns their mistakes, corrects them, and doesn’t make them in the future. The person who can understand complex concepts and relate them in simple terms. Is this you? Well, if it’s not, you might want to consider if there’s a way for you to build these qualities over time.

3. Think about your relationships. There’s one really critical question here. How strong are relationships that you have with the movers and shakers in your organization? Do they value and respect you? Are you comfortable in each other’s presence? Do they treat like an equal or a lackey? Do they ask your opinion and seek you out for your judgment?

The strength of the relationship you have with these people is an important factor, but so too is your ability to influence the people around you. When you need to get something done in conjunction with another team, how cooperative are they? You’ll constantly rely on other people for your success, so knowing how to form trust-based, productive relationships is vital.

THE FOURTH AREA IS THE REAL DIFFERENTIATOR

Those three ideas for kickstarting your progress can be pretty powerful, but they focus mainly on you and your individual competencies. They’re really useful in breaking out from where you are. Having said that, there’s one thing that beats all of those hands down.

In my experience, the greatest predictor of your personal success is the quality of your team. This is where the real leverage happens. Your ability and capacity to achieve the type of outcomes that lifts you up from the pack will depend almost entirely on the quality of the individuals, the clarity of the objectives, and the culture that defines team norms.

And the quality of your team is going to come down to one thing – the quality of your own leadership!

There’s no other way to say it. I often see executives – in all types of companies and industries – who, when they rate their own leadership performance, rate it relatively highly… but they rate the performance of their team much lower. The only way to ever bridge that gap is by leading your people up to the level of performance that you instinctively expect.

This is why the fourth focus area is to leverage the talent of your team. I’m sure you’ve got a reasonable idea of what great performance looks like, but if you think you already have a team that’s performing super well, then that begs the question: “Why isn’t the company moving you up through the promotion levels quickly?” Because that’s what they do to leaders who achieve great results.

Learning to lead for performance isn’t intuitive. If you’re a regular podcast listener, you’ve most likely come across dozens of areas that you could focus on depending on your circumstances, which are going to improve your leadership skill and performance. I had 20 years as a senior executive in business to hone my leadership skill. So when I put my content into the world, you know it’s been battle tested. It’s not just theory that I’ve picked up from reading books on the couch.

If you want to have any chance of increasing your leverage and improving your performance to the point where it breaks your current pattern of stagnation, then you need to inject something new.

I can’t think of any better way to genuinely improve the results you achieve than by committing wholeheartedly to the No Bullsh!t Leadership philosophy. It’s designed with just one thing in mind: outcomes!

So if you want to break your current pattern and regain control of your career, you need to be in our September cohort of Leadership Beyond the Theory. Nothing will increase your ability to leverage your team’s talent in such a short time.

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO MOVE – BUT WHY WAIT?

Wrapping this up, if you feel as though your best career opportunities may have passed you by, you’ve got a few choices. You can simply resign yourself to the fact that you can’t change it and focus your energies on something other than your career. Or, if you believe as I do that it’s never too late to change your direction and improve your circumstances, then put a line in the sand… today!

What will your life and your career look like 10 years from now? Do you have the qualities, the skills, and the attitude that are going to get you there? You’re not behind, because it’s never too late, but until you decide to take action, you’re going to remain in exactly the same place that you’re in now.

Value and performance don’t discriminate based on your age, your career stage, or your work history. But if you want to start again with a clean sheet, that begins with a conscious choice that only you can make.