Congratulations! You just got promoted to something you don’t know how to do.
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
Ideally, people wouldn’t need to receive a promotion to earn more money. We would be able to recognize a good professional and increase their salary without changing their role. Yet, with many promotions, people stop doing what they were already doing really well and start doing something else.
A good example is people that, due to a promotion, now have a team to manage. They were an excellent professional in their previous role, but, as part of their new responsibilities, they become a manager. But what happens when they prove unprepared for a leadership role? Then, many times, other employees end up reporting them as unable to lead, and a snowball effect begins.
In advertising, we see this happen frequently. A creative is promoted to director because they have outstanding ideas. Suddenly, the main task of this person is not to have ideas, but to improve others’ ideas, coaching and motivating a team. Unfortunately, in many cases, what we see is a creative with more power than their team competing against them, selling their own ideas, with more focus on their personal agenda.
Companies award promotions in order to retain talent. The result is more directors than people to report to them—an upside-down pyramid, with the top bigger than the base.
In the U.S., titles have been created to allow more space for promotions. In many cases, a promotion doesn’t mean a different role, it just represents a higher status and more benefits. That’s why, besides the straightforward titles, we notice that letters have been added: EVP (executive vice president) and SVP (senior vice president), VP (vice president), etc.
The majority of companies are still organized in a traditional hierarchical model. But its efficiency has been questioned, especially at a time when collaborative work is a common goal.
So, there are some companies challenging the traditional model. That is the case at Morning Star, the world’s leading tomato-ingredient processor, which serves food processors throughout the world. They have no managers nor titles—not even a defined hierarchy. There are no job descriptions. Every employee is responsible for defining their mission, and getting training and collaborating to contribute to the company’s purpose.
Another company that was founded with a new model is Cloudflare, which improves performance and provides security for websites. Matthew Prince, cofounder, says that, when egos are checked at the door, it ensures that the quality of an idea—not a person’s rank—always wins. That’s why Cloudflare doesn’t have managers nor executives, only engineers and designers. The role of each employee can easily flip depending on the project. A person that leads a project today can be led by another person for a different project tomorrow. It’s a flexible hierarchy where the work determines the best leader.
In advertising, we can find similar examples. The agency Forsman & Bodenfors doesn’t have creative directors, executive creative directors, nor chief creative officers. They just have creatives. When it comes to a reward system, the agency has a partner program. They have 30 partners, each with an equal part. In other words, there is no hierarchy in partnership, either.
The three prior examples demonstrate the initiative to create a new organizational model, which leads us to rethink the old promotions model, as well.
I know very talented creatives that have refused the chance to be promoted to creative director. I also know some creatives that, after a short period as directors, realized they didn’t like the new role and decided to return to what they liked most: coming up with ideas. A decision like that shouldn’t be considered a step back, rather, a different career path.
We need to create new ways to promote good professionals that don’t want to move up vertically through a company’s organizational chart. Instead, they gain more experience keeping the same role. And that can be considered a successful career, as well.
(this article was published in Portuguese here)