The complexities of today’s business landscape mean leadership has never been so challenging. In a four-part series, Lynda Ennis, Founder and CEO of automotive executive search and research firm Ennis & Co, discusses leadership in a changing world with Stevie Fine, Founder of the executive coaching and talent development company, Inspire.
Why climb the corporate ladder?
In the final part of our series on Leadership, Lynda Ennis and Stevie Fine discuss climbing the corporate ladder. Is progression the answer for everyone, or is there another option?
Lynda Ennis: When I was given my first leadership role, I absolutely hated it. I had to decide whether to progress my career by becoming head of something or continue what I was doing, which I really enjoyed. Looking back, maybe I should have stuck with the thing I really loved doing rather than forcing myself to do something I felt uncomfortable with.
Luckily for me, the organisation I was working for put a lot of training and development around me and sent me on various leadership programmes, but it does raise the question: is it better to do what you are happiest doing rather than pushing an elephant up a hill? We don’t all need to aspire to be great leaders. We should be more careful what we wish for.
Stevie Fine: I liken career progression to climbing towards the top of a triangle that becomes smaller and lonelier as you climb. What often happens in organisations is that technical excellence is rewarded with promotion, so a really good engineer will be promoted to director of engineering. But their technical expertise is no guide to how good a leader they will be. Once you reach a position of seniority in business, your role is about your leadership skills, not your technical expertise. So many organisations create unnecessary hurdles for themselves by following this pattern of promotion. Better job title, more money, bigger bonus – they’re all defined by going up the corporate ladder towards the peak of the triangle, driving people away from the technical area they are good at and which they really love. The higher you get, the more generic the leadership becomes. At the top – at chief executive and chief financial officer level – you are essentially a general manager.
Lynda: It’s embedded into our corporate culture that you’ve got to climb the ladder. In retail, if you’re excelling as a salesperson, the system says you’ll be promoted to sales manager, pushing you into an environment where you may not be very good. You lose confidence and your key skills are lost to the business. Perhaps the whole system should be reverse-engineered. Maybe people who are mid-career and no longer enjoying what they do should go back to what they enjoyed doing and excelled at earlier in their careers. It would plug a lot of the skills gaps we have in the automotive industry and we’d have the best people in the right jobs.
Stevie: At senior level, that often happens when a chief executive retires. The CEO who used to be global head of compliance will join boards as a non-executive director specialising in compliance because that’s what they loved doing.
Lynda: Just to add to the career progression debate, when I take a brief for a search, many organisations are looking for leaders in their late ‘30s or early ‘40s. They want what I call age-appropriate leadership rather than experienced-based leadership. I understand that the world is changing fast, and I’ve met some incredibly tech-savvy young entrepreneurs through our new investment arm at Ennis & Co, but running and leading a business requires experience. You can’t simply fast-track leadership. It’s something that has to be learned over time, and the idea that someone can be a perfect leader just because they’ve had their 38th birthday is very bizarre.
Stevie: As I’ve said before, perfect doesn’t exist, and anyone who insists that a leader needs to be in their late ‘30s is delusional. If we use a couple of stereotypes as an example, someone who is older may have experiences that are invaluable but may not be up to speed with the changing world. Someone who is younger may have a better understanding of the new landscape but does not have the experience to lead. Many businesses get suckered into this binary, either-or approach, whereas what they should be doing is building a diverse and enlightened leadership team that will enable the business to be as successful as possible.
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This is part 4 of a 4-part series on Leadership. Read our previous blogs here.
