Career Chasms and leadership skills gaps

People get stuck at different points in their careers. It could be early in a career where they can’t influence a project’s direction or later in careers when they are not getting the promotions they seek. They get frustrated as they struggle to cross these career chasms. This frustration is amplified by watching other people with seemingly similar skills progress much faster in their careers. I have faced my own share of career chasms and had to figure out the path to cross them.

Through this experience I learned that the hard skills that we are taught in school and that we continue to focus on, only help in landing early career jobs. But they don’t prepare us to grow in our careers. Growing in our careers requires working on and solving problems of increasing complexity by influencing the work of a large number of people. This requires a different set of leadership skills from a pyramid starting with mindset, self management, effective communication, emotional fitness and going all the way to presence, charisma, designing organizations and curating culture.

Leadership skills have compounding effects on career growth

When people have small amounts of leadership skills early in life, they tend to have hockey stick careers. On the other hand, people who don't have leadership skills fall into career chasms. They get frustrated and cynical believing that they are being treated unfairly, lose confidence and make social mistakes which puts them into deeper chasms. There is a compounding gap between the careers of people who have leadership skills early in life and others. 

The people with leadership skills receive the best projects, receive promotions, work at the best companies with the most talented peers, learn from the best managers, receive sponsorship from the best leaders, and receive additional leadership training. The “accumulative advantage” of leadership skills is the difference between having hockeystick careers and feeling stuck in career chasms.

Career Chasms are difficult to cross

When people get stuck in career chasms they struggle to get out of them for the following reasons:

1. Leadership skills are typically learned on the job: The most common way people develop leadership skills are through an apprentice model. In this model people get projects that they can lead and work with a group of peers. The project gives them the opportunity to deliberately practice leadership skills under the mentorship of their manager and organizational leaders. Since the managers work closely with them day to day they have a deep view into the strengths and growth areas of people. They suggest resources and training to help them close their gaps. The challenge with this model is that the people who are doing well get better opportunities and more coaching time from better/senior managers. This leaves the people who need to close gaps with fewer opportunities to learn and grow.

2. People don't know how to improve leadership skills: The second challenge people face is that people don't know what skills they lack and how to grow them. The feedback they get is typically vague and/or how people feel about their work rather than with the specific gaps in their work. Even when they know what the problem is, people then don't know how to go about fixing it. In addition they lean heavily on their manager to help them navigate their careers, which could be limiting.

3. Not a clear path/ route to developing skills: There are an incredible number of books that focus on specific areas and there are courses that are tremendously useful in building skills. But there is no easy way for people to figure out where to start and how to navigate their growth journey. 

Leadership Skills Pyramid

The good news is that there is a pyramid of leadership skills that people need to develop to get further in their careers. There is a misconception that leadership skills are innate attributes, while in reality they are learned through deliberate practice.   The ten themes for leadership skills are (i) Mindset (ii) Self Management (iii) Effective Communication (iv) Emotional Fitness (v) High Stakes Communication (vi) Career Navigation (v) Effective Management (viii) Presence & Charisma (ix) Organizational Dynamic & Power (x) Leading Teams & organizations. The details of each of these themes is represented in the leadership skills pyramid below.