Are the qualities required to successfully start a good career the same as those required to move an employee up the management ladder? Many organisations can relate to this: a bright and promising employee, with excellent credentials, who after several years of making admirable progress up the career ladder, begins to nose-dive and deteriorate in terms of managerial ability, gradually getting to a point where he is either labeled a poor manager or leader, or where he simply falls out of the system as a result of an inability to operate within it.
Derailment is a term used to refer to the usually sudden deviation of a senior employee from his or her career path or job. Derailment scenarios are varied and may arise from any of the following: disillusionment or disenchantment with a job or career after several years, gross incompetence, inability to perform job functions effectively or outright misdemeanor.
What is required to get an employee a job? In order to secure an excellent job, the emphasis of employers and employees is on simple, objective measures of success and achievement – basic and higher educational degrees, the prestige of institutions attended, membership of professional associations, work experience and other indices of merit.
What ensures an employee stays on the train and gets promoted? Interestingly though, the factors that are required to keep an employee, once employed, in a constant upward flux up the career ladder are more behaviour-based and intangible than those that got him there in the first place. While possessing a good degree in the right discipline, attending reputable organisations, having the right professional qualifications or affiliations, being the right age or gender and having the right work experience might be fundamental to an employee’s success and ability to procure an excellent job position, it is his ability to communicate successfully, prioritise well, maintain good interpersonal relationships, manage subordinates, relate successfully, be viewed favorably by superiors and work well within a team that keep him moving along in the train. The employee finds that his inability to meet these subtle / ‘soft’ aspects of job demands renders him unable to make anticipated progress in his career. He may then continue in his career, achieving more senior levels of employment, but if he does not soon realise that he must exchange the skills for which he was employed with new managerial/organisational skills required to keep him moving, he may get knocked off that career train, or as the term goes, derailed.
Several studies conducted on the subject of derailment generally discover that, once in management positions within organisations, senior staff spend increasing amounts of time engaging in highly subjective activities such as ‘paying homage’ to even more senior colleagues and riding the waves of organisational politics. Managers and executives who do not possess such ‘skills’ and are not able to handle such activities effectively may find themselves frustrated out of the career train entirely.
Studies on the reasons why executives derail in the career ladder, when a lot more might have been expected of them indicate that derailment occurs for a number of reasons including managers having strengths that are so strong they eventually manifest as liabilities; intolerance to other employees; poor communication skills; inability to think strategically; unnecessary aggression towards others; poor conflict resolution; inability to adapt or manage changing situations and; an overly narrow outlook or orientation. These problems are obviously distinct from the initial skills and attributes required at the onset of a career and appear unlikely to have been focused on either during the employment process or during early career development stages.
What can managers do? In order to remain relevant, prevent derailment and maintain upward movement on the career train, managers can attempt to: seek feedback on their management skills throughout their careers; seek developmental opportunities that help overcome flaws and add new skills; continually seek coaching and mentoring; and consistently take responsibility for personal development.
What can organisations do? The underachievement or derailment of employees, on whom precious resources have been spent in training and development, is a genuine source of concern for organisations. Signs of imminent derailment usually do not manifest overnight but may be detected in an employee’s pattern of behaviour and manner of handling management situations. Organisations that promote the fostering of skills which can help a manager or executive perform effectively when he eventually rises to senior management positions are likely to reduce the incidence of eventual executive derailment.
However, the aggressive result-orientedness of many organisations and the continual rewarding of ‘performance’ may mask unhealthy management practices which, if left unchecked, will resurface when employees move along the train and take up more senior positions.