This article is part of The Art of Leadership series, where I cover twelve principles of leadership that my research found underpin superior company performance. Read the full series here.
Among the executives who reached the chief executive’s job fastest, 97% had made at least one bold career move: a step sideways or down, a move into a job they were not quite ready for, or taking on a failing business.
That figure comes from the CEO Genome Project, a ten-year study by Elena Botelho, Kim Rosenkoetter Powell and Nicole Wong, published in Harvard Business Review in January 2018. They assembled more than 17,000 assessments of C-suite executives, studied 2,600 of them in depth, and then isolated the ‘sprinters’: the people who reached the top job faster than the average of 24 years from first job to chief executive.
Pedigree explained little. Only 24% of the sprinters held an MBA from an elite school. What set them apart was those three moves, which the authors call career catapults, and close to half of the sprinters had made at least two of them.
By the end of this article you will have a test to apply to any role you are considering to judge whether it will help progress your career, and how to handle the conversations that decide whether you are offered it at all.
The problem with doing your job well
The standard theory of a career is simple. Do the current job well, and the next one follows. Deliver and wait to be noticed.
In 2019, Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle Li of MIT and Kelly Shue of Yale published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics using the performance records of sales workers across 131 companies. A worker who sold twice as much as a colleague was around 15% more likely to be promoted into management.
Then they measured what happened after the promotion. The stronger a manager’s own sales had been beforehand, the worse their team performed under them. A doubling of pre-promotion sales corresponded to a 7.5% fall in that manager’s value added, measured as the change in what their people produced.
Sales is a narrow setting, chosen because the performance measure is unusually clean, so the finding should not be generalised. But the same logic applies well outside sales. Companies promote on the evidence of your performance in the job you are doing now, and that evidence is a weak predictor of how you will do in the job above it.
So a career built on outperforming everyone at your own level earns you a promotion into a job you cannot yet do.
Making a bold move
The three catapults feel like risk-taking. But remember, each one gives experience the next level will require, years before you need it.
A failing business teaches you to decide with incomplete information and public consequences. Building a small unit from nothing gives you a full profit and loss account to run in a safe environment. And in a role above your grade, you have to lead people who know more than you do, providing an accelerated lesson in delegating authority.
Mary Barra’s route to the top of General Motors shows the pattern. In 2009, she was an engineer who had run the Detroit Hamtramck assembly plant and was made vice president of global human resources, in the year GM went through bankruptcy. By grade it was a sideways step.
She spent two years in the job, a period in which the company went through four chief executives, and in February 2011 she was given global product development, an operation of 36,000 people. She became chief executive in January 2014.
In 2009 none of that looked like a plan. What the HR job gave her was the labour relations, the talent pipeline, and the internal politics of a company in distress, which was exactly the experience a chief executive of GM would later need.
Who puts your name forward
Capability is half of it. The other half is determined by people who are willing to back you.
In September 2010, Herminia Ibarra, Nancy Carter and Christine Silva published a study in Harvard Business Review drawing on a Catalyst survey of over 4,000 high potentials. More women than men had mentors. They were still paid less, held lower-level positions and reported less career satisfaction. The explanation the authors offered was that mentoring and sponsorship had been treated as the same thing. A sponsor puts their own standing behind you at the moment a role is being appointed.
The study was about the gender gap, and the mechanism it identified applies to everybody. Advice is cheap to give and pleasant to receive, which is why there is so much of it. Advocacy costs the giver something, which is why you have to ask for it directly.
Ok, here is the practical part.
The test, and the two conversations
Before accepting any role, ask one question: does this job require me to make a decision I have not made before, and will the result be visible outside my own function?
Both parts have to hold. A new decision taken somewhere the rest of the business never sees will build the capability and leave no one able to vouch for it. The reverse case, visibility with no new decision, gives you a reputation you will not be able to operate at the next level.
Then have two conversations. Both are short, and neither is easy to say out loud.
The first is with your manager.
“I want to run something that isn’t working. If there’s a business, a market or a function that’s behind plan and needs someone to take it on, I’d like to be considered for it, at my current grade if that’s what it takes. The one I have in mind is [name it]. What can I do to make this happen?”
Managers hand the difficult assignments to people who are already making their own job easier. If you have not been that person, start there.
The second conversation is with the most senior person who has taken an interest in you.
“You’ve been generous with your advice and it has helped me. I want to ask you for something different. When the next set of appointments is discussed, I’d like you to put my name forward for a role running a P&L. If that isn’t something you’re able to do, please tell me, because I need to know where I stand.”
The final sentence gives the other person permission to decline, and their answer tells you within a minute whether you have a sponsor.
Where this goes wrong
The CEO Genome data I referred earlier in this article is drawn from people who reached the C-suite. It cannot show you the executives who took a failing division and never recovered from it. Bold moves have a failure rate, and this study did not measure it, so treat the three catapults as what separates the fast from the slow among people who made it, which is a narrower claim than the headline suggests.
There is also a version of this advice that does damage. Take on a mess without the authority or the budget to fix it, and you will be accountable for an outcome you have no way to change. Before accepting one, establish who holds the decisions, what you are permitted to spend, and how long you have. If any of those answers are vague, the assignment is testing your willingness to volunteer. When you are the one allocating roles, remember that responsibility without authority is how organisations lose their best people.
None of this is an argument for constant motion either. Two years is rarely long enough to see the consequences of your own decisions, and someone who leaves before the results arrive never finds out whether they were right. Changing employer is a weaker lever than it looks.
What next?
Put one question to whoever decides your next role: which experience am I missing that would make me an obvious candidate for the job above this one? If they cannot answer it, you have learned something useful about where you stand. If they can, you have your next assignment.
Then write down the three most consequential decisions you have personally made in the past two years. Not the ones you contributed to or recommended. The ones only you could have made. If that list is short, doing your current job better will not add to it.