I read a Harvard Business Review article a while back with a plot that made an impression on me. It was a plot of career success versus time. There were three curves plotted and all three started out with a nice linear increase in success with time that eventually began to flatten. After the flattening, one curve resumed its upward slope, one remained flat, and the other reversed its course and began decreasing with time.
The point of the accompanying article was that as people climb the proverbial corporate ladder, they inevitably get to a point where what they used to do no longer works for them. The ones that succeed after this point are the ones that can expand themselves and learn new techniques, approaches, and skills that they didn’t have before. The ones that get frustrated and refuse to change, believing that what has served them so well in the past must inevitably be good for them in the future, top out their ladder climb at this flat spot and often ultimately end up sliding back down.
When you’re stuck in a bind, you don’t get out of it by doing more of what you always do. Doing what you always do is what got you into that bind. You have to do something new.
The HBR take on the ladder climb was that if you refuse to change, you will fail. If, however, you open yourself up to change, and learn new ways, you can and will succeed through the next phase of the climb.
I’m reminded of this article because I’ve just finished reading, “First, Break all the Rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (a book I really enjoyed and recommend reading). In their book, Buckingham and Coffman make a separation between talents, which are our more-or-less hard-wired ways of thinking and being, and skills which are sets of knowledge and techniques which can be learned. They argue that new talents can not be learned. The best you can hope for is to become aware of the talents you don’t have and maybe work on them enough to make the behavior consciously possible, but never a natural part of who you are.
They used this concept to explain the “Peter Principle”, where traditional corporate culture promotes people up the corporate ladder to their point of incompetence, where they either remain, or begin their slide back down – in other words, the HBR plot. The reason for people’s eventual inability to succeed when blindly climbing the corporate ladder is that the skills, knowledge, and most importantly, talents that are needed on the next rung up the ladder may not be the same as those that are needed at the rung below. The talents necessary to build a good widget are not the same as those needed to manage or train others to build good widgets. A person may have both sets of talents, but that’s just chance – there is no reason to expect any given individual to have the talents needed for each rung on the ladder.
Whereas the HBR article talked about people needing to learn new skills and techniques to survive their career flat spot, Buckingham and Coffman say only people with the right built-in talents necessary for the post flat-spot phase of their career path will continue to excel. It is partially about learning new skills and techniques, but mostly about having the right talents to do the next job. It’s not about dedicating yourself and getting new training, although some of that can of course be helpful. Rather, it’s about having, then drawing upon, the new talents that your new role requires. Don’t climb to that next rung, the authors warn, unless you have the talents to succeed there.
So, what does this say about astronomy? Well, I think the issues here are pretty generic, but may be compounded in astronomy. Typically, there is only one career path into an astronomy career – a lengthy academic trek to obtain the necessary license-to-practice PhD. (A similar situation exists for other related technical fields in astronomy.) People who succeed in this path will undoubtedly share some certain talents – talents that helped them through classwork and allowed them to produce some meaningful bit of new science, resulting in their degree and first job, etc. Pretty much all astronomers, to have succeeded to this stage, will have these talents. They will have others as well, certainly, but these, they all will have in common.
In the “real” world, managers can arise from within an organization from several different paths – some trained as widget makers, some as widget designers, others in business and administration, for example. We don’t have that same kind of kind variety in astronomy; we pretty much have one entry path and therefore we have to do a better job of selecting our managers and leaders – finding, nurturing, and promoting those with not only the talents that allowed them to excel in their technical fields, but with the talents necessary for management as well. Sending an astronomer with no management experience, but innate management talents, to management training classes will give them some skills necessary to effectively use their management talents. Sending another without the proper talents to the same classes will be unlikely to produce an effective manager. Management training for some people will never result in making them excellent managers. Passable, maybe, but not excellent.
We like to think that we can teach ourselves to do anything if we try hard enough. Having achieved technical expertise in our fields, we often view ourselves and our colleagues as living proof of this theory. Yet, it isn’t at all obvious to me that the talents and inner drive we each drew upon to succeed through our academic and technical careers would have been equally sufficient at leading us each through management and corporate careers. Hard work may not always be enough.
The first step in providing better management in astronomy, I believe, is to recognize this situation: not only do many of us lack the skills and training for effective management, but we may also lack the required talents – something much harder to develop after the fact. Armed with this awareness, we can do a better job of recognizing, rewarding, and developing those with management talents the same way we do with those with specific technical talents, and provide an alternate career path in astronomy that rewards management talents as much as the traditional path rewards our technical and teaching talents.
Scot wonders which HBR curve represents his career so far, but suspects, due to the impression the original article made on him, that he is somewhere near the flat spot – setting up for the next phase.
Interesting post; you touch on some subjects that I think about a lot, so here are some thoughts:
I agree that the ability to change behaviors/skills in response to changing circumstances is vital to a person’s success (in all aspects of life). My favorite expression of this principle is the Buddhist parable about a man who uses a boat to cross a river, and then decides that since the boat worked so well he will carry it on his back from now on.
However, I am extremely doubtful of the utility of the concept that people have certain immutable talents that cannot be changed. I guesstimate that around 95% of human failures involve a person deciding to give up before they have exhausted every possible path to success. Look for instances of that “I give up” decision in yourself and the people around you, and you will find them in abundance every day. Giving up is often the sensible thing to do when the costs of continued trying outweigh the possible benefits of success. However, people often tend to give up simply because trying something new takes them outside of the comfort zone of their familiar habits/skills. The concept of immutable talents can make it easier for people to rationalize not challenging themselves, and so to the extent it discourages someone from pushing the envelope of their own skills it is a unhelpful concept. To the extent it encourages people to not challenge others and give up on them it is also unhelpful.
While it’s easy for me to see the possible harms of the concept of immutable talents I have trouble seeing possible benefits. You say Buckingham and Coffman give the advice to not climb to that next rung unless you have the talents to succeed there, but how do you know for sure whether or not you have those talents until you really try to develop them? And how can you really try to develop them except by climbing to that next rung?
I read the Corner Office column in the Business section of the New York Times each Sunday; each week a different CEO is interviewed about their management techniques and style. If you read these columns you will see a number of CEO’s saying that one of the main things they look for when hiring/promoting is a history of learning new skills and taking on new roles and responsibilities. In other words, they are looking for people who tend disregard the concept of immutable talents.
Hi Andy,
Indeed- very good (counter)points. The advice to not climb the next rung without the appropriate talents, is actually a bit simplified on my part. One point they argue, though, is that we should have career paths that include being very good at the “doing” tasks and being appropriately awarded for them, versus having to climb the ladder into higher and higher levels of management and oversight in order to gain career and monetary advancement. In this way, people can choose to climb the net rung because the job there interests and challenges them, not because it is the only way to obtain a nice pay increase or a corner office, parking space, etc.
Yes, hard work can overcome a lot, but people without the “talent” or
natural instinct to empathize, for example, will have a harder time to build and manage a high performance team than those that do. There are, I agree, multiple ways to get the job done and I think more important than having all the needed talents yourself, is to be aware of what your base talents are and where and how you work most efficiently. Combine that with a knowledge of what you don’t do so well, and what your job needs for high performance, and you can find ways to alter your normal routine to include some of the needed “talents” or find other ways to manage without them, or get them from another source.
I think we’ve all seen very good people promoted to positions that simply no longer fit them. Did these people give up and stop trying? I don’t think so. I think they just found that the work they needed to do in their new positions no longer suited them – no longer was something they looked forward and were excited to do. That is, they didn’t have the talents needed to do this job with motivation and efficiency.
If you work hard and challenge yourself and do well, did you end up finding talents you didn’t know you have, or developing the new needed talents through your effort? Buckingham and Coffman would argue the former, but in the end if doesn’t really matter. There’s a place for hard work always, and there’s a place for recognizing and knowing your own strengths and weaknesses.
As for the Corner Office CEOs, there is a distinction between skills and talents that Buckingham and Coffman make that isn’t being made here. Skills can be learned, but the desire and interest to learn new skills- that’s a talent- and that’s something that is hard to learn if you don’t already have it.