How The Wrong Bucket Can Stifle Your Career
Do others’ perceptions become more important than results as you move up the corporate ladder?
I don’t think so.
Social capital becomes more important as you move up the ladder than it was at the beginning of your career.
Why? Because as your career progresses,
1) Your results are harder to measure, and
2) You are competing for promotions against others who produce results, and have taken the time to build social capital. In the beginning of your career this isn’t necessarily the case.
But even if perceptions are more important now than they were before, they’re not more important than results.
For the sake of simplicity, lets divide the corporate world into three buckets. In the first bucket, we’ll put the “results should speak for themselves” people. In the second bucket we’ll put the “it’s not what you know, but who you know” crowd.
Everyone in both of these buckets will hit a ceiling sooner or later.
The people in the first bucket are the best kept secrets in their organizations. They are the ghost people. We may know their name, or their face, but no one is really sure what it is they do.
In Texas we call the people in the second bucket “all sizzle and no steak”. They spend so much time working the crowd and promoting themselves, that it doesn’t take long before the perceptions of their abilities far exceed their actual abilities. They have spent more time worrying about what others think about them than actually developing themselves.
It won’t take long before they are put in charge of something and fail miserably, and very publicly.
Sure. We all know people who succeed in spite of themselves. But put these people in the same group with the 325 year old woman who has chain smoked for 324 years. Or the high school drop out who starts a
computer company and becomes a billionaire before turning 30.
If you want to work your way up, put yourself in the third bucket with those who manage results AND others’ perceptions of them.
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