How to handle a mid-career "slowdown"

Learn to be a CEO!

Seriously? ok stay with me while I explain.

You're probably familiar with the term “mid-life crisis”, sometimes used interchangeably with “mid-career crisis”. That feeling we get about halfway through our working life when things seem to have slowed down, and you find yourself asking  "What is this all about?"

What is actually happening when these feelings of uncertainty and doubt arise? How can a career that has usually progressed so well for many years, suddenly feel like a disaster waiting to happen?

During the first half of our working life, change is a constant, we are learning new things, moving upwards regularly or into new areas, and anything seems possible.

Where does it all go wrong?

Well ask yourself, how many CEOs does a company have? That’s right, just one. (ok, with the exception of some anglo-dutch organisations)

Our progression up the management ladder is usually within our area of expertise. Within the function that we have learned so much about.

The career path for a Sales Director will be up from the ranks of sales people, sales management. For a Finance Director, from starting as an accountant, For the Production Director, from being on the shop floor.

In other words, we tend to progress based on our specialised skills within a particular functional area.

Organisations, no matter how much flatter and matrixed they have become recently, are essentially a pyramid. As we move upwards, the number of available slots become less.

The opportunities to progress become fewer and less frequent. Very often we find ourselves at a plateau, where the next level up is not likely to become vacant for some years.

The wide open future view we had as we left school has narrowed to an extended tube in front of us. Leaving education we were invincible, immortal and the only questions was "What shall I do?" Everything was possible.

Suddenly we wake up with a view of doing for the next 20 years of our working life, exactly what we have been doing for the past three or four years.

A very scary thought. Sit can look like a prison sentence stretching out into the future until we retire. Where will the mental stimulus come from, what is there new to learn? 

Now stop and think: where does a CEO learn to be a CEO?

There is no functional speciality there. The CEO has to take a very different view of the organization. A completely strategic cross functional perspective.

I remember one of my early coaching assignments with an organisation that believed in developing CEO material from the ranks. It was a large conglomerate with many subsidiaries in associated business areas around the world.

The rule was; if you want to be CEO of a subsidiary, you have to operate at "C" level in at least three different functions first. The idea was for you to learn how to drop the functional speciality mindset and focus on being a strategic thinking business leader who developed the leadership capabilities of the ones beneath.

The first step was coaching a CFO to being CMO. His first thought? "What do I know about marketing?"

His team's first thought? "What does the bean-counter know about marketing?"

As he learned to focus on communicating the strategy, and allowing his team of marketing experts to own their piece, he relaxed into the role, and so did they. He wasn't paid to solve the marketing problems, he was paid to coach and develop them to solve the problems and determine the path forward.

The next step to heading operations in a different subsidiary came much more easily, and finally he returned as CEO.

Can we all become CEO?

No, and yet we can all find a way to develop into more interesting opportunities as Leaders of People, without being tied to a functional speciality.