Queening A Career

What one of the oldest games in the world, renders as a perspective to one of the the oldest unresolved queries in the professional world - that of Career paths and Ladders.

The unresolved question on Career-growth and game possibly has a perspective from one of the oldest games in the world.

Business environments in most cases are unable to provide a career path to professionals and paraprofessionals beyond a point, leaving the notion of career paths ambiguous and therefore necessitating individuals to take on increased responsibility for managing their own careers. Employees transitioning through career-paths/ladders are those with the ability to craft their jobs. The days of job-descriptions are over.

Senior executives spend only 3% of their workday thinking about the future (ref: Future of Work) and far lesser time on careers of their reportees and the line below. Managers have vested interest in keeping top talent exactly where it is, spend no substantial time in career discussions and are also not rewarded for building and sharing talent. More than 65% of the exit-interview details in large organizations I have worked for, contain ‘career growth’ as a reason for exit at mid-levels. A Deloitte survey ‘Talent 2020’, found that lack of career progress topped the list on the reasons that can cause them to look for new employment over the next 12 months. Close to 67% talent is misplaced due to absence of cross-functional experiences (standardizing/redesigning processes that span across functions, managing cross functional teams, being a part of negotiations and contract signing, techno-structural change involvement like outsourcing, shared-services setups, down-phasing, etc) and the inability to couple operational and commercial knowledge and experience with that on crisis-management, risk-mitigation, sustainable impact-measurements and scenario-modelling, driving business ethics across organizations or large departments used to doing things the other way, etc. 31% of top-level executives in a Korn Ferry Institute survey either did not want career of the CEO or ambivalent on it.

In specific cases, the jobs that could have created a career at some point in time have either vanished, or have changed form. In most cases, organizations struggle to do career mapping from bottom to top, and impacts of career mapping are limited in the range of junior to mid-senior levels.

A software developer may be career-streamed into a technical (Architect to CTO), projects (Project manager and upwards) or functional (domain specialist to practice-Head) stream; A nursing graduate can be career-streamed into ICU specialization stream (across therapeutic areas), an Education stream or Operations management stream. A retail point-of-sale employee can be career-streamed into a cold-storage/perishables zone manager, to a stores-manager position. A management trainee can be rotated through multiple functions before being deployed and re-deployed across functions. A production manager ideally can be developed on capability related to supply-chain and its sub-functions like logistics (inbound and outbound), procurement and stores. There however, is the practical difficulty in executing the transition; most organizations manage to do it at junior and mid-levels, with very limited ability to scale up such transitions at a mid-to-senior levels. This creates a blockage of career paths in the mid-management levels, distorts the ‘bulge-ratios’, pushes a sense of confusion into levels below as well, creates highly disengaged employees and risk of exodus of significant tacit and explicit knowledge-stream; Most career levels have a natural growth-stop, unless there is a drastic effort on the part of the role-holder to be able to make the transition, or there is a natural increase in the size of the pyramid to create lateral space for movement and growth.

Had the transition been that easy, it would have been utopia. One of the leading practical impediment is the ability to understand and build on degrees-of-movement. A degree of movement is the individual’s ‘ability’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘ground-state’ that allows/enables a next move, considering specific existing constraints. ‘Intelligence’ has seven forms that a successful career transitioner would need to leverage on and ‘ground-state’ has a lot many factors associated with skill, will, qualification, experience, temperament, personality, mind-sets, exposure, drive, internal locus of control, self-esteem and efficacy, network (socio political), net-worth (financial), physical state, life-stage and family conditions, philosophy and rules followed, dominant values, unique interpretations of situations and context, etc.

At some point in time, there would possibly be an Artificial Intelligence graphing of careers taking into consideration multivariate input-factors on deciding career stream movements. The game of careers however, remain to be very similar to one of the oldest structured games in the world – the game of Chess, with its innate complexities around degrees-of-movement. There is unexpected similarity between the world of the pawn and that of strategic career movements. Interestingly, the game of careers appears to be a pawn-game - the rules related to the movement of the pawn are fairly complex, and has the lengthiest documentation on it.

The pawn’s low-stake start, allows higher degrees of freedom. Experiment, be Bold, try Options.

C2 can move into B3, C3, D3 or C4 at level zero of the piece, through moves label 1, 2, 3, 4.

Navigating the career map as a pawn at level-zero comes with 4 probable degree-of-movements. The King with all its exalted position, the Queen as the most powerful entity and most others except the Knight, have zero degrees of movement at this level. This ideally allows a career-starter to experiment, be bold and try options as the stakes are lower. This means that a person keen on making a career has to be mobile, be willing to interface with other areas (a management trainee in sales must understand how inaccuracies in sales forecasting impacts non-performing assets build-up at a supply-chain level). 

Keeping net-protection while gearing for high-performance Careers

A movement of F2 to F3 is a protected move, guarded by E2, G2 and G1 knight through moves 5, 6, 7. A career movement into F4 could have been faster, but at the cost of remaining unprotected.

In most cases, the pawn moves with a back-end support not just from its colleagues, but also from higher-entities. It is almost similar to any high-performing art where net-practice allows protection from a fall as one prepares for high-altitude performance. A person interested in architecting a longer runway on careers, must therefore understand what earns respect and trust right from the beginning. It is creepy to realize how many colleagues actually give a neutral or negative response when it comes to a peer-level input on promotions for a colleague. Large fatalities in career streaming happen right in the beginning, without suitable alignment with and protection from senior entities. Where organization cultures smell like rotten eggs, a significant number of pawns are sacrificed through performance appraisal processes, to protect those responsible for erroneous decisions in business. Some of the world’s greatest Chess-masters however, leverage on the pawn’s tremendous latent power. In a business environment fraught with complexities, awareness of support systems help. Even if the leadership intent is to infuse fresh talent through campus programs and the HR department executes it, one of the largest barriers come on the quality of time that line managers are willing to spend (due to insecurity, unwillingness or lack of structure) – and this is exactly where that support is required for the program to succeed and effective career-movement of talent to critical positions.

Alea Iacta Est of Careers

History has it that Julius Caesar leading his army into Italy around 49 BC came across the Rubicon River and found himself caught against the river and the enemy. He pep-talked his army into moving forward, because according to him, it was “Alea Iacta Est” (the Die is cast). Pawns cannot do a backward movement in any case, which also means that unlike other pieces on the board, additional caution is required. Whether someone moving into too specialized an area, or an organization that services too contained a set of customers, or is the organization too large or too small that a backward movement will create an injury, are things to consider among multiple other points. Careers do have back-steps in specific cases. The point here is that once caution is applied on the movement, the rewards are significant – there can be form-conversion or ‘Queening of the Pawn’ that exalts the tiniest piece into the highest power-league.

Form-converting a Career

If A7 Pawn can move into A8 without being attacked-on-move, either from Rooks in B8/H8-A6/A1, a backward move of a Knight from C7/B6, or Queen from A6/B7/B-row, King from B8/B7, Bishop from B7-H1 diagonal, etc, the Pawn can take on any form-conversion as per the discretion of the player with white pawn.

If one really has the patience, makes sustainable and protected moves without getting waylaid and distracted by speed of movements of the other pieces and opponents, here is where the game of Chess has the deepest lesson to the field of Careers. If a pawn survives and grows to reach the end-row of the opponent’s side on the board, the pawn form-converts into any piece that the mover wants. This means, that the game that started with the pawn having 4 degrees of movement and looked down upon as a sacrificial-piece in most cases, typically form-converts the pawn into the highest power-entity. Since the Queen is the most powerful entity on the board, this move is also called the Queening. This however does not happen overnight. It requires stretch, patience, extreme strategy, psychological preparation, endgame viewpoint, and the right sacrifices – and continuous strength-building through enhanced capabilities and competencies that bring with it alacrity of the mind and situational judgement, which in turn, gives to the organization the right set of intelligence and competencies initiated at an individual level, translated up to a team level and thereon at an organizational capability level. The humility of the pawn, degrees-of-movement and its perceived vulnerability render it the agility for career movements.