American View: Why There’s No Express Lane Out of the Cubicle Farm

Management

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column on the notion of succeeding in business by making a “big splash.” That is, making a name for yourself with executive management by being so foolhardy that your peers perceive you to be a burgeoning insider threat. TL;DR: I advised against it.

To be fair, I understand why I got push-back from some of my readers. This sort of go-for-broke advice viscerally invokes the “chosen one” trope in fiction: people feel like the protagonist of their own life’s story. Existence is all about you; everyone else in your tiny corner of existence fits into one of three stock character types: admirers who recognize your awesomeness, rivals who you’ll inevitably defeat, and unimportant background characters that don’t matter. Your success is assured because you’re The Grand Hero.TM With that sort of self-centred mindset, all it takes to ascend to your rightful place among the stars is to get the Right PeopleTM in your organisation to notice you and recognize your destined brilliance … right? [1]

This is a killer appeal since it appeals so strongly to people’s vanity … especially while they’re young and naïve. It implies that one’s success is inevitable; only the timing of one’s rise is in question. The sooner the Universe’s Sole Protagonist™ reveals their awesomeness to the other main characters, the sooner they’ll be extended a hand up by the Right PeopleTM to take their rightful place at the top of everything. That’s how it happens in rags-to-riches stories, right?

That wasn’t a rhetorical question: it absolutely is. The entire premise of these stories hinges on behaviours and values that don’t exist in real life. Authors from Horatio Alger and Joanne Rowling have sold millions of wish fulfilment fantasy tales for good reason! The idea that a good person can and inevitably will rocket from obscurity and poverty to fame and prosperity is intoxicating. It’s what we all wish would happen to us. I get it.

I know a certain run of young adult fantasy stories was hugely inspiring to millions of impressionable readers. Still, it’s depressing how many adults’ bumper stickers and cubicle signs I’ve seen that wistfully complain “I’m still waiting for my letter from H******s.”

That’s all nonsense, though. Predestination isn’t real outside of fiction. No one is a capital-p Protagonist.™ No one is born innately superior to everyone else. No one gets to skip ahead to the front of the queue because of their innate qualities and wacky happenstance. Those are fiction tropes and vanity strokes … Good for setting up impossible stories. Nothing more.

To be fair, anyone can be born into obscene generational wealth and thereby achieve power, prestige, and little-g “greatness” despite an utter lack of redeeming characteristics or competence. Such people aren’t “chosen” heroes, though. They’re accidents of birth, from princesses and kings to “nepo babies.” In all such cases, the accidental inheritors of the world turn out to be vile disappointments more often than not. [2]

As for the rest of us … Reality doesn’t care. There are – according to the U.S. Census Bureau – 7.992,224,291 people on Earth. [3] None of us were born with an epic destiny. Setting aside the 2,085 billionaires wasting our precious air, the vast majority of people on earth are struggling to get through life. In the USA, that means being working to live; food, housing, and healthcare aren’t human rights over here. To keep wages low and workers fearful, we’re all considered fungible and disposable by the would-be Chosen Ones™ acting as our employer-gods.

The consequences of this inherently “unfair” condition is that we’re each competing with everyone else, all the time, whether we want to or not. Even when we realize it’s counterintuitive to compete with the people who are most likely to empathise with us and offer us support. We’re conditioned early on to think in terms of “my success” rather than “our success.” Everything that can be gained in the workplace – like power, prestige, pay, promotions, and protection – is defined in individual terms rather than collective ones. Each individual worker is encouraged to find their own way out of the individual contributor dungeon and up into the (relative) safety of the management tiers … regardless of who they have to hurt along the way. That’s just the “cost of doing business.”

Once you convince people that ethics are a luxury they can’t afford, the entire concept of mutual support gets discarded overboard.

That’s why, I argue, the “big splash” technique is such an seductive “sell” for a Whatever-as-a-Service provider. Most everyone working in a niche field is either an individual contributor or a small shop supervisor tucked away in a support function. There is no career path from being a specialist to the CXO suite. As such, there’s no reason for any executive to groom people like us for future success. Our only way “up the ladder” is to change careers into one of the “full range” tracks (e.g., IT Operations, Finance, etc.). The longer we stay in a niche field, the less time we have make our name in a new one. It’s a depressing situation if you buy into the American imperative that one’s value as a person is based on the pretentiousness of your title and the number of digits in your pay cheque.

That’s why it’s viscerally exhilarating when a vendor slides into our DMs and offers to sell us a ready-to-bake solution. Just buy our product or use our service or hire our consultants – they promise ¬– and BOOM! In no time at all, the £50k or £100k or £1MM you spent on our magic will cause every executive in your company to regard us as a breakout rock star! The rich men at the top of the pyramid will reach down into the fabric-walled dungeons in the basement and pluck us – The Rightful Chosen One™ – out of obscurity. They’ll elevate us to your rightful place on the Top Floor. They might even get Robbie Coltrane to tell us “You’re an executive, ‘arry!”

Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Most good sales pitches do. That’s why they work. They promise to alleviate our desperation by doing for us what we could never manage for ourselves. They’re Willy Wonka’s “golden ticket” for the low, low price of … how much do you have in your budget? Wow! What luck! Exactly that much!
Here in pedestrian reality, though, the “big splash” career advancement technique isn’t the mystic shortcut to career success that WaaS vendors promise. Sure, making a splash with an edgy video or a memorable training product or an exhilarating escape room game will earn you some praise. Nothing wrong with that. What it won’t do is catapult you out of the mob and up into the executive ranks. Remember, everyone else in your company is looking “make it” up the ladder.

“Only one seat in the lifeboat” ≠ “only one empty seat on Mahogany Row.” Organisational structure is a wholly invented fiction. Your employer can make as many higher level “positions” as they want to at any time. There’s no law or force of nature saying that there can only ever be two director billets in the Glasgow office. When your boss says drek like that, what they’re really communicating is that management wants to see you abandon your principles and brutalize one another before they’ll consider “allowing” just one of you to move a single, inconsequential, notch up in their hierarchy.

That is to say, you’re competing with everyone else in every conceivable speciality for a limited amount of attention, praise, and sponsorship. Remember: the “non-track” career fields are almost always second-tier support functions, not critical production functions. The odds that a single “big splash” training product or engagement effort or interactive platform or funny video from a vendor will awe your executives are near zero. Everyone is trying to make the same splash to get uplifted into “fast-track” positions that don’t exist. It’s competing for a prize that doesn’t exist.

As I told the last young professional that I mentored, there is no path to the corner office from our corner of the cubicle farm. As the fine folks at Despair Inc. phrased it on the framed lithograph that hangs above my desk: Just Because You’re Necessary Doesn’t Mean You’re Important. Understanding and making peace with that painful truth will set you (somewhat) free.

Success in a niche field, I counsel, won’t come from “making a big splash” with the higher-ups. It comes from earning a reputation for integrity, endurance, and competence. If yours is a niche field, perform on it well. Earn your superiors’ respect and appreciation as people they can count on to deliver. When you’re fighting for space on the lowest floors of the organisational pyramid, fidelity counts far more than flashiness. No, this approach won’t score you a skip-level promotion to Vice President and a red-carpet life. What it will get you is the best perquisite we can hope for in the American working world: someone with clout who will protect you when the inevitable “right sizing” initiative comes around again.

I know … everyone feels like The Grand HeroTM of their own story. I hear it the voice of every eager new hire. They all want the grand and glamorous life they were told they could expect from the stories they consumed growing up. They believe our culture’s sugar-coated lies about how “anyone can make it to the top” if only they “just work hard enough.” It hurts both mentor and mentee alike to shatter that illusion … still, everyone comes to realize it eventually.

That’s why, I argue, the sooner a young professional can get their priorities straight and work towards realistic goals, the better off they’ll be. “Big splashes” are wasted efforts, in that they’ll never deliver on the sales weasels’ promises of promotions and prosperity. Sure, that means fewer lucrative contracts for WaaS providers, but I’m okay with that. Don’t try to sell me fireworks when what I need is a good shovel.

[1] That’s the entire Harry Potter franchise summed up in one paragraph. Saved you 60-70 hours of binge-reading time.
[2] See “Musk, Elon.”
[3] At time of writing.

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