“With the new position I’m rather struggling.
I don’t know how to get hold of it all.”
This is a word-for-word sentence from the form on this site. It was written by someone who was promoted from specialist to manager. And I get similar ones all the time: “I was promoted at work. I’d like to learn to be a good boss, not to take work home and to get rid of the uncertainty.” “I’m stuck in my career growth.” They’re written by people who were good at their job. That’s exactly why it catches them out.
A promotion isn’t a reward. It’s a different job.
You were the best player in the team. You scored goals, people came to watch you. As a reward they took your boots away and gave you a whistle. And then everyone wonders why you’re not scoring, and you wonder most of all. But a coach doesn’t score goals. A coach does a completely different trade and nobody taught it to you, because that whistle came as recognition, not as a job description.
And it isn’t only about promotions. Almost every career crisis I see isn’t about the field. It’s about how much of you fits into the role. When half of you fits and the other half waits out in the corridor, it works for a while. After a few years it speaks up, but not as “I want to do something else”. It speaks up as “I don’t enjoy it”, and absolutely anything can hide under that sentence.
Three situations people come to me with most often
1. You got promoted and you’re drowning
Until Friday you did the work. From Monday you’re supposed to arrange for others to do it. Instead of work you have meetings, instead of your own result you have responsibility for other people’s, and in the evening you catch up on the old stuff, because you’re fast at it and it’s the only thing where you feel you’re getting somewhere. Two things are almost always missing here: a clear agreement on what you’re actually measured by now, and permission not to be the best at the new role straight away.
2. You want to move up and you’re waiting for someone to notice
“I’m stuck in my career growth.” One person wrote this to me and it fits plenty of others. You do the work and you count on it speaking for you. It doesn’t speak. Your boss is dealing with his own things and your career isn’t on his list. Meanwhile everyone carries a question almost nobody here has answered: up means what? More money, more people under you, less boredom, or more peace? Each of those answers leads somewhere else and two of them you can have without a promotion.
3. It isn’t the job, it’s one person
Sometimes that dissatisfaction has a name and sits two floors up. You can’t tell him you’re doing the work of two people. Or it’s a colleague you’ve been reacting to for a second year in a way you don’t want to. Or you’re coming back from parental leave, from illness, from a year out, and you feel the train has left without you and everyone can see it. These aren’t small things next to the “real” career. Usually they are the career, because this is exactly why people change jobs and a year later have the same thing in the new one.
And one request I won’t help you with
The most common message on this topic goes roughly like this: “What I’ve been doing for fifteen years doesn’t interest me. I can’t do anything else. Tell me what to do.” I understand it and I don’t think it’s stupid. But it’s honest to say up front that it will end badly with me. I’m not a careers adviser or a recruitment agency. You won’t get a list of professions from me, I won’t rewrite your CV and “what should you do” tests don’t work: each one spits out something different and you don’t believe it anyway. Anyone who comes for this leaves disappointed.
What can be done is to look at what’s underneath that dissatisfaction. It’s almost never the field. It tends to be exhaustion, because with an empty tank nothing interests anyone. It tends to be a boundary you never stated, so you do the work of two people and you’re angry at the work. And it tends to be a value you can’t live out in what you do. When this gets named, the question “what job should I do” often turns into a different one, and that one usually has an answer. Not rarely it comes out that the field is fine and what should change is the boss, the contract or the way you talk about yourself at work.
What you can do about it now
Write yourself the job description nobody gave you
Two columns on paper. On the left, what you really did in this role last week. On the right, what you think is expected of you. With a new role those columns come apart almost every time. Ten minutes and you have it in black and white, exactly where the confusion is.
Sort last week into three piles
Go through the bigger things you’ve done and label each one: I can do this and I enjoy it, I can do this and I’m sick of it, I can’t do this and nobody ever taught me. The third pile is your learning plan. The second one is a list of candidates for delegating or for a conversation with your boss.
Write two lines today
To your boss: “I’d like to sit down for twenty minutes and ask you what you expect from me in this role. And to tell you what I see in it myself.” Most people never write that sentence in their whole career, and yet it’s the cheapest piece of information you can get. If you don’t have a boss, write it to the person you work with most.
Rewrite one complaint into one sentence
Take a concrete situation that annoys you and write it in this form: when this happens, it does this to me and I’d need this. Read it out loud. If it sounds like an accusation, rewrite it. Then use that sentence once for real.
Give the decision you’re putting off a date
Not “this year”. A specific day in the calendar by which you’ll decide, and one thing you need to find out before then: what it pays, what an ordinary day looks like, what they say at home. A decision without a date isn’t a decision. It’s misery in instalments.
Does this sound familiar?
Tick what fits you:
The more you tick, the smaller the chance it’s about the field. These sentences are about the role, about agreements and about the people around you. All of that can be moved before you hand in your notice.
When the new role fits you like someone else’s coat
In the session we’ll go through what the role actually demands, what you can already do, what you need to learn and what you’ll never do in it. Come with nothing more than the sentence “I’m struggling with the new position”. Plenty of people before you wrote exactly that. Sessions last two hours instead of the usual fifty minutes, the intro session is 20–30 minutes online, free and commits you to nothing.
Free intro session →