How to get promoted and avoid mid-career crisis
Most leaders suffer from a mid-career crisis. This is when they feel stuck in their careers and career growth stalls. How to get promoted and avoid a mid-career crisis? Read how you can use this one tool to supercharge your performance and career growth.
Rapid growth at the start of the career
If you are like most professionals, here is what happens. When we start our careers, there is a period of rapid learning and performance improvement.
Over a period of a few years, we become good at our profession – whether we are a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, a musician, a scientist, or a leader. The sad part for most of us is that we stop getting any better. We hit a plateau, and more often than not, it acts as the ceiling for our performance level, often for the rest of our lives!
Hitting the plateau and the mid-career crisis
How do we get better in our profession, even when we are reasonably good at what we do? How do we become better leaders? How do we get past the plateau? How do we get great at something? How do we take our performance to the next level? How to get promoted and avoid the mid-career crisis?
These are the questions Dr. Atul Gawande asked himself. Dr. Atul Gawande is an American surgeon and an author – has written four New York Times bestsellers and is a public health leader – has won several awards for his research to improve healthcare. He did some research on how to improve his performance and finally found the answers. In his TED talk, he describes how he got past his plateau as a surgeon. Watch Dr. Atul Gawande’s Ted talk here – Want to get great at something? Get a coach
The traditional view of professional development – How to get promoted?
The traditional view in most professions–leaders included–is that the individual is responsible and capable of managing their own career and performance improvement. School, college, on-job training, etc., help the professional learn. Then she practices these skills at work and gets better. Most professionals use this approach to become successful in their careers.
Dr. Atul Gawande also used the traditional approach to become a good surgeon. For the first five years of his career, he had significant learning and improvement as a surgeon. His complication rates dropped steadily until they leveled off around five years into his career. Although he was a successful surgeon, he had hit a plateau.
Read: What are the ego traps and Leadership Derailers leaders fall for?A coaching approach to professional development – How to get promoted after the mid-career crisis?
The opposite view comes from the field of sports. In sports, no matter how good you are, the expectation is that you can get better. You are never done. And you don’t do it on your own. Everybody has a coach. The average player has a coach, the good player has a coach, and the greatest in the world also has a coach.
Would the sports coach analogy work in other professions? Can it help avoid mid-career crisis and help how to get promoted? Dr. Atul Gawande wanted to see if it would work for his own profession as a surgeon. He hired his professor Dr. Olsteen, who had retired at that time, to observe and critique him during the surgery in the operation theater. Initially, this idea sounded absurd to him.
Coaching creates awareness and growth.
It was a painful process, and sometimes it seemed like things were getting worse; he didn’t want to work on doing things differently; he didn’t even like being observed. Although unpleasant, this was a different level of awareness.
He recalls the first surgery that he performed with his coach Dr. Olsteen observing him. Atul’s perception was that the surgery went without a hitch. It was quite flawless. Dr. Olsteen had a different idea. He had a page full of notes and observations to share–how the spotlight was off the wound, and the surgery was performed with reflected light, how his elbows were raised, which is not a good position for a surgeon, and on and on.
Achieving performance improvement after the plateau, avoid mid-career crisis, and get promoted faster
After two months of continuous feedback from the coach, he started improving again. This was the first time he had seen improvements since five years into his career. His stalled career growth started again, and he avoided the proverbial mid-life career crisis. A year after the coaching ended, he got even better as the surgeries’ complication rates dropped even further.
Dr. Gawande found this fundamentally profound. Great coaches act as external eyes and ears and provide a more accurate picture of your reality. They break down your actions into fundamentals, help improve each area, and then build it back up for improved performance.
Using coaching for leadership development, avoid mid-career crisis, and get promoted faster.
Leadership development is similar. Leaders hit a plateau and often suffer from the mid-career crisis. How to avoid it, hit career growth, and how to get promoted? The answer lies in coaching! One-on-one coaching with an experienced leadership coach has proven to be the best and most effective leadership development method. A coach helps the leader to become more self-aware. Understand their strengths and improvement areas. The coach helps the leader to devise a strategy to utilize strengths and overcome derailing behaviors. The coach also provides support and accountability while the leader tries new behaviors and keeps working until these new behaviors become habits. How to get promoted and avoid a mid-career crisis? Improve your performance through coaching!
Get the best leadership coaching to get promoted faster.
Read: Everything you ever wanted to know about executive coaching.
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That delivers guaranteed and measurable leadership growth. It is based on a stakeholder centered coaching process with a 95% effectiveness rate (in a study or 11000 leaders on 4 continents). It is used by companies ranging from startups to 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to develop their leaders.
Here are some of the salient benefits of NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching
Time and resource-efficient: The leader does not have to leave work to attend training programs. We go to the leader and her team. And it only takes 1.5 hours per month. The rest of the time, the leader is working to implement with her team.
Separate and customized improvement areas for each leader: Every leader is different. One size fits all approach doesn’t work. Individual development areas for each leader aligned to the business strategy.
Involves entire team: Unlike most leadership programs, NAL Triple Advantage Leadership Coaching involves the leader’s entire team, and it has a cascading effect – increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture.
The leader becomes the coach: for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams. It is like kaizen for your leadership development.
Cost-Effective: Our entire one-year coaching engagement often costs less than sending the leader to a short duration leadership program at any reputed B school.
Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth: as assessed – not by us – but anonymously rated by the leader’s own team members.
Pay us only after we deliver results!: We work with many of our clients on a pay for results basis. What does it mean? If the leaders don’t improve, you don’t have to pay us.
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References: How to Cope With a Mid-Career Crisis I originally published this article on my LinkedIn Profile.