When it comes to career progression, AC/DC put it best in their 1975 classic: “It’s a long way to the top”.
Getting robbed, getting took…
I tell you folks, it’s harder than it looks
It’s a long way to the top,
if you wanna rock ‘n roll
AC/DC : It’s A Long Way To The Top
Back when I was a young and naive trainee accountant in my first job at a Big 4 Accounting Firm, my first job was to figure out the status hierarchy.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that whilst all employees at the firm were equal, some were more equal than others.
The partners were rarely seen and were treated with a mixture of fear and respect.
Partners in a professional services firm (think lawyers, accountants etc) have dual roles as both workers and also owners of the firm.
In my imagination, the partners were making unfathomable amounts of money for what looked like a pretty cushy gig.
The longer I spent climbing the ladder at work, the less cushy the gig started to look.
At first the promotions were pretty easy; all you had to do was pass some exams.
But as you progressed further up the status pyramid, the managers and the senior managers looked increasingly harried and over-worked. These were the people chasing the carrot of partnership.
When it was my turn to go through the partnership application process, I had to swallow my doubts that the whole thing might be more grief, stress and hassle than it was worth.
Was I ready for it? No.
Was I willing to change to become ready for it? Perhaps.
Ultimately I wanted it enough to make the necessary changes.
I didn’t really want to to be a partner…other than as a means to an end.
What I did want was to be just rich enough to have choices.
I still remember the moment when I realised that in order to make it to partner, I was going to have to play A LOT of games that I was ill-prepared for.
I was talking to a senior partner and they invited me to “pitch them” i.e. to make my case for why I should be a partner.
Their response left me in no doubt that I was going to have to sharpen up my game, pitch a lot of people and jump through <a lot> of hoops over a ~2 year period.
If you think that just working hard and being good at your job is going to prepare you for that sort of “stretch-promotion” then think again.
What got you here, won’t get you there.
You have to learn a whole new set of skills.
These include (but are not limited to) influence, persuasion, psychology, strategy, game-theory and – last but not least – negotiation.
To get to partner, I had to do a lot of things that didn’t come naturally to me.
I am not just talking about hard work (although that’s part of it).
To explain what I mean, when in the past I have taken a Myers-Briggs Personality Test, I have always come out as an INTJ. That is my natural state.
We don’t need to get into a big debate about whether that test is scientific or not. Suffice to say, the I stands for “Introvert”.
To make partner, I had to act like an ENTJ. The E stands for “Extrovert”. In other words, I had to overcome my natural introversion and engage with people.
There is no bigger driver of increased earnings for introverts than learning to deal better with other people (and yes, that includes navigating office politics!).
There is an art to extracting a BIG payrise.
There are some opportunities in a career that don’t come round often.
In 2007/08, I interviewed for a role in restructuring advisory. Bear in mind that this was the peak of the debt boom when banks were lending to anyone or anything with a pulse and restructuring was a backwater.
Who would want to go from corporate finance (when it was booming) to restructuring (when it looked like a ghost town)?
Answer: me, if the money was right.
People forget that the labour market <is> a market. You have to have other options. You have to create competitive tension. And you have to be willing to walk away.
At the time I made that move, I conducted an auction where I spoke to multiple firms, negotiated hard and made sure I was getting paid as much as the market could bear.
I landed in restructuring in June 2008.
Three months later, Lehman Bros went bust (which was nice of them), the banking system teetered on the brink of collapse and in restructuring we were off to the races.
You say: lucky!
I say yes, that’s true…but luck only helps provide the opportunities. You still have to do the work; first to spot once-in-a-career opportunities and then secondly to follow through and monetize them.
There are multiple layers and levels to this game.
The further up Mount Everest you go, the thinner the air gets.
Take the case of a junior (fixed share) partner at a law firm who is seeking to negotiate a promotion to senior (equity share) partner.
Or the case of an overly-diligent senior employee at a startup / tech firm who has not been cut in on the equity and is slowly burning themselves out.
I like challenges like this when I’m doing career coaching because they are multi-disciplinary problems to solve.
When you are pursuing a “stretch promotion” (or dealing with one that you weren’t expecting) it becomes important to learn some new tricks.
People skills, presence / impact and mindset are more important than technical skills (which are assumed as a given).
There are limiting beliefs to overcome. Imposter syndrome must be crushed. You have to realise that the people at the top do not have it all figured out.
David must learn to fight with Goliath. Or at least negotiate like a pro.
In my experience, few can do this on their own without role models or mentors (and probably more than one).
I certainly had multiple mentors and couldn’t have done it without their example, support and guidance.
Is it worth it?
It might be. Ultimately that’s a decision that everyone must make based on their situation.
All I’d say is that I was reminded this week of the benefits of “FU Money”.
If you were in any doubt about the advantages of being financial independent (plus brave), watching JK Rowling single-handedly shift the entire cultural narrative is quite the reminder.
When you are financially set and uncancellable in the way that JK Rowling is, you get free speech. Everyone else, not so much.
Money allows people – even ordinary people that are not billionaires – to be braver and have more options in their career and in life. And that is why it matters.
Love to everyone
Barney
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The Escape Artist 
Thanks for writing this up; an interesting read!
Do you have any book recommendations for those who are naturally introverted but need to exude extroverted traits for the purposes of career development and/or networking?
Cheers, and thanks again!
Yes…many….I always tailor my book recommendations to the individual…if you email me with the context (age, job, level etc) Ricky I will reply and hook you up with the most appropriate for your situation
Ah, I just did a personality test out of curiosity and apparently I’m INFP, the lowest paid of the lot. The I and P being both the parts I didn’t need a test to know, and also the things that jar most strongly with the professional world. Fortunately I make pretty good money as a software developer, where I think IxxP is common enough, but I can agree that in most work domains, especially corporate environments, it sucks to have this personality type.
What you’re talking about in terms of presenting in a more ENTJ way sounds to me like a sort of masking, which in turn sounds like a recipe for (maybe) getting the promotion and the money, but (also maybe) being less happy anyway. There’s a difference between playing up latent extraverted traits and pretending to be a completely different person. Anything that requires the latter – which I think would be the case for people like me who sit really hard in the I and P camps – doesn’t sound like a good idea, money be damned!