The gaps between the rungs on the career ladder are not evenly spaced These gaps happen when your old way of understanding your job no longer works and must be replaced by a new paradigm.

One of the big gaps is somewhere between first level management and senior management. The early to middle stages of a career are all about doing more and doing better according to a well-defined job description. The next levels are defined very differently. You can no longer do more, because everyone’s capacity is finite. Not can you make as much progress on doing better, because there are so many different things you have to do. Instead, it’s about doing the most important things adequately. This switch is hard because the intuition on how to get ahead that has been trained and refined and reinforced for years stops being the right one. While the right strategy isn’t exactly the opposite, it is hard to let go of the previous strategy that worked so well.

The second difficulty is in knowing what those most important things are and what adequate means. More senior positions don’t usually have a limited and clearly defined set of activities. It’s more likely that the job is effectively “do the right thing in everything related to X.” Nobody tells you in advance what “the right thing” is. Nor do they tell you exactly what they mean by “everything” or “related.” You can’t even copy someone else, because nobody has a job similar enough to yours. You can’t even copy your predecessor, because she had different strengths and weaknesses and was leading through different circumstances. Though they won’t tell you the standard (because they can’t), you’re still accountable to meeting it. It’s just that now part of the job is figuring out what the job is.

This transition is a classic example of “what got you here won’t get you there.” No actionable strategy will serve you all the way through your career progression. The most you can hope for is durable meta strategies or components of strategy, like how to learn. If your strategy is ineffective, then you won’t progress. If it is effective, it will only be that way for a while. Eventually you’ll outgrow it, and you’ll either stop progressing or have to define a new one. As soon as you figure out the answers, they change the questions.