Career Paths at the Most Effective Organizations

What does NASA do with its people that I have found to be uncommon in most companies?

It strives to apply their capabilities and encourage progress along their natural lines instead of forcing them into roles where they aren’t well suited.

What does that mean?

Hypothetical Star Engineer

Let’s say you are an engineer. Not an ordinary engineer–you have a gift for it. You’re exceptional. You come up with solutions to engineering issues that most other engineers can’t begin to imagine.

Nobody can be exceptional at everything, so there’s a high chance that you aren’t so great at dealing with people. You’re likely to be much more comfortable with technology than with other human beings. A machine or a computer program responds reliably to what you tell it to do. When it does something wrong, either you set it up wrong or it broke. If it broke, troubleshooting and repairing it is methodical and makes sense. But when you say or do something with a person, the way the person reacts is not so predictable. When you make a mistake with a person, there is no flow chart to guide you in mending it and sometimes correcting the mistake is impossible. Coping with people is uncomfortable, perhaps even distressing, so you minimize it and spend most of your time with technology.

A Nerd By Many Other Names

This is not a new phenomenon. We change our terminology for it, but it has been with us for ages.

During World War II, a lot of engineers like this worked for Lockheed, which blossomed from barely surviving to a powerhouse designing and turning out warplanes at a breathtaking pace. Wives of the engineers began complaining to psychologists about their husbands. Many of the engineers put in long hours at work, citing the war as their reason. When they did come home, they didn’t spend time with their families. They retreated into the basement and spent most of the rest of their waking hours tinkering with model trains.

The engineers were more comfortable with machines than with people, so that’s where they chose to spend as much of their time as possible. Psychologists dubbed this “Lockheed syndrome.”

After the space program, I worked in three world class information technology teams. Midway through my career, people with the traits I’ve described began to be labeled as having Asperger’s syndrome. Now they are being nudged toward new labels. The label doesn’t matter much, but what’s underneath it matters a lot.

Typical Career Paths Are Harmful

At many companies, if you stay in a particular type of role, you will be lucky to get pay increases that keep up with inflation. You’re supposed to seek promotions in order to get rewarded better for your work. The promotion path typically assumes that to go higher, you will move into management, and then if you are the cream of the crop you will move into the executive level.

What’s wrong with this?

It assumes that each time you become really good at something, you will move on to a new role that requires a different skillset. If you are our hypothetical engineering wizard, you’re expected to start supervising other engineers, and then managing people and budgets. You’re expected to do the very thing you find most distasteful and perplexing–do less and less with technology, and more and more with people. You are likely to go from being a star performer as an engineer to being a poor performer as a boss. It’s bad for you, bad for the people you have to manage, and bad for the company.

Effective Career Paths

What have I seen in world class teams, not just in the space program but also in private industry, that works better for everyone?

I’ve seen paths for advancement that allow people to continue refining what they naturally do best.

Let’s switch to private industry for an example so you can see this is something useful on the ground and not only for outer space.

Immediately after the space program, I spent five years on contract at Du Pont. They were especially deliberate about this. According to Arthur Andersen’s consultants, they had ten times as much world class IT expertise in-house as their typical competitor.

They had an entire promotion track for people whose best talents were technical. Our hypothetical engineering wizard could climb that ladder and never think about becoming a manager. If our engineer became one of the best in the world, Du Pont would promote them to Consultant. There weren’t many of those. Each spent their time poking around at the leading edge of their specialty with a remarkably free hand, looking for advances that Du Pont might want.

For an example of what came from this, a Consultant noticed Tom McCabe’s work on analyzing the complexity of software, then using complexity measurements to make software more reliable and maintainable. Du Pont funded much of McCabe’s early development. In return Du Pont got to use his tools when they were still work in progress. I participated in a project that put over a hundred thousand lines of FORTRAN software on top of 238,000 lines in an underlying system. It was immensely complex and made extensive use of McCabe’s tools. In its first year and a half of live operation, only two bugs were reported. Fewer bugs meant less downtime and better profit.

That’s great for technical people, but what did they do about roles that must deal with people?

They identified people with an aptitude for management or executive strategy early on. These people got put on the management track. They were moved through a series of roles at a series of locations around the world for a couple of years in each post, gradually building up broad perspective, ability to adapt across a variety of cultures, wide acquaintance with the full span of what the company could do, and nuanced skills for working with people. From the management track, those with the best aptitude for strategic thinking could be plucked for the executive track.

In Summary

This is what the most effective organizations do. They find ways to enhance natural gifts in their people, letting workers apply their strengths to their jobs, instead of trying to shoehorn people into career tracks that are easy to track but force people to take on work that needs strength where they have weaknesses.

It isn’t rocket science, but rocket science would fail without it.