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Welcome to the fourth part of my series dealing with the failures of internal promotion along the corporate development career path. More often than not, companies are unable to promote their own employees, which not only derails employee motivation but also causes companies to invest valuable resources in senior recruitment from the outside.

I’ve addressed this unfortunate situation in three other posts, which you might want to have a look at before reading on:

Why Managers Lack Empowerment for Promotion. 

Why Imitation Won't Get You Promoted.

Why Winning Habits Might Need to be Changed.

In this post, I’ll address another perspective of this “lose-lose” situation, showing how to turn a corporate development career path into a “win-win”. But first, I’ll recap a bit about what I call dominant habits. As I explained in my last post, dominant habits are a double-edged sword. They often help junior employees quickly climb to middle management but block them from moving any further. So what dominant habits really do in the long run is prevent middle managers from fulfilling their potential. 

Let’s take a practical example. If you’re over 35, you probably remember planning a road trip by consulting either paper or online maps ahead of time and then saving them as a reference during the trip. To follow the map, you needed to keep your eyes open for landmarks, changes in terrain, etc. In short, you were developing your sense of direction. Now let’s look at younger drivers, who might use a GPS to drive from one end of town to the other. While they could very well have the potential to develop a sense of direction, their dominant habit of firing up their GPS everytime they get into the car has actually suffocated their potential for developing this sense of direction. But what would happen if they traveled for an extended period of time without 100% GPS coverage? You’ve got it - they’d employ less of their dominant habit (GPS), making room for their potential habit (sense of direction) to flourish. The same happens when climbing the corporate ladder. Certain dominant habits must give way to potential ones so that they can develop.

The unfortunate thing is that most organizations and middle managers have failed to realize how crucial developing potential habits is. So middle managers automatically carry on reacting the same way to situations, while organizations are unsure of how to empower their middle managers for promotion. 

What needs to happen instead is for middle managers to identify their dominant habits and then to rein them in. In this way, their potential habits, the crucial missing link to promotion, will finally come to life and bloom, allowing managers to achieve their career dreams. 

To learn more about this exciting and rewarding process, please visit my Executive Mirror Program.

And always remember: 

Great managers are made. Not born.

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