• Very common, especially in smaller companies. Some bosses do reach a stage of their career where their ambition wanes and the performance of the company, or the part of the company they are managing, is satisfactory and all becomes a little comfortable.
• Do you know for sure that your boss isn't going anywhere? The average length of tenure for a ‘C’ level person is around five years
• What succession planning is in place in your organisation? It’s a dangerous question: if succession planning is in place and you don’t know about it, the chances are you are not part of the plan. A motivation to leave perhaps. Conversely many organisations don’t formally make a succession plan, and asking the question could put you more in the frame. Is this a subject area you could approach your boss with? Clearly a matter to approach (very) sensitively.
• The best way to approach the subject of succession planning and what plans may be in place for you lie in the formal review process. Any well managed business will have an appraisal process in place and part of this appraisal is to establish your career ambitions and create personal development plans for you. This is the safest environment. If you are in a company that doesn’t have formal appraisal we suggest you open a dialogue with your immediate superior whereby you suggest you meet every six months or so to discuss how you are doing and what more you could contribute towards. In this informality you can open the subject around plans for the business and measure what is intended with you in balance with corporate development.
• Do you genuinely know you want to move up? What about moving along (for instance to head up a different function)?
The big career move in anyone’s progression is to move into a role where you are no longer managing your specialist function. It is quite natural for the sales professional to progress through to sales management and into a Sales Director’s role. The quantum leap in someone’s career is to move into a role managing the other specialist functions and then on to general management. To facilitate this and make this ultimate move easier, advanced organisations move their high performance individuals across the organisations to manage new functions. In this capacity the new manager is leading people who know more about the technical elements of their disciplines than their new manager does. Success in this new post is a clear indication of leadership and general management capability.
In summary, factors that may encourage you to leave include:
• The only move you want to make is into your boss’s role
• You have a good feel that your boss is planning to stay for some time
• You are not part of the succession plan
• You see little value in investigating other roles outside your natural career path