Senior managers, managers, and worker bees

When I started work, I believed that getting promoted was about being better than others. It turns out I was partly right. If you’re no good, you probably won’t get promoted (unless you’re in a pretty dodgy environment, which, I suppose, happens more often than we’d like). You need to be able to get your work done convincingly well to have a chance at promotion. But there’s another sine qua non that I didn’t get at the time, and that many people don’t ever get: it’s extremely difficult to get promoted until you act the part that you’re aiming to be promoted to.

Think about it. How often do you see managers that don’t look, talk and move like managers? Picture a senior position that you’re familiar with (in my case, it would be an IT department manager at a bank). They all behave in a similar way. They don’t speak very much, and when they do, they tend to speak more slowly and quite clearly, with good enunciation. They listen. They have a body language that tells you not to bother them unless you have something important to tell them. They move in a controlled manner, as if they were calculating their movements for maximum effect (and in most cases they are!). They walk like they move: slow, controlled. Many of these guys are very competent, but in addition to the rote competence at their job, they’ve learnt something else: how to look like senior managers.

Managers? They look a bit more lively, perhaps because part of the manager’s job is to make the project move forward by injecting his own life and energy into it. So they move a lot more, going in and out of meetings all the time. They always have an open, confident body language. They say “we” a lot when they speak - it’s not until they become senior that they start to assert their own personal opinion as being the rule of law. They usually try to appear approachable by looking around quite often while they’re working (though to someone who doesn’t understand this it may appear they are distracted).

And the rest? One day, walking to the office, I noticed I was looking down at the ground while walking, my head hunched forward as if I wore a slave collar. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this was not the way a free man should walk, and I raised my head. Since then, I never walk facing downwards, but if you look around your office or in the streets around it, you’ll notice plenty of people who do. In the UK, they often wear blue shirts (astonishingly few senior managers do!). Sometimes their shoes are even cheap and beat-up, even though it’s a mortal sin in England. If they’re your colleagues, you might notice they often mumble. If you’re one of them, you might also notice that you often feel annoyed at the system around you and the way it uses and abuses you, and you’ll hear your colleagues complaining about it regularly.

Have a look for yourself. You may notice a different set of behaviours, but you will notice some common behaviours across each level. Observe the body language and dress code for each level, and you might even be able to recognise what level people are when they’re walking in the street (it’s a fun game to play).

Be what you want to be

It’s interesting to notice these patterns, but it’s not excessively useful on its own. Where this knowledge becomes really useful is when you decide that you want to be promoted to one of these levels. When that happens, in order to achieve that, you must ensure that you adopt the same patterns of behaviour as that of your target group. If you fail to do that, you’ll be putting yourself at a huge disadvantage compared to someone who does.

This is a lesson that was regularly drummed into me in the consulting corporation where I used to work, because there, it was completely explicit. The only way to be promoted from analyst to consultant was to function as a consultant for 6-12 months. Then, to be promoted to manager, you had to be a manager already. The explicit criteria for promotion included that you needed to be functioning at the target level for the entire performance period prior to the promotion evaluation.

Now that I work in a small business environment, the rule is even more subtle, but still true. No one will trust you with their seed money unless you look like you’re the right kind of person to lead a company. I have many friends who are technically good or even brilliant, but in whom I would not invest because they don’t look the part. The difficulty with small business is that the behaviour of small business leaders is extremely varied, and you don’t get such a long time to study it (if you know a job where you spend all day sitting in the same office as half a dozen successful small business owners, let me know!).

Try it for yourself

Have a go at it today. Pay attention to your the body language, dress code, and verbal speech patterns of people who rank above you. Do it during meetings, while walking to the toilet, or while standing next to the coffee machine (or even while working!). If you can observe the patterns, adopt them (with some common sense of course), and see whether they make your life better. It’s not that hard to consciously alter your body language to be more open and confident, once you’ve figured out that you want to do it, and that’s true of most of those behaviour patterns.

Again, my examples focused on the industries I’ve had experienced with, and on the UK. If you’ve got other examples of patterns in your own country and industry, please do share them in the comments.