Learn to think two levels above your current pay grade for real growth

Don’t be busy reorganizing the deckchairs on the Titanic goes the saying. And yet scores of corporate stewards are neck-deep in their finite job descriptions oblivious to the eventuality that the whole enterprise may be sinking. It’s a curious case of monopsony (a market with a single buyer) coupled with moral hazard (taking risks knowing there is no cost) that often ties an individual’s thinking to the pay grade. Yet, employees mistake career progression as the license to think bold. Why is it that employees find it so difficult to escape the gravity of their hierarchies?

At birth, we all promise practically infinite potential. The years of pruning—first through the mechanisms of parenting, then the means of formal education and informal imitation, and eventually baked in the furnace of market dynamics— make your reality is a pale shadow of your potential. Parents model the behaviour that is (or rather, was) socially accepted, teachers double down on subjects with economic utility, and the individual is constantly trying to fit in, eschewing the possible in the pursuit of the practical. This economies-of-scale-driven logic leads you to the job market, where nothing much can go wrong, but nothing springs out of the ordinary either.

Escape The Trap

With over three-quarters of an adult’s life spent working (or often pretending), a career is an existential priority for many. With eight hours of sleep and eight hours of work becoming the rule, work controls your fears and imagination alike.

At the onset of a career, it’s typically an arranged marriage between your talent and the finite needs of an employer. No job description, however curated, does justice to your talent set. Resultingly, it’s a compromise where an employee lets go of her native talent and even idiosyncratic aspirations to wear the cloak of what a certain job demands.

Over time, both demand and supply increase, and the activities have far outstripped the original remit. The real victims are your skills, temperament, desires and talent that never were in demand and got purged in the bargain.

The essential difference between an entrepreneur and an employee (at any level in an organization) is that of the scope of work. An entrepreneur, especially at infancy, is everybody—right from the doorman to the chairman, and then the division of labour takes over, relieving the entrepreneur to take on more high-leverage activities. As for an employee, the roles are typically narrowly defined, and with promotions, this slides over a spectrum—doing higher-order activities and delegating the lower-value ones—but always operating in a narrow range. But what comes first: the promotion in the hierarchy or the elevation in the thinking? If one’s thinking is stuck to a certain pay grade, it’s almost fatalistic. The resort is to escape the trap, and it starts with elevation of thinking.

Thinking Differently

The idea is to think two levels above your pay grade. Why two levels? Firstly, by the virtue of delegation, you are partly thinking like your supervisor and might someday be in that seat, but a level further remains almost like a black box. Secondly, thinking two levels up will free you from a lot of trivial, day-to-day activities that occupy your time but don’t amount to much. Sample this: As you encounter a problem, instead of jumping at solving it, take a pause and ask yourself: What will my boss’ boss do in this situation? If you get to the realization that she won’t even get bothered, then it means that you are solving a lower-level issue. It can’t generate the desired impact. Further, if you gather that your boss’s boss isn’t perturbed about the problem you are neck deep in, it’s time that you now sell the problem. Remember: just because a problem is solved well doesn’t make it important. Since hard work is the resort of the most un-imaginative, creativity isn’t about working hard, rather it’s about thinking hard.

As you think two levels above your pay grade, you get to rise beyond your parochial view and prepare yourself as a leader. You break the shackles of your arbitrary job description, bring your dormant faculties to the fore and be more than your title. You become an entrepreneur. You aren’t waiting for marching orders, for someone to draw your attention to a problem, and then the next. You anticipate the bigger issues, select the high-leverage activities, appropriate your scant attention and efforts to creating a lasting impact, and transcend your rank and file. And if your thinking remains rooted at your pay grade, so will you.

Pavan Soni is the writer of Design Your Thinking and Design Your Career.

Write to us at feedback@livemint.com