How Joe Escaped From his Niche to Being Promoted

Shôn Ellerton, April 4, 2024
This is a story about a technical guy who created a niche for himself through years of hard work, but somehow, never got promoted.

Joe works for a manufacturing company building aircraft components. He works in the IT department and specialises in writing scripts to migrate data in and out of the company’s SAP environment. It is a highly technical role requiring proficiency across a plethora of technologies including Java, ABAP, PHP, C#, and of course, SQL. He’s very good at this!

Being fairly new to the professional world, this is Joe’s first real fulltime job and joined the company at the young age of twenty-two. The company needed someone who had some skills at creating reports taking data from a variety of sources including SAP, Microsoft Access and SQL Server databases. The company took him on paying him a reasonable but modest salary given his relative inexperience in the field and his age. During his first few years, he made significant strides in improving his technical skills, to the point, where he became invaluable to the business. He had become a ‘sticky’ employee and had become part of the furniture.

Sounds like a success story, doesn’t it?

However, there is one small problem.

Joe is now forty-five and occupies the same position in the company maintaining the vast collection of applications, APIs, scripts, ETL packages, and other wonderful mechanisms of data manipulation that he had created over the years.

During this vast time span, Joe had seen many changes to his surrounding environment but, alas, somewhat fewer changes to his own. He had modest increases to his salary, most of which, fell in line with changes in the inflation rate. Successive managers came in, only to be replaced with new ones, each of which had to be brought up to speed with what Joe does. Which, of course, never happens because by the time that manager has an inkling of what Joe does, he is then promoted and in swoops another manager.

So what is happening here?

Joe has dug himself into a niche in which he is unable to escape. Therefore making promotion a near impossibility.

And why is that?

Because the organisation he works for does not want to lose Joe’s pivotal role in understanding the spaghetti-like nature of the systems he has put together and maintained throughout the years. It’s an understandable scenario.

But this leaves Joe ultimately puzzled. Throughout his career at the organisation, he has become nothing short of exemplary in his work. He earned many Red Letter rewards and certificates of appreciation, but when it came to organisation reshuffles, or when new members came on board, it surprised Joe that he was never offered a promotion in his team. He could not partake in the same level of benefits as his manager did. The higher pay, the better company car perks, access to exclusive manager training events, fuel charge cards, and, of course, the satisfaction of earning a better position through years of hard graft.

Those at the top of the chain of command don’t know Joe because, like his ever-changing managers, they too, keep changing.

What Joe doesn’t know is this.

If you don’t make any effort to move, no one is going to do it for you.

I’ve seen this play out with those at executive level in big organisations. CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, COOs, and so on. They move frequently as do senior managers down to middle managers, although to a lesser extent. Most of those at the top play hard, act aggressively, and move decidedly quick when action warrants it. They are particularly good at self-preservation often at the expense of those lower in the picking order.

And this is the key. They keep on moving. That is why they are so particularly successful at the top of the food chain.

I liken the whole thing to the martial art of Jiu Jitsu or wresting, because it’s all about planning to escape and moving to the next domineering position. When someone is on the bottom, that person needs to move quickly to find a way to get out by planning ahead and anticipating the move by the opponent. Stop moving, and that person will be tapped out very soon.

This is quite a common occurrence in the corporate world. Especially at the highest echelons of the business where the board room lies.

New top level executives are brought in while the news is announced to all the underlings in the organisation that they will bring an element of freshness, vivacity, or some other sparkling comment. Changes are made and new initiatives are put into place, many of which, provide many opportunities to plant gold stars against the CVs of newly-placed executives.

What is so inherently fascinating with this is that kudos is often given regardless whether the initiatives succeed or not. And this is the thing to watch out for. When senior executives angle their way out of their position looking for new ‘exciting’ challenges in other organisations, it may be a signal that it’s time to get out while the iron is hot, so to speak. Perhaps even to escape being submitted by a potential failure of a project or some initiative which didn’t go as well as planned. Those at the top have far better visibility of writings on the wall than the rest of the troops. Much can be learned by following the movements at the top.

But this is a lot to take on for poor Joe knowing that he has now seen a little more of what happens with the political movements of his organisation. He now feels that he has been taken granted for. And yes, in a way, he has been taken for granted. But no one in his chain of command may be aware of this. After all, the movements of who goes in and who goes out is so fluid, that it’s unlikely that Joe will be viewed this way, but rather, that very helpful and knowledgeable person everyone goes for support and help.

Let it be known that, throughout this story, Joe is a fictitious character working in some high-tech industry. He is one of many such examples of those who have dug a very deep niche, or rather, a hole, in which it got increasingly more difficult to escape from.

Back in the real world, I encountered such an individual, who having worked the best part of two decades in one organisation had accumulated a vast wealth of knowledge about the company’s systems, and yet, I found it surprising that he was not raised to a more senior position within the team.

I had a discussion with one of his colleagues as to why this could be. He gave me an answer which I predicted. He said that he probably wouldn’t be interested. I said to him if anyone asked him. His reply was that he wasn’t sure, but doubted it.

Going back to our fictitious Joe, this is often the reality.

Seeking promotion requires being active in looking for opportunities. It doesn’t come automatically in terms of time being served or through merit alone. I’ve seen those from the military come in two decidedly different flavours in the world of telecommunications. Those who never rise in the organisation expecting promotion in terms of serving time and those, usually in higher command, who aggressively put out the feelers and strive to gain high positions very quickly. Adjusting to ‘civvy street’ is not easy for all who come out of the military. Telecommunications, an industry I worked in for more than twenty years, is one with many such employees.

Back to the story.

Joe begins to ask questions and seek some long overdue advice.

He begins to take more detail as to his team dynamics.

Is the team overstretched with a view to taking in more people? If so, could that mean an extra layer of management to distribute the load of having too many direct reports is needed? There may be an opening for a promotion, but Joe needs to be observant and act quickly because what Joe would prefer is that the company hires someone to fill his shoes rather than for the company to hire another middle manager externally to separate him by an extra layer from his existing manager.

Joe keeps close to his manager, being friendly without brown-nosing, and offering advice and assistance when the occasion warrants it. Most importantly, Joe begins to make it clear that he seeks to offer his expertise in a mentoring capacity to teach others in the team what he can do.

Joe learns to dispel his fear of obsolescence by passing his age-old ‘secrets’ to others in the team. What Joe pleasantly realises is that his manager finds Joe an even more valuable asset contrary to Joe’s initial fear of being redundant.

By mentoring others, Joe has taken a new leaf in his career. He begins to have confidence in hosting technical workshops and presenting roadshows to other branches of his company in different regions of the country. He also finds it fun and gets to meet new people who now look up to Joe. Not as someone who simply knows some technical stuff and how to do it, but as a person they can trust and respect.

Joe’s manager, at the nick of time, informs recruitment that they need a data engineer to assist with what Joe had been doing for more than twenty years. At the same time, he has a quick chat with Joe asking him that he would like to propose a position for him to manage a technical team in which he can gradually mentor to full capacity.

It’s a great idea and the company offers Joe a promotion.

Those at the very top have little visibility or, indeed, much care at all, what is happening with Joe. But that’s okay, because Joe, at least, is making a step in the right direction. Of course, as the number of seats in the upper echelons become more rarified, the competition will be that much greater. It is up to Joe, of course, how hard he wants to climb up the ever-increasingly difficult ladder.

As with wrestling or jiu jitsu, there are always workarounds and escape routes.

In the real world, I had the personal experience of becoming a regional manager for a telco company. However, I was one step below becoming a partner of the business. For three years straight, I was rejected on rather mysterious grounds, much of which, was kept within the secretive walls of the partnership clan.

During my time as a regional manager, I had forged connections with other organisations, not just with my own. It was just as well that I caught up with a friend of a friend who was a senior partner in an organisation who wanted to start a division of business similar to what I currently managing.

Without any formal interview, I met up with him for a beer whilst casually discussing which Pink Floyd album was the best, when he posed the idea if I’d be interested to head up a telco division within the organisation he worked in.

I accepted and then resigned much to the surprise of my team.

And interestingly, not long afterwards, the telco sector in the organisation which I quit began to dwindle to a skeleton crew of sorts. Not because of my absence, but purely because of the overall direction of the business. It was mere coincidence. But was it karma that led me to defect to another organisation? One can only wonder.

Yes, I had escaped and rolled out of that predicament to newer and richer pastures.

Our fictitious Joe may come across the same scenario given time, but at least, he managed to climb out of his niche, armed with both his technical knowledge and his newly-founded skills for him to climb up the greasy pole of upper management.