by Serguey Shinder
Where do you see yourself in three years. It was the last question on the form and I had eleven minutes before the meeting. I wrote that I saw myself leading a team.
I did not want to lead a team. I had never wanted to lead a team. What I had was a blank box, a manager who was going to read the answer out loud, and a strong sense of what someone of my age and salary was supposed to put in it. So I wrote the expected thing, and then forgot I had written it.
It did not stay forgotten. The next appraisal opened with a reference to it. The one after that arrived with a development plan built out of that sentence, with courses on it. When a lead role came up two years later I was the obvious candidate, partly because I was decent at the work and mostly because there was a two-year paper trail saying this was what I had been aiming at. Nobody imposed it on me. I simply never contradicted it, which over a long enough period is the same thing.
I got the job. The email came on a Tuesday afternoon and I remember the feeling exactly, because there was not one. I read it twice looking for the pleasure I was expecting, then closed it and went back to a merge I had been putting off, which I enjoyed considerably more than the email.
Eighteen months. I was not bad at it. I ran honest one-to-ones, I kept some nonsense away from the team, and I was quietly bored by the parts that made up most of the week. Headcount spreadsheets. Sitting between two managers who disliked each other. Being the person who gets asked, and never the person doing the thing.
Stepping back down cost me a title, a little money, and about a year of privately believing I had failed at something, which was the expensive part and was entirely self-inflicted.
What I took from it is not that management is a mistake. Half the people I admire do it and want to. What I took is that I had never once examined the ambition, because it had never presented itself as a choice. It arrived as a sentence written in eleven minutes to fill a box, and every year after that it collected another layer of evidence that this was who I was.
So I test differently now. Not whether I want the outcome, because everyone wants the outcome and an outcome is one afternoon. I ask whether I want the Tuesdays, and whether I would choose that week hour by hour if it came with no title.
An ambition you never say out loud stays yours. The one you write in a box to be agreeable starts quietly recruiting on its own behalf.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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