Do, manage, decide: a career cocktail has 3 parts

Time can be spent at your job in only one of three ways:

Do things Manage the doing of things Decide which things should get done

Early in your career it might be 90% doing stuff, 9% managing the doing of stuff and 1% getting to decide what to do. Rarely will any number ever be zero or 100.

An early job of mine was as a COBOL programmer for a financial system. I was given specs written by a Price Waterhouse analyst. Here Steve, do this. But even then there was opportunity to at least influence the getting to decide what stuff gets done. The analyst gave me very thorough specs that laid out paragraph names and numbers. So, the overall structure was 100,200,300 and 200 would call 210, 220 etc. so it occurred to me that I could write a skeleton code generator. COBOL is pretty wordy as a language. So, I wrote a COBOL generator (in COBOL!). Nobody asked me to do it, but when they saw me using it and being very quick at cranking out new programs, the rest of the programmers started using it and PW put me on a tools team.

An exciting part of becoming senior management is getting more and more say in deciding what gets done. It's a heady challenge, with so much more responsibility. But it can be so much more rewarding than simply doing what you're told to do.

Sometimes you can get upside down. You're a senior person that is overwhelmed with things to do and under-resourced with ways to get them done. That can be OK temporarily, and even a good way to force you to maintain those skills that got you to your present level. But it can also be a sure sign of organizational dysfunction. If nobody is noodling through new directions, then simple inertia will keep your organization going on the same path. In this situation, everyone can be shoveling coal to make the train go faster and faster and without a driver, that'll just get the train over the cliff sooner. As a friend of mine says, you'll get to the disaster faster.

So from time to time, take a look at the mixture in your career Pousse-café. If it's wrong, then fix it. If you're unable to fix it, it might be time to find another bar.

Cheers!