Getting to L6 is Skill, Getting to L9 is Luck

The Right Place at Right Time Can Overcome Any Amount of Skill and Planning

Although I would love for this to not be the case, most human organizations become less democratic as they become larger. You can easily see this dynamic in governments, large companies, and political parties. It’s comparatively easy to debate complex topics and make good decisions when there are only a couple of well-informed decision makers. But it becomes nearly impossible when you get to even a small team size. To prove the point, try to find a lunch restaurant to satisfy 10 of your coworkers. Seriously, try to do it this afternoon and record how long it takes and how satisfied people are with the outcome. 

By the time an organization comprises 1,000 people, the only way that we humans have found to retain group cohesion and decision making is to give some people more authority. But for this to be an effective strategy, there have to be a small number of people in authority.

The simple fact that large human organizations require a small number of leaders has a profound impact on the connection between skill and reward in your career. 

Luck and Senior Leadership

Imagine that you run a large, highly competitive tech company. You only hire workers that can demonstrate that they are in the top 10% for their skill set. Because your company doesn’t need a lot of employees to be very profitable and the labor market is pretty big, you have an essentially unlimited talent pool to recruit from. Because it’s very difficult to measure performance on the job, let alone in an interview, workers at your company appear to have a pretty much undifferentiated level of total skill. Some will be better at coding, marketing, internal office politics, presentations, or management, but for a senior leader without intimate knowledge of what each person is doing, they all appear to be bright, hard-working people.

Your large organization can only remain effective and cohesive with a small number of senior leaders. But to you, all of your workers will appear to be pretty much equally skilled. So how can you differentiate the top 1% from the merely top 10% and promote them accordingly?

Rewarding Business Results Reinforces Luck-Based Promotion

Most organizations solve this (at least on paper) by promoting senior leaders on the basis of real world business results. After all, a corporate entity places no intrinsic value on being fair. The point of a business is to generate profit, and it makes sense to promote leaders who have done that in the past. 

This isn’t a problem for the business, but it is a problem for anyone aspiring to be a senior leader. Although skill, work ethic, and a dozen other positive traits are positively correlated with getting good business results, there isn’t a strict causal relationship. The world is random.

MIT graduates do better than the average college graduate in their careers, but some won’t do well at all. At the same time, some graduates of local community colleges go on to lead fortune 50 companies.

Driving Business Results

From the perspective of an employee at a technology company where everyone is already an MIT graduate, driving significant business results and being promoted to senior leadership largely boils down to luck. If you are a software engineer, you would have had a pretty good shot at driving huge business impact as employee #5 at Facebook in 2005.

But in 2005, Facebook looked like most other high-risk startups - there was absolutely no guarantee that it wouldn’t just fizzle out in 18 months. Those that took the risk and stuck with it got rewarded, but those that worked at a dozen other promising social network startups at the time got nothing.

The same winner-takes-all dynamic is at work in a large organization’s promotion choices. Those that work on projects that succeed get promoted on the basis of having delivered real world results. But often, those results are a product of having been at the right place at the right time, not skill.

So how do you hack the system and get to L9? Increase your exposure to lucky events.

That may sound like tongue-and-cheek sarcasm, but it’s not. There are behaviors that you can cultivate that will make you more lucky. Check out my post next week to learn what they are!