The Version Next Required

The next stage of a senior career requires a different version of the self from the one that built the current stage. This is one of the structural truths that the senior person discovers slowly, and often resists for some years before accepting it.

The resistance is structural. The current version of the self has been the source of the success that brought the senior person to the current stage. It has been validated repeatedly and at significant cost. The instinct to keep operating from that version is not vanity. It is the rational application of a strategy that has, by every measurable indicator, worked.

The strategy does not always continue working. The next stage, by definition, is a stage that the previous version of the self has not yet operated at. The constraints of the stage are different. The decisions of the stage are different. The relationships the stage requires are different. The version of the self that built the previous stage is not equipped, by definition, to operate the next one. If she were equipped, she would already be operating it.

What this produces, in many senior careers, is the period in which the person attempts to operate the next stage with the previous version of the self. The attempt produces results that are recognisable but slightly off. The team notices it before the person does. The senior performance is competent but the texture has thinned. The decisions are technically right but they are slow to arrive. The energy that was once available for the work is rationing itself differently. None of this is failure. It is, more accurately, the early signal that the version of the self that is doing the work has reached its natural ceiling for the kind of work the stage actually requires.

The senior person can, at this point, do one of two things. She can intensify the use of the previous version of the self, trying to overcome the ceiling by application of more of what built the previous stage. Or she can begin the slow work of letting the previous version of the self give way to the version the next stage will need.

The intensification rarely works for long. The ceiling is structural. Effort cannot, by definition, change the structural ceiling of a particular version of the self. What it can do is exhaust the person while leaving the ceiling in place.

The work of letting the previous version of the self give way is the work most senior people would, if they could, avoid. The work is uncomfortable, slow, and unrecognisable as work for most of its duration. The person is asked to relinquish what has been generative for decades, before she has a stable replacement, and to operate in the gap between the two.

The gap is the part that is rarely written about, because it is rarely visible from outside and rarely articulable from inside. The previous version of the self is no longer fully available. The next version is not yet fully formed. The work that needs to be done has to be done from a position that is neither the old self nor the new self. The position is awkward, often emotionally exposed, and produces work that does not feel like the person's best work because the person doing it is no longer the person whose best work the previous decades produced.

This period can last months. It can last years. The variable that most determines its length is, in my view of the pattern, the senior person's willingness to stay in the gap rather than to short-circuit it. The short-circuit is the return to the previous version of the self, attempted with renewed intensity. The short-circuit always works for a stretch and always exhausts itself, because the structural ceiling has not moved.

What emerges from the gap, when the gap is allowed to do its work, is a version of the self that is not, on the surface, dramatically different from the previous one. The person is still recognisably the person she was. The work is still recognisably the work she has been doing. What has shifted is the operating system underneath the work. The instincts have moved. The default reach has widened. The kind of decision the person can make has changed. The quality of attention the person can hold has changed. The version of the self the next stage required has, slowly, come into being.

This is not the version of the self that the senior person would have designed in advance, if she had been asked to design it. It is, more accurately, the version that the stage itself produces, when the previous version is willing to give way.

The Diagnostic is a place to begin to read what version of the self is currently doing the work, what version the next stage is asking for, and what the gap between them is actually about. Thirty minutes, free, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

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