Who Gets to Grow (And How It's Really Decided)

There's a piece of work that needs doing.

Nothing enormous. A project with a bit of visibility on it, the kind that gets noticed if it goes well. You have to hand it to someone, and by the time you reach the end of the email you already know who.

You didn't weigh anyone up. A name simply arrived, the way names do, and everything after that was you assembling reasons for a decision that had already happened.

That isn't carelessness. It's how it always works.

Nobody decided anything

Ask most managers how they choose and you'll get something deliberative. Readiness. Capability. Who has earned it. They're not lying — the reasons are real and usually decent. But the reasons came second. What came first was recognition, and recognition is instant, well before any criteria get involved.

Which changes the question. Not why did you pick them. Why were they the one you could see?

The track across the grass

Every park has one. The paved paths go where the architect thought people ought to walk, and then there's the other route — the worn brown line cutting the corner off the lawn, because it's shorter and anyone can see it's shorter.

Nobody designed it. The first person cut across because they were late. The second because there was already a faint line. By the hundredth the line is a groove, the grass is dead, and it has stopped being a shortcut. It's just the way.

That's how you came to know who to hand the work to. Not through a decision — through a few hundred unremarkable moments of contact. The desk you walk past. The person who happened to be in the room when it came up. The one whose work crosses yours, so you see it without going looking. None of it was strategy. All of it was traffic, and the traffic wore a path.

But traffic on its own isn't the thing. You can walk past someone for five years and still have nothing to say about them. What the path produces is knowing — what they think, how they are when something goes wrong, what they do with work nobody's watching. That isn't exposure. It's a relationship, however small and however accidental. And it's the only thing that ever gives you anything to say.

Which is the whole mechanism. You can't advocate for someone you have no relationship with. Not because you're unwilling — because you'd have nothing to offer the room but an adjective.

Then the grass either side keeps growing. The person who isn't on your route doesn't stay equally visible; they get harder to see every month, because you have something new about the other one every week and nothing new about them at all. It isn't that you rated them lower. You have less to rate.

And then we pave it

This is where organisations do the strange thing.

Sooner or later somebody notices development is being handed out unevenly, and the answer is always more process. A nine-box grid. A talent review. Calibration, with names in boxes and a facilitator keeping time.

None of it is cynical and not much of it is useless. But watch what it does. Forty names, ninety minutes, and the ones argued for are the ones somebody in the room can speak about with any confidence — which is to say, the ones somebody already has a path to. The process doesn't discover anything. It ratifies. It finds the track already worn across the grass, lays tarmac along it, and calls it the route.

And now the shortcut is official, which makes it very hard to question, because it has a framework behind it.

From the other end

What people say to me when they've been passed over — and I hear it a great deal — is almost never that it was unfair. It's much quieter. It's I don't know what I did wrong.

The honest answer is somehow worse. Nothing. There was no verdict, no moment when it got decided, which means there's no moment to appeal to. Being judged badly is painful; not being judged at all is disorienting in a way people struggle to name — so they supply a name themselves, and it's usually their own fault. At least that's a story with a cause in it.

And the two obvious responses, work harder or get better at describing what you've done, move almost nothing. Nobody in that room is refusing to speak for you. They can't. Advocacy needs material: how you think, what you did when it went wrong, what you're like to disagree with. Good work alone doesn't supply it. Somebody has to have been close enough to watch it happen.

Which sounds like an argument for networking, and it isn't. Back in April we drew a line between investing in a work relationship and merely transacting in one. A transaction leaves nobody with anything to say about you. It's the invested ones that hold weight — and they carry your prospects as well as your difficult conversations. Same asset. Different load.

The bit that's actually ours

You can't fix this with better assessment. That's the trap. Every attempt to make selection more rigorous lays more tarmac: it makes the existing path more legitimate, not more accurate. If you've ever sat through a calibration session that produced precisely the names everyone walked in expecting, you've watched it happen.

What's actually yours is smaller and much less satisfying. It isn't who you're near. It's who you actually know.

You can't make yourself see people fairly. You can change who you have anything to see. A dull half hour with someone whose work never crosses yours does more for their prospects than any amount of conscientiousness in a talent review — not because it's kind, but because it's the only thing that will leave you with something to say when their name comes up in a room they're not in.

Worth sitting with

So, with nobody watching:

Who did you last put forward for something when they weren't in the room — and how did they come to be someone you could speak about at all?

Which of the people around you have you got nothing new to say about? Not nothing good. Nothing new.

And turning it round: who could speak about you like that — and when did you last give them anything to work with?

And if you'd been standing three metres to the left these past two years — a different desk, a different project, a different set of accidental encounters — would the same names still be arriving?

Resource Corner  Curated content to deepen your understanding:

"Pygmalion in Management" — J. Sterling Livingston (Harvard Business Review, 1969). Nearly sixty years old and still the sharpest thing written on this. Livingston's argument is that a manager's expectations of someone largely determine how that person performs, and that most managers do this unknowingly and downwards. The uncomfortable corollary: you cannot fake the expectation. People read what you actually believe about them, not what you say.

Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor — Sylvia Ann Hewlett. The distinction this month's article rests on, made explicit. Mentors talk to you; sponsors talk about you when you're not there. Hewlett's research follows where sponsorship actually goes, and the answer is uncomfortably close to "wherever proximity and resemblance already point it".

"Why the best hire might not have the perfect resume" — Regina Hartley (TED). Fifteen minutes on the gap between looking the part and being able to do it, built around the difference between a polished CV and a scrappy one. A useful corrective if you suspect your own recognition reflex is better calibrated than most.

Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott. Not remotely a book about talent management, which is exactly why it belongs here. Scott's subject is what happens when institutions impose formal, legible order on messy local practice — and how the map ends up governing the territory. Read the early chapters and the nine-box grid will never look quite the same. Heavier going than the rest of this list, and worth it.