What happens when you outgrow your own role?
Every role in the business was designed except yours. The roles around you were written for the work. Yours accumulated. So it is normal, a few years in, to be doing the job the company needed two years ago while the company has moved on.
The signs are rarely dramatic. Monday mornings get heavier. The work that once absorbed you now irritates you. You are competent at everything and interested in less of it, and the skill that built the business is now the thing holding you in a job you have outgrown.
Outgrowing a role is not a reason to leave the company. It is the business asking for a role nobody has written yet. The way through is to write it: name the one hat that is yours and only yours, hand the others to people or to structure, and design a role for the version of you the next stage needs, not the one who started.
What is usually underneath
- The role accumulated instead of being designed. Every job you have ever done in the business is still partly yours.
- The skill that built the business became the trap. Being the best at the original work keeps you doing the original work.
- The title survived and the job did not. The name on the door stayed the same while the work underneath it changed.
- Loyalty to an old self. Stepping into the next role means leaving a version of you that people, including you, are used to.
- Monday is reporting the mismatch before you have admitted it to yourself.
What not to do, and what to examine instead
Not a sabbatical as a cure, not selling because you are bored, not hiring a replacement for the whole of you, and not pushing through on discipline.
Examine which parts of the week give you energy and which take it. The one job only you can do. What the next stage of the business needs from the person running it. What you would write if the role were a blank page.
Essays on this