Climbing vs. Growing

Mariah was a pharmacist who had joined a small telehealth company and grown up inside it. She made director at thirty-one. By thirty-eight, she ran clinical operations for a business ten times the size of the one she'd joined. She was good at the work and knew it.

But she started feeling stuck. The company had flattened as it scaled. The few seats above her were full, held by mid-career people who weren’t going anywhere soon. The next rung for Mariah would not come for years, if it came at all. She began taking recruiter calls in her car before she drove home. She didn’t want to leave, but over the last two years she had stopped believing she was still becoming anything.

I met Mariah at a workshop I run for women leaders. When I passed a cross-section of an oak tree around the room, cut clean across so the rings showed, Mariah held the wood longer than the others. She was counting rings. A tree adds one every year, even in the years it gains no height. The trunk thickens, and the roots deepen. The wide rings and the thin ones sit side by side. I use this oak slice to demonstrate that growth begins from within. It doesn’t come in equal amounts. It can move in more than one direction.

She told me later that she saw her last two years as flat because her title had not changed. And yet, during that time, she had taken on the broken intake system no one wanted, which meant months working with the VP of software development, who was a level above and nothing like her. She found a way to work with him, and together they fixed the system. She also had kept coaching a young pharmacist on her team all the way through his promotion in another department. And other directors often came to her when they had to make a tough call. All of these successes were like tree rings, wider not higher.

She had been growing the whole time and grading herself only on altitude.

Mariah stopped waiting for the rung above her and went deeper into the work she had. She built, mentored, and widened her reach beyond her title.

When the vice president's seat finally opened, eighteen months later, it came to her without a search. By then she half-wondered why she ever needed it, because she had already brought her leadership to the next level the moment she stopped trying to escape her seat and started to master it.

Climbing is the next rung. Growing is the next ring.

The Question

Where are you measuring your growth only by what sits above you?

“What we need is here." — Wendell Berry