Nonlinear Leadership: Why Straight Career Paths Don’t Lead to the C-Suite

The best career advice I ever received came from one of my mentors when I was twenty-four years old and working at the Governor’s Division of Medicaid. I had put together a five-year plan for my career, and I was proud of it. I knew where I wanted to go, what position I thought should come next, and what I needed to do to get there. I showed it to her expecting her approval. She looked at it and said, “No. Try again.” I went back and worked on it some more, but when I showed it to her again, I got pretty much the same response. By the third time, I finally said, “Clearly you see something I don’t, so tell me.” She laughed and told me to stop trying to make my career so linear. I was so focused on getting from one position to the next that I was leaving very little room for opportunities I could not already see. She told me to look at what was in front of me, weigh the risk, consider what I could learn, and not dismiss something simply because it was not part of my plan.

She pointed to her own career. Had she only accepted positions that looked like the obvious next step, she told me, she would not have gotten where she was. Some of her moves took her in a different direction before they moved her forward. I understood what she meant at twenty-four, or at least I thought I did.

More than two decades later, I had to decide whether I was willing to follow her advice. I had spent most of my career in healthcare when I accepted a position as Director of Marketing at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the world. There was nothing predictable about the move. I knew healthcare. I had spent years in marketing, member experience, and external affairs, and I had built a career in an industry where I understood the business and knew many of the people in it. Aviation was new to me.

Earlier in my career, I probably would have looked at the opportunity and decided it did not fit. By then, I looked at it differently. I knew how to lead people, manage a brand, understand an audience, and learn a business. I did not believe those abilities stopped being useful because I changed industries, so I took the job. Working at the airport required me to learn an entirely different operation. I could not rely on years of aviation experience because I did not have it. I had to ask questions, listen to people who knew more than I did about the industry, and learn quickly. What I brought with me were the things I had already learned about leadership, marketing, reputation, and people.

That move changed the way I think about experience. Spending years in one industry gives you expertise, but it can also convince you that your expertise only works there. Sometimes you have to leave what you know to find out which parts of your experience are actually yours and not simply a product of where you worked.

I still make plans for my career, but I do not treat them the way I did at twenty-four. A plan can give you direction without deciding every move for you. Had I followed the straight line I once thought a successful career required, there are opportunities I would have turned down simply because I had not thought of them first. When I think about that five-year plan now, I understand why my mentor kept sending me back to work on it. The problem was not that I had a plan. The problem was that I thought everything worthwhile had to fit inside it.