When Is A Demotion A Good Career Move?

by David Brown, Co-CEO of Techstars

The traditional way of thinking about a career is to climb the corporate ladder. Over the years, you get promotion after promotion, with each step adding on responsibility, pay, and stock options. Sounds awesome, right?

The problem with this approach is two-fold. First, you have to wait for your boss to leave, be promoted, or die — and each of these might take a while. Second, you likely aren’t her only direct report. Maybe one of your peers will get the job. Time to start politicking or backstabbing, I guess.

A better approach is a long term one. Don’t think about title and promotion, think about your skill set. Maybe you’re in marketing, working on social media strategies and execution. If you’re learning a ton, awesome. But at some point, you might find that you aren’t learning any more, you’re just doing the job. It might be time to consider getting involved in content marketing or creative strategies. The same is true if you’re the VP of Marketing. Again, if you’re learning a ton, awesome. But at some point, you might learn more if you were involved in sales or product management.

You might be tempted to try to have this be just an expanded part of your job — and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the gutsy move is to take a whole new job. Jump off the cliff and learn a whole bunch of new things. Importantly, you get extra credit if you’re willing to take a demotion or a reduction in title in the process. That’s hard to do, but will pay off in the long run.

Why? Because imagine yourself five to ten years from now, if you repeatedly take this approach. You’re going to be an expert in a lot of different areas: social media, content marketing, sales, product management, and more, in my example. THOSE are the people that have truly successful careers in the long run. They make for great general managers, executives, and CEOs, because they have deep experience in a number of different areas. They understand how all of the details work.

Great managers identify their superstars and try to find ways to develop them in this way. It’s all about having the long term view and not viewing life linearly, just blindly putting one step in front of the other.

So if you want to have a successful career, go ahead and take that demotion. I dare you.