Arabian babbler group

Leaving a legacy

The key to careers in decentralized organizations

Manuel Küblböck
7 min readDec 13, 2021

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What if we didn’t have to climb a ladder that takes us away from what we love doing in order to feel like we are making progress in our careers? What if success didn’t mean others have to lose in order for me to win and “get ahead”? What if I told you that the key to a different kind of career is to understand social status? And that the birds in the photo above — Arabian babblers — have figured it out long before us?

Typical career progression

Career progression in centralized organizations is typically equivalent to increasing the budget and number of people you have power over. Usually accompanied by a new title that symbolizes this progress.

This type of career progression incentivizes growing the number of people and their responsibilities below us in a power hierarchy.

Our own status is derived from the current budget and number of people we have power over. In doing so, this model of career progression also disincentivizes handing over or sharing responsibilities, because that would consequently be equal to a regression in our career.

These incentives promote org structures with many levels in a power hierarchy. If my responsibilities are getting too complex for me to manage directly and I cannot hand some of them over to someone else without losing status, my only option is to create a new level in the power hierarchy below me that manages the parts while I manage that new level. This way, not only did I keep everyone under me, I also created more distance between me and the majority of them by adding another level. Bonus!

Career and social status

Career progression is closely tied to an increase in social status. This is true within the company but even more so beyond the company. How do we signal to our parents, to our family, to our friends, to our former classmates at a class reunion, to other companies, and to ourselves that we made progress? The variety of this target group is what makes

  • the number of people we lead,
  • the size of the budget we have at our disposal, and
  • the title we carry

so effective: because they are universally and easily interpreted.

This form of status is known as dominance status. In the workplace, dominance status uses titles to determine the pecking order: Who needs to defer to whom in decision-making? Who needs to ask whom for permission? Dominance status relies on social threats (like public shaming) and financial threats (like termination) to ensure submission.

Unfortunately, the dominance status symbols don’t work sufficiently well in a decentralized organization where there are too few levels of hierarchy and where responsibilities are shared and passed around.

There is, however, a second primary form of status known as prestige status.

Seeking prestige status is to strive to impress others so that they might admire us. In the workplace, prestige status uses awards to recognize achievements: Who did something beyond the ordinary? What is going to shape the fate of the company in the years to come? Prestige status relies on public celebrations (like award ceremonies) to convey admiration.

For a more detailed look at dominance and prestige, I recommend this excellent essay on social status by Kevin Simler. There you will also learn a whole lot more about Arabian babblers and how they use prestige status to incentivize helpful behavior for the groups they live in.

Career progression using prestige status

We want to incentivize people to hand over or share responsibilities instead of growing the number of people and their responsibilities below them in a power hierarchy.

To achieve this, we need to substitute some dominance status with prestige status. That doesn’t mean we can’t use dominance status at all, but we need to supplement it with prestige status. The prestige status earned from „giving up“ and handing over responsibilities must compensate for the loss of dominance status that is incurred by doing so.

The value in status

For status to be valuable, it needs to be extraordinary — i.e. not everyone gets the same amount. This is counterintuitive to a post-modern egalitarian perspective. I think in an attempt to get rid of the scarcity mindset, the post-modern stance of “we are all the same” destroyed the value of status. My assumption is that by using prestige status with a high bar for recognition, we can get the benefits of status without the scarcity built-in in dominance status.

Example:

  • Dominance: Only the business owner with the highest revenue gain gets promoted.
  • Prestige: Only the business owners that pass on a portion of their business worth more than 3 million in revenue get an award.

Both limit the amount of “winners”. Dominance does it by fixing the number of possible winners and with that pitting competitors against each other. Prestige does it by fixing the value of the desired achievement. Of course, also the prestige version creates some competition, e.g. for shared resources like marketing budget, but it isn’t per se limited to result in exactly one winner. It may result in several or no winners at all. And it leaves options for win-win strategies where several “competitors” can cooperate to win together.

Using legacy to implement prestige status

One way to implement prestige status is to recognize legacy: value that has been created and passed on. Doing this requires us to not only look at the current responsibilities that someone holds but at the history of their achievements up to today.

In order for “leaving a legacy” (i.e. prestige status) to work as a viable replacement for “gaining a new title” (i.e. dominance status), it must be implemented in a way that signals career progression as effectively or even better than titles. It needs to be just as valuable to put our legacy on our LinkedIn profile as a fancy new title.

Concrete implementations of prestige status

What I’ve learned from experiments to implement prestige status so far is that it is

  • about completed achievements, rather than our current position
  • permanent, in the sense that it recognizes something completed that can’t be taken away from you, though the status gained from this achievement fades over time
  • additive in nature: prestigious achievements add up, whereas dominance titles tend to replace previous titles

From my perspective today, my assumption is that my previous experiments to implement prestige status had little success because they

  • lacked public celebration
  • lacked perks for having gained prestige status
  • were not visible outside the company
  • were too easily attainable and hence too ordinary

There is something paradoxical about increasing someone’s prestige status by telling everyone how great they are. On the one hand, the admiration from others increases their sense of status, growth, and mastery and with that their bond with the company. On the other hand, it also increases the likelihood that they will leave after getting approached by another company that we just signaled how great they are.

Rather than a fear-based response to hide our best people, we accept the challenge to create the best company we possibly can. A company that the best of us want to stay with — no matter who approaches them. A company that is great to be from. A company that is even better to be at. These tweets by Nate Hanson about his experience working at Buffer are a good example of what I mean.

This together with all other concepts on this blog is nicely bundled up with 88 visualizations, 37 videos, and 11 templates in my New Work by Design Transformation course. Helping you put New Work into practice for less than the price of a consulting day.

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Manuel Küblböck
The Caring Network Company

Org design & transformation, Agile and Lean practitioner, web fanboy, ski tourer, coffee snob.