The Counterintuitive Way To Promote Your Rising Star

In a typical company, someone gets promoted or hired outside, then given the shiny title so he/she can have the power to do his/her responsibility. This is how Spiderman works. He was given superpower so he could save the world.

Let’ just call this the Spiderman rule.

It says:

“With great power comes great responsibility”

This scenario works perfectly if the person

(1) does not abuse the power

(2) lives up to the expectation

However, all of us know that there is not always the case. I am not saying that we should completely ditch this rule but we should look into another alternative to cover the negative case. In a tech company, we are fortunate to be able to get a chance to hack how we empower people with a diametrically opposite rule.

It is the Reverse-Spiderman rule.

Reverse-Spiderman rule says:

“With great responsibility comes great power.”

Leaders should strive to identify capable colleagues with a deep sense of ownership. Then, sustainably increase their leverage in the organization in every way possible. This can be done in various ways.

Without this principle baked into the organization, smart, capable, committed people simply burn out or become disenchanted or both.

“Angry young men” is the term applied to a group of English writers of the 1950s whose heroes share certain rebellious and critical attitudes toward society.

In the context of a company, angry young men usually have the following characteristics

Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant explains something similar in his podcast, Work-Life in the episode about “Creative Power of Misfits”. He uses Pixar as a case study. Pixar was founded on a disruptive vision. Their leaders fervently believed it was never too early to throw your own recipe out the window. So Pixar hired John Walker and Brad Bird. Brad had been working on a new story for an animated film. It would be called The Incredibles. It was different than anything Pixar had ever done.

Brad needed some original thinking. He went looking for a team of unconventional recruits. The outsiders among Pixar’s insiders: The black sheep. Brad searched Pixar’s ranks for people who were frustrated with the status quo — people who had risky ideas that had been dismissed or overlooked. Research shows that the kind of frustration he harnessed can fuel creativity.

In other words: the curmudgeons on your team could be great untapped resources.

The “Angry Young Men” segment is a classic example of where the timely application of the Reverse-Spiderman rule is critical. The person in question is either a toxic blowhard or they’re the real deal. There’s only one way to find out which is to provide them the opportunity to prove their claim.

Although the “Angry Young Men” should be given opportunities to prove themselves, leaders should be careful to choose the right people. I should emphasize the importance of applying the Reverse-Spiderman only to CAPABLE colleagues. Most organizations have plenty of well-meaning, committed people WITHOUT the requisite professional skills. Granting them disproportionate power creates a dysfunctional oligopoly.

The hard part is to identify who the capable people are. In a hyper-growth company, this is inherently hard because the outcome, such as revenue is heavily affected by randomness. For example, this month, Product team ships a new feature. The following month, the revenue increases. At the same time, our competitor is stopping their subsidies while our marketing team is flooding customers with a discount. In this case, it’s not straightforward to conclude that the Product Manager does a good job.

In this situation, it’s easy to misjudge skills. We might give too much credit to people who don’t deserve it and vice versa. Without a well-developed ability to judge professional skills (“What does a capable dev/PM/etc. look like?”), applying the Reverse-Spiderman will have deeply harmful effects on the organization.

At the same time, the organization should strive to design a system is able to identify capable people in an objective, comprehensive, and scalable way. One of the companies that I admire is Bridgewater, an American investment management firm founded by Ray Dalio in 1975. They defined what good looks like, collected artifacts to prove someone’s capability, and developed internal tools that are able to do this in a scalable way. Dalio wrote it down in his book, Principles: Life and Work.

Once you empower Angry Young Men, there is no guarantee that they will always have the power. An important corollary to this is “Taking on great responsibility without great power constitutes self-harm.” It is important to keep this in mind. If someone’s power has been diluted, he/she should dilute the sense of responsibility in proportion.

This means we should pick the battle where we believe that we have the balance probability or beyond a reasonable doubt that we are going to win. Then again, identifying which battle is worth pursuing is not easy. In fact, in most cases, we will be wrong. Therefore, collecting as much information as we can, should be the prerequisite before making the choice. There is a great odd that we will be wrong but it will give us more closure because, given the constraints, we have done our best.

Just to be clear, this does not mean “when your power is diluted, give up.” It means that you judge yourself LESS HARSHLY when outcomes you hold yourself accountable for fail to materialize. Judging yourself too hard will give you a sense of inadequacy in the short term and burnout in the long term. In the meanwhile, continue working to reverse the dilution of power. There are a couple of ways to do so.

Firstly, reflect if the power is diluted in a significant amount. You might have less power than before but you might still have a huge amount of it. Dramatizing the impact of it will risk you trapped in unnecessary emotional burden.

Secondly, build on top of the remaining leverage you have. Based on what you still have, you should continue finding the opportunities to bring your power back. It can be done by creating synergies with others, overdelivering when needed, and constantly looking for opportunities to help.

Finally, back off when it’s structurally impossible to reverse the dilution of power. In some organizations, it’s systematically hard to reverse the dilution of power. Especially, for people who lose power through screwing up in a spectacular way. If that’s the case, you should accept either staying with minimum power or move somewhere else.

Quoting what Bruce Lee said, “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

Hope you find this useful. Share, clap, and comment to let me know your thoughts!

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