In High Flyers, McCall outlines sixteen key developmental experiences (in four broad categories) — they are things that are generally difficult, but people grow significantly through them.  Think about your career as you read this list.  How long it has been since you’ve experienced one of these:

• Assignments
  • Early work experience — entry level and pre-management job stuff
  • First supervision — your first time being in charge of people
  • Starting from scratch — creating a new role from nothing
  • Fix it/turn it around — going into a role knowing you need to improve things considerably
  • Project/Task Force — a special one-off project
  • Scope — An increase in responsibility
  • Line to staff switch — moving from a satellite to “HQ” (generally)
• Hardships
  • Business failures and mistakes — something that went wrong
  • Demotions/missed promotions/lousy jobs — kind of obvious
  • Subordinate performance problem — dealing with a difficult employee
  • Breaking a rut — taking on a new career entirely because you’re dissatisfied
  • Personal traumas — difficult things happening in your personal life
• Other people
  • Role models — people that showed you what to do (or what not to)
  • Values playing out — seeing someone behave according to their own or corporate values
• Other Events
  • Coursework — formal instruction
  • Purely personal — doing something outside work, like volunteering, hobbies, etc.

I’ve worked for the same company for over eight years now, but at that company my role has changed … probably seven or eight times, depending on how you count it.  In those roles, and in my personal life I have experienced … fifteen of the sixteen developmental experiences.  That’s crazy.

Most of them were not on purpose.  Nobody said “What Josh needs next is a project slash task force!”

But they happened and, even though some of them were extremely difficult, I am grateful for almost all the experiences in the end.  Grateful enough that I don’t want to avoid them in the future.  In fact, I feel like I need to make sure I keep throwing these experiences in, or I risk complacency.

Right now I’m in the middle of an increase of scope, starting from scratch, line to staff switch and working with role models.  I could also be in the middle of “business failures and mistakes” but we won’t know that for a few months at least.  And yet it doesn’t feel overwhelming — not nearly as overwhelming as my “first supervision.”  Maybe I actually have learned something.