Managers who want to shape strategy move into the unit gaining importance, where consequential decisions get made, so their work feeds straight into what the company cares about next.
An example
Four years of building credit models had improved loss rates in a regional bank's commercial lending group by a fraction of a point a year, and the senior analyst who built them rarely saw her recommendations reach the executive committee. The bank's new payments unit, eighteen people in borrowed space, was where the chief executive spent his Thursday afternoons; it had been told to double fee income from business clients in three years. When it posted an opening for a risk lead at her grade, colleagues told her it was a sideways move into an unproven team. She took it. Within a year she was presenting fraud-loss limits for instant payments to the executive committee, because every product the unit launched needed a risk view and hers was the only one in the room. Her proposal for real-time fraud scoring was funded in the next budget.
Why it works
Coming from the part of the company leadership already cares most about, the manager's proposals look better and are easier to approve. A unit gaining importance gets attention, budget, and access to senior people, and work done there ties directly to the company's next priorities, so it reaches decision-makers with less friction. The same proposal from a declining unit would wait longer. The risk is in the read: the unit has to be genuinely rising, the manager has to do the new work well, and the rise has to last long enough to matter.
The thinking behind it
Jeffrey Pfeffer Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't (2010) advises choosing with care where to start, often in a powerful unit. In Who Gets Power, and How They Hold On to It: A Strategic-Contingency Model of Power (1977), power goes to the subunits that can cope with an organization's critical problems. A payments unit charged with doubling fee income is coping with such a problem, so work done there reaches the executive committee in a way loss-rate models in a mature group did not.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter Power Failure in Management Circuits (1979) locates power in a manager's position: positions that carry discretion, recognition, and relevance to central tasks confer it, while routine, rule-bound jobs leave people relatively powerless. Moving from an established lending group to the risk seat in a new unit trades a routine position for one with discretion and relevance, which is the change that put the analyst's proposals in front of the executive committee.
When it fits
Early or mid-career managers who want influence over strategy, and whose skills transfer to the unit leadership is betting on, are best placed: a new business line, a digital unit, a function at the center of a turnaround. It takes the flexibility to move, a tolerance for the risk that the unit stalls, and something specific to contribute.
How to use it well
Read where the company is going from what it does: where budget is growing, where the chief executive spends time, which units are hiring and which are frozen, what the board asks about.
- Pick a rising unit where your skills fill a gap. Being the only person who can do something carries more weight than being one of many.
- Accept a lateral move if the unit is right; position counts for more than grade here.
- Deliver early and visibly on the unit's main problem.
Keep your relationships in your old unit. If the new one stalls they are your way back, and in the meantime they are useful allies.
What it costs and where it backfires
Rising units can stall or be folded back, and a lateral move into one that fails can set a career back. Leaving a stable unit may strain things with the boss you left behind. Newcomers to a hot unit compete with everyone else who had the same idea. A real move to do real work is ordinary career management. It turns into something else when the move is a way to escape accountability for a failing project in the old unit, leaving others to answer for it.
When it is used on you
Losing attention to a colleague who moved into a rising unit usually means their work sits closer to what the company now cares about. Look at the substance. Tie your own proposals to the same priorities where you honestly can, and consider whether your best work belongs in that unit too.