High on the Totem Pole

Watch what people do right after a promotion. Most of them get quiet. They have the new title, so they settle in at the low end of the totem pole, learn the room, and wait to feel like they belong there. The same thing happens after a long vacation or a stretch spent recharging. People come back and ease in, taking the safe work and leaving the big calls to someone else.

That instinct makes sense. Starting low is safe. Nobody blames you for a project you never owned, and you get time to learn the room before anyone grades you.

The trouble is that low becomes a habit. A month of easing in turns into a year of staying out of the way, and the promotion turns out to be a ceiling you installed yourself. The people who keep growing do the opposite. They step into the new scope before they feel ready. They pick up the problem nobody owns and stay high on the pole, where the work is visible and the decisions are theirs.

Height has its own risks, though. The first is ground nobody bought into. You can push hard on an area the org doesn't actually care about and fail in plain view, while everyone politely watches. Being ambitious about the wrong thing is still failure, just a more public kind.

The second risk is the base. On a real totem pole, the figure at the bottom often carries the most weight, and carvers sometimes gave it to their most skilled hand. The idiom has it backwards. If the people under you are weak, or stretched thin, or not with you, the whole pole sways, and the person at the top falls the farthest. That's why an org is a pyramid and not a spire.

So staying high isn't about posture. It's about checking what you stand on. Before you climb, make sure the area matters to the people who fund it. While you climb, invest in the team below you as hard as you invest in yourself. Go high!