Before I get into your yeah, buts, let me tell you about mine.
Because I had them too. For years. Decades, really. And I believed every single one of them while I was climbing.
“If I don’t take this promotion, someone else will — and they’ll screw the crew worse than I will.”
That was my favorite. The noble sacrifice.
I’m not climbing for me, I’m climbing for them. I’m the only one who can protect these people, so I have to keep ascending.
Never mind that each promotion took me further from the floor. Made me less available. Turned me into exactly the kind of distant manager I’d spent my twenties resenting.
It’s a beautiful lie because it’s built out of something real. I did care about those crews. That part was true. It just wasn’t the reason.
“Once I get to the next level, I’ll have the power to fix things.”
The just-one-more-rung lie. I told myself this at every single level.
Foreman: once I’m General Foreman, I can really make changes.
General Foreman: once I’m Manager, I’ll have real authority.
Manager: once I’m Director, I’ll be in the room where decisions get made.
And when I finally got to Director?
The room where decisions got made was controlled by people above that level.
The goalposts never stop moving. That’s not a flaw in the system, it’s the mechanism. There is always another room. The belief that you’ll eventually arrive somewhere with enough authority to make it all make sense is the engine that keeps competent people climbing past the point where the climb was doing them any good.
What I actually got
The title. The salary. Business cards that impressed people at parties.
And a specific kind of distance I hadn’t priced in.
I stopped knowing my crews’ names. Not all of them — but I’d walk through a facility and recognize maybe a third of the faces, and I’d have told you that was normal at that level, which it is, which is exactly the problem.
I stopped hearing about problems early. Nobody brings the Director the small thing. By the time it reaches you it’s an incident with a report attached, and the window where it could have been solved by a conversation closed weeks ago.
And I stopped being able to tell whether I was any good at this. Down on the floor you know. The unit turns or it doesn’t. Up there, everything is proxy measures and quarterly narratives, and you can go years without a single unambiguous signal about whether you’re doing the job well.
Then they sent me back
The company sent me back to the floor. Back to where I started.
I’m not going to dress that up. It was the worst professional thing that ever happened to me and I did not handle it gracefully.
What I found there was men with half my education and twice my effectiveness leading crews I couldn’t have held together on my best day.
Not because they were better people. Because they’d never left. They’d spent the years I’d spent climbing getting better at the actual work of leading actual people doing actual jobs.
I had spent those years getting better at being seen.
The question I’d ask you
Not “should you take the promotion.” I don’t know your mortgage or your pension or how many years you’ve got in, and anybody who gives you a clean answer about that has never had to live with the consequences.
The question is narrower:
What specifically will you be able to do at the next level that you can’t do now?
Write it down. Actual sentences, not “more influence.”
Then — and this is the part that stings — go find somebody who is currently at that level and ask whether they can do those things.
Sometimes the answer is yes, and you should go. There are real reasons to climb and I’m not against any of them.
But often the answer is: no, that gets decided one level up.
And if you hear that and you go anyway, at least go with your eyes open. Go for the money, or the title, or because you’re bored — those are honest reasons. Just don’t go telling yourself it’s for the crew.
The crew can tell. They always can.
What I’d say to the version of me at thirty-two
The distance you’re about to put between yourself and the floor is not temporary and you will not be able to close it later by wanting to.
Every rung costs you something specific. Name it before you climb, not after.
And if you find yourself explaining to your wife why this promotion is really about protecting your people — listen to how it sounds out loud.
Adapted from “The Hard Stuff” — Chapter 14 of Hard Hat Philosophy: Building Wisdom from the Ground Up.