How to get unstuck
Becoming complacent at work is a warning sign that you've stopped growing. How do you figure out you're stuck? What are the reasons behind it? How do you get unstuck and unleash personal growth?
Hi and welcome to the Corporate Waters weekly newsletter 🙌
I’m Mikhail and I'm excited to share my learnings to help you navigate the complex waters of product management, leadership, and corporate dynamics. Subscribe to unlock the full value.
In today’s PAID newsletter:
(Free) Signs that you’re stuck and stopped growing;
(Paid) Reasons why we tend to get stuck;
(Paid) Actionable tactics for how to get “unstuck” from my personal playbook.
Have you ever found yourself complacent at work? You are confident, you have enough knowledge, skills, and the whole process is well-oiled. Things are going buttery smooth, and projects are delivered within the deadlines. Everything seems to be okay.
I've found myself there multiple times during my career. All those times, my over-confidence was shattered by a portion of candid critical feedback from the manager. One moment you're flying high, another you're actually falling short of expectations. How is that possible?
The more I reflected on this divide in perspectives, the more evident two things became. First, I was really lucky to have great managers. Second, there were very similar (if not identical) warning signs every single time this occurred.
The best way to describe my state in those moments is “getting stuck”. The issue with being stuck is that often you don't realize it. Since you're not aware of it, you're not doing anything to step out. That in turn can hinder yours, your team's, and your company's growth opportunities.
This has led me to ponder. How do you figure out that you're stuck and not growing? Why is it happening in the first place? How to shatter the glass walls and get unstuck?
On my voyage into this topic, I've arrived at some counter-intuitive conclusions.
Let’s dive in.
🚧 Signs that you’re stuck
🛑 Being bored
Boredom is a feeling. One definition of boredom that resonated with me is: “boredom comes when we can’t see a way forward, when we want to be doing something, but don’t want to do anything currently on offer”.
What this essentially means is that boredom is also a signal. You want to do something, but only see a limited set of equally dreadful options. This is either because those options have become routine, or you just don’t have enough knowledge to look beyond them.
In a way, boredom is a clear indicator that you’ve plateaued. What’s more interesting is that if we keep on ignoring the boredom, it can spiral into stress, anxiety, and eventually burnout. Yes, doing the same routine stuff over and over again multiplies your chances of burning out. At the end of the day, it’s not about the amount of work, but the level of engagement you experience while doing it.
One such type of activity for me is regular reporting. It’s manual copy-paste, editing work that can easily become drab after a few reps
🛑 Prioritizing external comp and titles over personal growth
The moment you start obsessing about a promotion or a pay raise, it’s a warning sign. Why is that?
When stuck in a “growth rut”, you often seek stimulation. The most obvious one typically involves ego-boosters, like promotions or pay raises. There’s a widely held mistaken belief that both can enable growth.
In reality, both pay raises and new titles are short-lived gratification triggers. Most studies show that satisfaction from a pay raise dissipates within three months, and the feeling of acknowledgment from a title uplift lingers for around a year. What’s more interesting, there’s a threefold likelihood for an employee to leave in the first month after being promoted.
Excluding situations where an employee is severely underpaid, thoughts about salaries and promotions are typically a byproduct of insufficient personal growth.
🛑 Thinking you know it all
Being overly confident and even defensive about your beliefs and competencies is another warning signal. This is deeply rooted in the Dunning-Kruger bias. The less we know about something, the more confident we are in our knowledge.
The best case example for me are junior PMs. After graduating from online product management courses, most are incredibly confident in their capabilities. They know that a good product manager starts with a problem and only then thinks about a solution.
What they don’t realize is that defining a problem might take months, if not years. It comes with a set of customer development and value proposition framing skills. Then, whatever theoretical notions we have are going to be crushed with field user testing, forcing us to get back to the whiteboard.
What’s more, one rarely thinks if that’s the right problem to solve in the first place. There are broader factors like business models, operational context, and market dynamics influenced by industry forces. Once you begin understanding these MBA-level concepts, you realize how little you actually know about product management.
Being stuck at a junior level is just one example; this can happen at all levels of seniority.
🛑 Your team debates less
It’s much trickier to identify when you’re stuck at a more senior level. You’re aware of those complexities, can reason well, and even conceal the 'preaching fixed mindset' with convincing arguments.
I’ve noticed that being “rigid” during team discussions and out-debating your direct reports with strong opinions eventually leads to the whole team shutting down. If my team has fewer debates during the regular staff meetings, it’s a clear sign that I’ve overstepped. The team needs a safe and uncensored place for heated discussions and conflict resolution. Otherwise, they might find discussions pointless or just be scared of speaking up.
Strong opinions are equally a sign of knowledge and rigidity.
🛑 Constantly falling short
Another more obvious angle to being stuck is falling short. Continuously dropping the ball on deadlines, depth and quality of discovery, expectation management, outcomes, etc., can all signal a lack of skills that one may be unfamiliar with.
Product managers can even have a high-level awareness of the skills they're lacking, but still not understand the technicalities required. It's easy to admit that you suck at data analysis, but you might be completely clueless about where to start.
❓Why are we getting stuck
Context change
A manager hired in a startup can be expected to extinguish fires and enable the business. In a few years, the startup might scale, and the same “fireman” mentality won’t be applicable. What the organization needs now is the discovery of new opportunities. In another few years, the scale-up becomes a corporate environment, where uncertainty is replaced with processes and established rituals. A PM thriving in a startup might find herself completely unfamiliar in a corporate context.