Brainware

"Exposure" Works Magic for Kids. And Adults, Too.

The latest US News has a revealing article on successfully reformed schools, but I was especially struck by a couple paragraphs about differing approaches at schools for educating low-income children.  Low-income children often bring two limitations to school: small vocabularies and limited background knowledge. 

For example, at one school in the Louisiana Bayous, George Hall, teachers know that their students haven't had the opportunity to travel.  They live ten minutes from the bayou, but they've never seen a boat.  So they get taken on a boat trip.  In fact, George Hall students go on an average of one field trip a month, each one carefully selected to help students learn a great deal about the world around them.  Each trip comes accompanied by writing, videotaping, and blogging assingnments.  Not only do students get to hold a snake, for example, but they have multiple opportunities to use snake-related words such as slithery, slippery, and scales.

Exposure to different experiences, of course, is a lot more than just the experience.  It's learning about the experience, being able to analogize from that experience, and being able to put the learning from that experience into practice in other settings.

Exposure learning shows itself to be a highly useful process for everyone.  Some years ago, the chairman of the speech-communication department at the University of Minnesota asked if I'd be willing to teach a course in basic communication skills at a maximum security prison in one of the distant suburbs.  At the time, I'd just left a university position, and though I was building my business, I had the time to teach one course.  Much to my suprise I found that one of the course members had spent a year in the home of one of my professors from undergrad college.  The state of Kentucky often furloughed prisoners to attend school if there was an available family willing to take them in.  I knew immediately that he was giving me no snow job for he described the profs in detail as well as buildings, events and other teachers at my college.  Then he described living with my prof and his wife.  He said that there was time devoted each day to studies with tutoring from one of them, a movie nite, a theater night (staged productions), a sports night, and a restaurant nite.  He loved the exposure and performed very well in college

So why, I asked him are you in prison now?  He leaned back and told me that my prof and his wife had had a different prisoner every year for more than twenty years, all of whom, except him, had gone on to graduate from college and hold down a job.  The exposure and experience they had provided these criminals had been of much value.  And, he was, he related, the only "jerk" in the bunch.  He was, he continued, a compulsive thief and deserved to be in prison.  I commented that I thought a 90% success rate was pretty damn good.  He held up his hands in frustration and agreed.  In spite of my student's record, exposure and learning can often work magic. 

At the other end of the age spectrum, when my first grandchild was exactly 28 months old, he initiated me into the truck business.  His parents were living in a Philadelphia suburb off the Mainline, about a block from a grammar school that was completing a major renovation.  Trucks were pretty constant up and down the street, and as with a lot of little boys, he was enamored of them.  Since we lived in Minnesota, I hadn't kept up with his verbal growth.  But he and I went for a walk to see the school and the trucks.  Obviously, I was unaware that I had a precocious monster on my hands, but that was immediately clear when I pointed out a "biggggg dump truck" to him. 

With the disgust only a kid that age can demonstrate, he turned and said, "Actually. . . (I knew right then I was in for trouble).  "Actually, it's an ar-tic-u-la-ted dumptruck."

I had never heard of such an animal so he explained in great detail, with little fingers pointing, and a serious face transfixed, telling me how the dirt and gravel could come out of the middle of the truck, instead of just the back, and that they could carry a bigger load than other dumptrucks. Just a few years later, he was learning the math to figure out how many cubic yards of gravel different trucks can carry. 

It's all about exposure.

The same is true in the workworld.  Some of the best learning can come from exposure to different experiences, what I call stretch experience.  And still other learning can come from exposure to better company processes.  I often urge Gen-Yers to get into the best firm possible, even if for just a few years.  You'll always learn more from the processes of the better run companies.  Working with great processes is more important than working with highly talented people.  After that exposure, you can go do your own thing outside the corporate cubicle.

Favorite Quote: Hillary Clinton

My husband is not Secretary of State.  I am.

--Hillary Clinton

This is Hillary's now famous snap at a student who asked during a press conference in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, what "Mr. Clinton" thought of a Chinese loan offer to the country.  According to State Department officials, the student said afterward that he had meant to ask what "Mr. Obama" thought of the potential deal.

Knowing the male African culture, I'm skeptical of the response of the student and the State Department.

As the father of three successful professional daughters and highly protective of them during their early years, I'm always amused when a smart female takes over the setting from males. 

The episode reminds me of a parent-teacher encounter my wife and I had with my youngest daughter's math teacher in the 8th grade.  Kris, as usual, was leading the pack of boys.  The teacher, a man, commented that Kris does very well in math, "especially for a girl."  Before I could open my mouth, my wife kicked me under the table, so I shut up.  Afterward, she chided me that my mouth would probably have been more harmful than helpful.

Today, I'd probably have reamed the guy, just before I throttled him and choked him to death.  Welcome to the new world. 

Enjoy Hillary's rejoinder.

Why Advice Doesn't Work

More and more managers and even non-managerial employees are expected to coach on a regular basis.  Indeed, as a result of the constant change and innovation taking place in most corporations, both managers and execs are often incentivized for coaching their employees.  Many of my client execs tell me that up to half of their time is used for coaching, and the rest oriented to strategic matters, along with some networking and administration.

Often, however, the coaching takes the form of advice that is so abstract that it's difficult, if not impossible to use.  Consider these recommendations:

"If you want to avoid the financial debacles of the past, hire the best people, ensure they are people of integrity, and that will enable you to avoid those problems in the future."

What are the characteristics of the best people?  What means will enable one to ensure they are people of integrity?  How would one recognize them?"

"You really need to improve your team skills.  Your team hasn't made a significant decision about that problem in the past month."

What team skills need to be improved?  How will he go about improving them?  How can he assess his effectiveness in the future?  What's a significant decision?  How will he know when a decision is significant? 

"What is it that you're recommending?  You need to explain in a way that is meaningful."

How does she recognize a meaningful way from a nonmeaningful way?  How does she act to explain in a meaningful way?

None of the above illustrations can be implemented accurately.  How can we resolve the "advice syndrome?"  In order for coaching to be implementable, it must contain three important ingredients:

1. It should describe the consequences.  "If you act in such-and-such a manner, the following will happen. . ."
2. Illustrate the "such and such" manner at two levels.  First, the protocol:  "Ask your questions in ways that don't intimidate people and raise their defense levels."  Second, the actual script:  "You said that I needed to preplan my meetings.  What do you think that will do for us?"  Instead of "Why in hell do I need to preplan the obvious?"  Or, "What makes you think you can tell me how to run our meetings?"  Or, "Why should I take time out of my already overplanned life to plan this meeting?"
3. Include the values that should govern the strategy:  If you ask non-threatening questions, you'll get better information and keep the communication channels open.

Your first response to this approach might be that it will take a lot more time than giving advice.  That's true.  However, recent studies on coaching emphasize specific and concrete information-giving.  That's because over the long term you'll save time and money if you deal with perfomance issues concretely and thoroughly from the get-go.

Here are some "questionable" analogies, but I've found that they have legs.  When you're trying to become a more effective coach, think about teaching your puppy new tricks, teaching a six-year-old to ask to be excused from dinner, and to put his plate and utensils in the dishwasher, or teaching a seven-year-old to improve her batting.  As they say in sales, "put the cookies on the lower shelf where everyone can reach them."  

It's also important to follow through on your coaching and assess the performance of your coachee.  Think about it this way: his performance is a reflection of your performance.  If your coaching was effective, your coachee will reflect that.  His mistakes are often your mistakes.  Coaching is always a two-way street.  At least half the time after coaching someone, you'll find yourself asking how you could have done a better job.  Was it my original assessment?  Did I break the competency into small enough chunks?  Do I need to use more concrete language?  What doesn't my coachee understand?  Coaching is not something that can be learned overnite.  It's a continuous learning experience for all of us.

I have had a number of exceptional coaches in my life.  Coaches for skiing, for biking, for running, for singing, for piano playing, for choir conducting, for both team participation and leadership, for consulting and for public speaking. 

But one of the finest coaches I've ever experienced was a factory "leader" that worked with me between my freshman and sophomore year in college, when I worked in a dirty Detroit factory.  I told this story in a previous post, but since that post has gotten between 15 and 25 hits nearly every day since September 9 and gained a life of its own in the blogosphere, it's obviously worth retelling.

Although I don't remember his name, I can still see him, a short, wiry, muscular guy.  He swore like a sailor, told more dirty jokes than 50 factory toughs, and teased me mercilessly, but he also sat with me until I'd learned a new task, then came back and watched throughout the day, giving me feedback as needed and letting me know when the work was performed perfectly.  Furthermore, my coach was not an advice-giver, but taught with very specific, concrete, descriptive statements.  Nothing he said was open to ambiguity.  It was always this "f----ing" part or that "damned" ball bearing.  Inevitably, a couple weeks later he always seemed to have a still more difficult task for me.  I was easily bored, so in spite of his ways, I appreciated the new opportunities.  Today's research on learning confirms the lesson of small wins that I learned from that "teacher."  In short, don't even waste your time on huge gains, take it step by baby step.  

FYI:  Mistakes are good, whether you're the coach or the coachee.  Mike Moran's book title is spot on: Do it wrong quickly.  We're liable to learn more from mistakes than from getting something right the first time.

The Best Way to Build Leadership Skills

Most of us have finally arrived at the conclusion that leaders are grown not born.  But what's the best way to build your own leadership skills?  The current issue of Fortune details the leadership gains from IBM's practice of forcing employees to take on new global risks.  IBM sends teams around the world to work with local organizations on local problems.

Essentially, the firm has developed an extensive program of stretch assignments, new work experiences, that force their fast-track potentials outside of their comfort zone.  It's been common knowledge for a long time that the best way to gain new insights and learn new skills is through real experience, not in the classroom.  There is a caveat to that.  The experience will also need to be supported with mentors or coaching.

Although very few of us will ever have the opportunity that IBM provides its potential leaders, locating stretch opportunities within your own firm is available to many employees.   It's a very common process for IT workers and those in the film industry.  Although a lot of consultants work with just a single shtick, many of us are continually upgrading with stretch work.  My business and my expertise have very little relationship to what I started with 25 years ago. A huge proportion of those gains came as a result of stretchwork.  I lay out the research in a paper aptly titled Bluff Your Way Into a New Job. You'll find the paper here.

The Fortune article also emphasizes that leadership development is an investment that will pay off only later.  With so many corporate cultures addicted to the short term, that's often a hard sell.  But that need not be a problem for the typical employee searching for stretch work inside his company or perhaps in better times, at another company.  Just remember that leadership development--call it career development--is a continual process.  It's not like a game of checkers.  It's a game of chess, always figuring out the next five or six moves and taking avantage of them.

(The article is in the December 7 issue, and not yet available on the web.)

Why Personal Goal Setting Can Be Dangerous

While I am a personal advocate of goal setting, I've thought hard and deep about an instructive piece of research by Max Bazerman and colleagues on goal setting that goes bad.  Although the research focuses on the relationship between leaders and their organizations, the research obviously applies to personal career development.

The study contains numerous examples of goals gone wild, and includes overcharging by Sears mechanics, Enron's commission program for traders, and Ford's small Pinto, a car that was found to have dysfunctional engineering that caused it to ignite on collision. 

The research finds that performance goal setting is fairly easy to implement, easy to measure, and easy to document successes.  But it also can readily result in undesired results.  Indeed, good people, people with the best of intentions, focus so much on a stretch goal that they engage in excessive risk-taking, and on occasion, unethical behavior. 

Although focus is always necessary for personal success, what the research emphasizes is that when people focus on a specific stretch goal, they often fail to perform other valued activities that are needed by the organization.  So on occasion, the goal can do more harm than good.

What was most intriguing to me were the recommendations regarding goal setting.  Bazerman suggests that learning or mastery goals more readily lead to better effects than performance goals.  He provides us with an excellent analogy for thinking through our personal goal-setting processes. 

Just as doctors prescribe drugs selectively, mindful of interactions and adverse reactions, so too should managers carefully prescribe goals.  To do so, managers must consider. . . the complex interplay between goal setting and organizational contexts, as well as the need for safeguards and monitoring.

That conclusion applies just as readily to our own career goal setting as to organizational goals. 

One of the firms I've consulted with for years mixes performance and learning goals for yearly objectives.  We've found that though performance measures can be straightforward, mastery and learning goals need more support.  The organization is very good about helping in learning goals, but they actually take more insight and commitment to implement.  Over the long-term, however, the organizational leaders have also found that learning goals are more useful for the development of the firm's business.  That applies to our own careers.  Sure, we need measurable performance goals, but businesspeople who focus on mastery goals find that employability is rarely a problem and that opportunities often present themselves as a result of mastery-initiated successes.

What Can We Learn From GE's New Emphasis on Listening and Humility?

After stumbling badly in the recession, the Wall Street Journal reports that General Electric executives are studying recession lessons, as they seek new, more flexible ways to manage.  How are they going about this focus?  They're learning to admit they "made mistakes" and working at the "skills of humility and listening."  There's a significant lesson for all of us in that focus, but not what some might suggest or think.

But first of all, humility is not a skill.  It's a personal quality or state, marked, the dictionary suggests, by freedom from pride or arrogance.  If you were to give feedback to someone and say that he ought to be a bit more humble, what would that look like?  Should he walk stoop-shouldered, face to the ground and mutter, "woe is me?"  Not quite.  I suspect that anyone who tries to gain the skill of humility will eventually be very difficult to be around.  Most of us are repelled by smarmy, religious, "humble" people. 

Susan Peters, the VP of executive development and chief learning officer at GE says that the company has a "post-mortem headset" on as it evaluates where it erred.  The real humility issue is that the GE leaders are diagnosing, paying attention and trying to figure out their missteps.  It's about being able, Peters says, to admit that they've made mistakes. 

So the GE leadership is working on listening skills.  That's a smart move if you understand that listening is not a passive behavior, but a very active behavior. 

FYI:  More than 40 years of research, spotlighting the level of effectiveness and efficiency of the average leader, comes up with shocking results.  On average, listening retention from a conversational is down to 25% of effectiveness with 48 hours, and it goes downhill very quickly from that point on.

So GE's success in humility develpment will depend on their success in listening training.  Here's what I mean.  Students of listening look at listening quite differently than most laymen.  In a post earlier this past week, I pointed out that listening is not improved by merely trying to listen better.  In an earlier post,I suggested that active listening demands that you attempt to understand another person's communication WITHOUT PASSING JUDGMENT ON WHAT IS BEING SAID. 

One of my communication colleagues, Manny Steil, states from research that active listening involves sensing, interpeting, evaluating and responding.  That's a mouthful.  Sensing means that you're paying attention, hearing and inserting that data into your gray matter.  Interpreting is the mental process of trying to make sense out of that data.  Evaluating is more familiar:  looking at the pros and cons, the importance or priority of the data.  Responding is the conversation you have with yourself and then out loud to the talker about that data and what it means. 

Viewing listening that way means inherently that you view the other person and her ideas as worthy of consideration.  Active listening means that you're trying to understand and learn from the other person.  And that's what humility is all about.  Humility, in business speak, is the opposite of macho, the disease some of us catch with just a little bit of success.  Macho means that the success has gone to your head and you think that you can make no mistake.  You've got the world by the tail.  And as Immelt, GE's CEO has said publicly, the firm was close to a financial meltdown. 

Most of us have had an occasional comeuppance when we've become a bit too enamored of our own ideas and success.  I occasionally blush at some of my macho ways, and I also realize that the disease has not been conquered.  Most of us have not been cured of machoism.. 

But I find one semester-long experience from my sophomore year of college of ever-intense relevance.  I attended a land-grant college where all of the males (a few years ago) were required to take ROTC.  I had the shock of my life when some of the guys I thought I knew pretty well were promoted to the lowly position of squad leader or even higher in the echelon.  What I saw in a few was enlightening.  There were a few, thankfully not too many, who I had previously considered to be nice guys.  But give them the power of a promotion and they became, well. . . assholes.  They were incorrigible.  THEY STOPPED LISTENING!  And that is the real relationship between not-a-skill humility and a real skill: ACTIVE LISTENING.

Three Keys to Your Work Promotion in The New Economy

About the middle of the 1990's a lot of ideas began to shake out as the technology revolution took control of business.  One of the most important bits of clarity surfaced around the issue of careers and career promotions.  What's driving this post?  Over the past ten years, as more and more research has on organizational behavior has surfaced, the way to get a promotion has become pretty straight-forward. 

But let's get rid of one dumb idea.  That's the notion that if you suck up to your boss, he or she will get the promotion for you.  First, I don't believe in sucking up, and second, the idea is false.  Unless your boss owns the company, very few bosses have much in the way of "promotion power."  Promotions require all kinds of input from all levels, and organizations try to limit promotions to the few because they're expensive.  Furthermore, most organizations don't have an overweening need for managers in the world of flattened organizational hierarchies.  I should add that that situation will be changing over the next five to ten years.  There's going to be a dearth of talent as the boomers retire and technology makes more and more complex demands.  But why wait it out?

People get promoted for three reasons, and all three of them need to be operative: 

1. A quality network. 
2. Competent, high performance on the job. 
3. Calculated luck--you're in the right place at the right time. 

Now let's look at each of these.

The research on network quality has been stacked high for nearly ten years.  It shows that people with a quality network have access to rewards, early promotions and better opportunities.  It does take six months or more to get a network going, but it's well worth the investment in your future. 

In this day and age, performance means a lot more than in the past.  The ability to solve complex problems, demonstrate significant people skills in complex environments, set a pace for creativity and innovation, deal with problems of ambiguity, etc. etc. etc.  The new research on deliberate practice shows that we can grow our way into most any expertise.  

But you've got to advocate for yourself.  The basic way the important people know about the excellence of your performance and the quality of your growing expertise is to advocate for yourself, keep your bosses and peers and internal clients updated, and manage up.  Do it tactfully and indirectly.  Remember that the people with the power to assist you rarely know of your contributions or the value you bring to an organization unless you tell them.  So learn and practice the skills of self-advocacy.

Finally, promotions come as a result of calculated luck.  This means that you'll you need to understand the business, the industry and the economy and work to be in the right place at the right time.  The information is out there with vendors, trade magazines and business journals. 

Recently one of my clients, stymied because of limited opportunities within his firm, talked to me about moving on so that he could get a promotion from another company.  Here's his thinking:  Over the past four years he's developed unique expertise in a business and industry that is undergoing monstrous transitions.  Unique technology has come into the industry.  Very few manager have his background, and most organizations know they've got to make changes and integrate that technology to maintain their competitive advantage.  He's got the network, the competency and he's calculated his opportunities. 

Smart thinking.  The business world is his oyster and he'll eventually get the promotion.  The stuff is out there for every fast tracker.  So, go for it!

And for Gen-Yers?  Wow, this process really works.

How to Succeed with Failure

A few weeks ago, while teaching an MBA class at a local university, a student asked one of those questions not usually surfaced in front of one's peers:  "How do you deal with failure?"  Obviously, he isn't the only person dealing with the issue.  In a recent blog, one well-known guru shared a few suggestions about building self-confidence and dealing with failure.  He went on with recommendations to quit worrying about being perfect, learning to live with failure, and showing courage, even when you're scared on the inside.  Another blogger interviewed a number of CEOs, all of whom stressed that their failures were not preventable, so they were able to pick themselves up and go on.  Hmmm. . ??

Back to the student's question about how to deal with failure.  At the time I had a few suggestions, but on further reflection, I've realized that's the wrong question.  The better one is, "How do you succeed with failure?" Furthermore, when I'm dealing with an issue like that, the first question I ask is not about the conventional wisdom or blaming the circumstance, but whether or not there's some relevant research about the subject.

Why bother with conventional wisdom, when research on the subject is at hand.  You'll find a stack of relevant research on dealing with failure by Stanford's Carol Dweck and her colleagues.  The highly consistent research pooh-poohs answers like the above, and rightly so.  Basically, she finds that your mindset determines the meaning of failure.  If you live your life out of the traditional mindset, the belief that your talents and abilities are set in stone, and you fail, the responses are obvious.  You'll keep quiet about your failure, stuff it, blame someone or the environment, and, perhaps never try that option again.  As Dweck writes, In the fixed mindset. . . the loss of one's self to failure can be a permanent, haunting trauma.  What's important to recognize is that the traditional mindset gives you no good recipe for overcoming failure.  Ohhh, yahhhh.  Some recipes, but long term they don't work very well, and that makes failure pretty difficult.

Admittedly, failure doesn't feel good for any of us.  It can be a painful experience.  But it needn't define you.  Instead, if you have a growth mindset, failure is not a signal that you're not perfect.  It's a signal that you've got something to learn.  You can face it, deal with it, and learn from it. 

My son-in-law, a research physician, tells me that failure is actually very useful.  Failure lets you  know what strategy won't work, and that can be useful data for a research project.  In other words, failure is a signal that you're going to have to try some other alternatives. 

So change your mindset and think of failure this way.  Failure can hurt, but it doesn't define you.  It's merely an annoucement that you've got to figure out some other alternatives.  Change and growth are nearly always possible, and there are still many more paths to success.

Here are my steps for succeeding with failure:

1. Go ahead and moan a few minutes.  It's painful.  Sometimes I beat my desk a few times and cuss.  Remember the story of the first grade reading teacher who hit the car in front of her, got out and pointed to the dent, "oh, oh, oh.  Look, look, look.  Damn, damn, damn!"  That works for me.
2. Move on and dig into the failure to see what you can learn from it.
3. Create some other ways of working with the situation.  A little more elbow grease (do they still use that idiom?) or effort will be helpful.
4. Remember that the next failure on the project means that you will know two things that won't work.

It's especially helpful to bring colleagues and experts into the process as soon as possible.  I realize that some are not comfortable admitting failure to colleagues, but you can learn to announce that you blew it.  It's rarely life or death.  And always take advantage of the insights of others.  Problem solving, creativity and innovation are, fundamentally,  contact sports.  You might also want to look at my white paper on asking questions. 

David Silverman's blog on the subject of failure had an especially useful quote from Tom Watson, the founder of IBM:  Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure — or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success.

As Carol Dweck emphasizes throughout her book, Mindset, success is really all about effort.

 

Quotation of the Week: Anonymous Building Superintendent

"The professional makes as many mistakes as the amateur," he said, swinging a wrench onto the main valve and closing off the fountain, "The difference is, a professional fixes them faster."

--Reported statement by a building superintendent, who was fixing a blast of water from a toilet fitting.  The original question was:  "You know the difference between a professional plumber and an amateur?"

That's not just conventional wisdom.  The research shows that the more you work at learning, the faster you learn.  And once you've attained competency, experience enables you to see the errors much quicker and move faster to fix them.

What's the Relationship Between Intelligence and High Performance?

I recently wrote a post on developing your intelligence like a muscle.  That's good news, especially since it's obvious that a significant relationships exists between muscular intelligence and high performance.  So why does this relationship between intelligence and performance exist, and what can you do about it?  

Nearly ten years ago, the question of performance and intelligence was detailed in a meta-analysis of recruiting methods.  A meta-analysis, in a nice definition by Bob Sutton, is a macro review of literature that reveals the overall patterns revealed by the weight of evidence, rather than the particular quirks of any single study. 

The study showed that GMA (General Mental Ability) was the number one predictor for success.  That, of course, provides the rationale for the testing that some execs and managers go through before they're hired.  [As an aside, it's always been a mystery to me why all these guys (male and female) spend so much time developing their physical muscles which won't put bread on the table, when they could be spending time developing their intelligence muscles which can put a lot of bread on the table.  Idiocy takes a lot of forms in the American culture!]  I'm not especially interested in hiring practices or recruiting.  That's not my business.  But I am focused on performance, and tucked away in the research discussion were two highly important conclusions. 

The major reason that more intelligent people have higher job performance is that they acquire job knowledge more rapidly and acquire more of it.  And, the authors indicate, the knowledge of how to perform the job has the most important effect on higher job performance.  What that info reveals is that the faster you can learn and the more you learn, the better you'll become at your performance. 

But some of you say you can only learn so much.  Not true.  Other research shows that the more you learn, the faster you can learn.  Learning is a skill, and the more you keep at learning the better you get at it.  That's key.  Here's how I put it to my clients:  if you want employment security, get your ass in learning gear, and keep it in gear. 

The second conclusion is just as important as the first:  Opportunity to learn is also key to higher performance.  Pay close attention.  Some firms and some corporations simply can't provide quality opportunities to learn.  I've been fortunate that some really talented people in outstanding organizations all across the country have accessed my service, and taught me as I consulted for them.  I learned as much from my consulting as my clients learned from me.  I also consulted for firms, with far less effective processes and talent.  That, too, taught me a seminal lesson:  the lack of opportunity to learn is a serious limitation for personal growth.

So?   Pay close attention to the opportunities in your firm.  When you've gotten all it has to offer, get out.  Find a firm with more to offer.  In a recent post, I lay out some of the issues of moving on.  Although this recession is limiting, it too will pass.  That means you'll need to keep using your network to find still better opportunities for yourself and your development.  The firm you work for actually has a larger impact on your success than your own natural talent.  Many will find that difficult to believe, but thems the facts, buddy.  

Here's the research reference: 

Schmidt, F.L. and J. E. Hunter (1998) "The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings,” Psychological Bulletin, 124, 272.