Over the past year or so, I have been thinking differently about professional growth.
For a long time, many of us are taught to think about career advancement vertically: work hard, perform well, earn another credential, accept greater responsibility, and eventually someone recognizes that effort with the next opportunity.
Sometimes that happens.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
And sometimes growth requires us to stop looking exclusively upward and start looking outward.
I recently attended a professional gathering where a panel of Texas city managers discussed their careers, leadership philosophies, and the realities of leading local governments. Somewhere in that discussion came a piece of advice that has stayed with me:
Sometimes, to move up, you have to move out.
I don’t interpret that simply as leaving an organization.
Sometimes moving out means moving outside your familiar professional circle.
It means joining professional associations and committees. Meeting people working in neighboring communities. Learning what other organizations are trying. Finding administrators willing to share their experiences. Talking with someone who has already implemented the project you are considering. Asking questions of people whose responsibilities extend far beyond your own.
In other words, you begin intentionally building an education that no single job description can provide.
Your Organization Cannot Be Your Entire Professional World
One of the city managers encouraged professionals interested in advancement to participate in committees and professional organizations as a way to develop skills and broaden their networks.
That advice resonated with me because I have become increasingly intentional about doing exactly that.
I have begun reaching beyond my immediate work environment to have conversations with people working at higher levels of municipal leadership. Some of those conversations have been with assistant city managers. Others are beginning with city managers themselves.
I am not asking anyone to hand me a position.
I am asking questions.
How did you prepare?
What experiences mattered?
What do you wish you had understood earlier?
What does the work require that cannot be learned from a textbook?
Those conversations are helping me see local government through a much wider lens.
They are also helping me understand something important: your professional development cannot depend entirely upon what your current organization is able—or willing—to expose you to.
You have some responsibility for constructing your own path.
Credentials Are Valuable. They Are Not Enough.
Another point from the discussion was equally important: credentials alone do not prepare someone for executive leadership.
As someone who values education deeply, I do not interpret that as an argument against academic preparation. Education teaches us how to think, question, research, analyze, and understand complex systems.
But executive leadership requires another layer of development.
It requires judgment.
Political awareness.
Operational experience.
Relationship building.
The ability to listen to competing perspectives.
The ability to make decisions knowing there may be consequences you cannot completely control.
One city manager described the responsibility as needing to see 360 degrees of the potential impacts and blowbacks of a decision.
That struck me.
At one level of an organization, you may be responsible primarily for whether something works.
At another level, you must think about who it affects, who supports it, who may oppose it, what it costs, what precedent it establishes, how employees will experience it, how residents may interpret it, how elected officials may respond, and what external forces could change the entire equation.
That is a fundamentally different way of thinking.
And developing that perspective can begin before someone gives you the title.
Know Your Value—and Your Values
Two words appeared in my notes beside one another:
Value. Values.
The distinction matters.
Knowing your value means understanding what you bring with you: your experience, education, perspective, judgment, creativity, accomplishments, relationships, and capacity to learn.
Knowing your values is different.
Your values help determine where you are willing to take those abilities.
Over time, I have become increasingly interested not simply in whether I can advance, but where I would want to advance.
What kind of leadership culture allows me to do my best work?
What communities would I be proud to serve?
What behaviors am I willing to accept as the price of advancement—and which ones am I not?
What kind of leader do I want to become?
Professional networking gives us more than contacts. It gives us information.
You begin learning which organizations invest in people.
Which leaders develop their teams.
Which communities are doing innovative work.
Which environments align with your values.
And which ones probably aren’t for you.
That knowledge is part of career development too.
I’ve also started adding another consideration to that equation: peace.
Career advancement cannot only be about what position I can attain, how much responsibility I can assume, or what title comes next. I also have to consider what kind of life that career allows me to have. There are opportunities that may look like advancement on paper but require a personal price I am no longer willing to pay.
Knowing your values means understanding that peace belongs somewhere in the calculation, too.
Leadership Requires Listening Before Reacting
Some of the most useful advice from the panel had nothing to do with getting the job. It dealt with what happens once you have responsibility.
Don’t assume every fire needs to be extinguished.
Sometimes it will burn itself out.
Determine where the real fire is.
Don’t make every difficult interaction about you.
Let people finish climbing what one speaker called their “anger mountain” before responding.
Don’t feel pressured to produce an answer immediately.
Ask questions.
Try, “Help me understand.”
Listen long enough to discover the actual issue beneath the complaint.
Those lessons apply well beyond the city manager’s office.
They apply to anyone responsible for people.
And I have found myself considering how I can practice them where I am right now.
That may be one of the most useful ways to prepare for a future role: begin developing the behaviors before you need the title.
Representation, Access and Building the Network
I have also been thinking about these lessons through another lens.
I am a Black woman intentionally exploring what broader leadership in local government could look like for me.
That makes access to people, networks and experiences especially meaningful.
There is tremendous value in finding people willing to explain the terrain.
There is value in seeing how someone else navigated the path.
There is value in having conversations outside your organization where you can ask questions freely, compare experiences and broaden your understanding of what is possible.
And there is value in eventually becoming one of those people for someone else.
None of that requires waiting for an invitation.
We can join the organization.
Volunteer for the committee.
Attend the symposium.
Introduce ourselves.
Ask the question.
Request the conversation.
Learn from the neighboring city.
Take the course that actually advances our goals rather than simply collecting another credential.
And gradually build a professional network that stretches beyond the walls of wherever we happen to work today.
Preparing Before the Opportunity Arrives
One panelist made another observation that I appreciated: nothing completely prepares you for being a city manager until you actually become one.
I suspect that is true of most significant leadership roles.
Eventually there is a point at which preparation ends and experience begins.
But that doesn’t make preparation irrelevant.
It makes intentional preparation even more important.
I can learn to listen differently.
I can strengthen my understanding of municipal operations.
I can seek experiences outside my normal functional area.
I can learn how other communities approach common problems.
I can understand intergovernmental relationships.
I can pay attention to external trends rather than looking only inside my own organization.
I can become more conscious of the political and community environment surrounding administrative decisions.
I can learn from people who already carry the responsibility.
And I can continue developing the judgment required for wherever my career eventually takes me.
Career advancement is sometimes treated as something another person gives us.
A promotion.
An appointment.
An opportunity.
Someone deciding that we are ready.
There will always be parts of advancement that depend upon another person’s decision.
Our development does not have to.
Sometimes moving up begins with moving out—outside the familiar network, outside the narrow definition of our current role, outside the expectation that someone else will create the experiences we need.
And perhaps one of the most important professional lessons I am learning in this season is this:
Know your value. Know your values. And take responsibility for preparing yourself for the rooms you haven’t entered yet.
