Lost in translation?

A friend recently described her experience of working as a translator in a medical setting, a few jobs ago, along these lines:

‘The doctor asks a question of the patient and you repeat it to the patient in their language. The patient says something in response and you repeat it to the doctor in theirs. Back and forth. Back and forth. You cannot say “she says the pain is in her elbow”. You must say “the pain is in my elbow”. You speak in the first person, but that person isn’t you. You cannot leave your trace on the conversation.’

Management sometimes feels like this: stuck in the middle, neither having licence to bring the ideas nor direct involvement in realising them. You simply listen to proposals and requirements from above, passing them down intelligibly and ensuring that they’re delivered, while leaving no trace of yourself.

I’m oversimplifying, of course.

Yet clients in middle management positions often talk of feeling invisible, impotent, pointless or just plain bored. They hanker for the days before they moved up in the hierarchy, when they were experts delivering specialist work. Believing that a step back ‘down’ is out of the question, they may feel compelled to move further ‘up’ to where they think they will have better information, visibility and agency (not necessarily true).

Or they have played with the idea of moving into something altogether different and very evidently hands-on and meaningful. But that, too, might be a step ‘down’ and has therefore remained a daydream.

This dilemma of direction can become more acute as you get older. You may feel that your career should be reaching a peak. You may wonder if it already has and you missed it. You may worry that if you either can't or won’t go up or down, you'll just have to stay put where you are, even though you’re feeling ‘lost’ there.

You may feel a desire to explore a new, positive way to leave your trace, but it’s at odds with what you tacitly understand to be ‘right’ in terms of career development (which you know is nonsense, and yet …)

But who decides what’s progression and what’s regression, what’s up and what’s down? Who defines what a ‘peak’ is and determines how many you’re allowed in one career lifetime?

Well, you.

And so, if you feel you’ve gone missing and you want to be present, and you want to decide on your next step without the baggage of how a career ‘ought’ to look, then let’s talk and put you in charge of the definitions.

Photo by Vishnu Prasad on Unsplash