🪜Career Strategy #1: Ladder Climbing

And how Pano Christou went from assistant store manager at Pret A Manger to CEO 23 years later.

Aug 14, 2024

Welcome back to Fuzzy’s Career Strategy Series, where we share research-backed strategies & stories to help you realise your best career.

Part 1: 👋 Introducing the Career Strategy Series
Part 2: 🪜 Ladder Climbing as a Strategy
Part 3: 👩‍🎓 Controlled Supply as a Strategy
Part 4: 🥇 Excellence in a Power Law Field as a Strategy
Part 5: 🔍 Niche-ing as a Strategy
Part 6: 🧱 Skill-stacking as a Strategy
Part 7: 👷 Be A Generalist as a Strategy
Part 8: 📊 The Portfolio Career as a Strategy
Part 9: 📣 Building a Platform as a Strategy
Part 10: 🌊 Wave-surfing as a Strategy
Part 11: 🏗️ Adding Leverage as a Strategy
Part 12: 🌏 Proximity as a Strategy
Part 13: ⏱️ Sequencing as a Strategy
Part 14: 🧪 Optimising for Discovery as a Strategy
Part 15: ⚡ Do What Gives You Energy as a Strategy

👋 Reminder: what is a ‘career strategy’?

Everybody hates jargon! So here’s a quick explanation.

Definition: Strategy is your theory of how you’ll ‘win’.

In this case, how you’ll invest your finite resources of time, energy & money into your career to maximise things you care about (job satisfaction, money, social impact, etc).

Strategy ≠ tactics. Strategy is high level - tactics is the execution. For example, a business might decide that a strategy of expanding into a new country will maximise their growth - and then execute it using tactics like viral PR stunts, hiring local experts and attractive launch pricing.
Strategy ≠ a vision board. We love a vision, of course! But strategy is about developing the strongest ‘move’ based on the environment you start in, rather than wishful thinking without a plan to get there.

There are thousands of possible tactics & visions for your career, but our research found there ~10-15 dominant career strategies, which can be layered together if needed - and we’ll be breaking those down for you in this series.

🪜 Introducing Strategy #1: Ladder Climbing 🪜

This is Pano Christou, the former CEO of Pret A Manger.

And this is his LinkedIn:

Pano Christou started managing a Pret A Manger store at 21 after deciding not to go to university, and ended up managing the chain with over 700 locations worldwide 23 years later. He’s a great example of someone who realised his best career through a strategy known as ‘ladder climbing’.

🙋What is ladder climbing?

Joining an organisation and moving ‘up the ladder’ by being promoted.
Historically the most common strategy! People used to spend whole careers demonstrating their value and being rewarded with bigger roles. But in many fields, employers and employees have become less ‘monogamous’ over recent decades - with less job security and less company loyalty.
Ladder climbing is now most common in single-employer fields (like the police, military and public service, where the government is the only ‘game in town’), and in large hierarchical organisations like big corporates.
Ladders can be formal or informal - with promotion pathways attached to strict criteria (e.g. passing your sergeant’s exam in the police), or more loose dynamics (e.g. moving up the ranks in a corporation when you’re ‘ready’ or when roles come up).

🤷🏾‍♀️ A lot of us might not consciously think “I’m following a ladder climbing strategy” - but then we realise…

“My goals are focussed on advancing in my current workplace”,
“My professional development is driven by my employer’s priorities”, and
“My energy is going towards building a strong track record with existing colleagues (rather than external ‘career capital’)”…

… and then… “Oh, I actually am ladder-climbing! 🤯”

We all grow up in educational systems which train us to excel at tasks given by authority figures (our teachers) in our immediate environment, and encourage us not to get distracted by other tasks and interests.
So it’s easy to take the same approach straight into the workplace without pausing to consider: is this right for me?

So should I use this strategy? 🤔

We’re not saying ladder climbing is a bad strategy - far from it!

Especially if you value security, long-term relationships with colleagues and knowing how to succeed in your job, this can be a great strategy for you.

But you should also consider these factors:

Ladder shape matters: Not all ladders are built the same. The ratio between the ‘width’ (number of people) at the top and the bottom will dramatically change your career. In a fat-bottomed ladder, like the one shown on the right, you might find yourself waiting for spots to open above you, or find you get ‘stuck’ in a career rut even if you’re ready for more. The closer you get to a 1:1 ratio, with a gently-sloped ladder like the one shown on the left, the easier it is to be promoted, but the less impact you can personally have through your role.
Lower lifetime earnings: Research by LinkedIn, Glassdoor and even the Journal of Labour Economics confirms what you might already know: changing job frequently (every 2-3 years) leads to greater salary increases, as employers are more likely to ‘match the market’ when trying to hire you than when you’ stay put - and these increases can compound to be worth millions of dollars of difference over a career.
Low risk in some ways, high risk in others: You might have minimised uncertainty and risk in one area, but you’ve now got all your eggs in one employer ‘basket’, so you’re over-exposed to all the negative risks of that employer, culture, industry, colleagues and more. In finance terms, this would be a lack of ‘diversification’. If something isn’t going well, you don’t have as many options to exit. Imagine being a ladder-climber at Kodak (or Lehman Brothers) - you might wish you had given yourself more breadth.
Same employer, different jobs: Even if you’re working in one place, the skills you need to succeed as an early-career individual responsible for your own work are extremely different to the skills of a mid-level people manager who is responsible for the productivity of their team, or a high-level executive who needs to communicate priorities without being able to manage people directly. You might effectively need to learn a new job every few years, which draws upon very different strengths - and many people find these transitions challenging, and even can find they get more satisfaction from being closer to their work.
Ladder climbing doesn’t have to be vertical: You can choose to make ‘lateral’ or ‘lattice’ moves within a large organisation, moving horizontally or diagonally to new functions, roles, countries and more to gather a wider set of experiences. You can also practise what’s known as ‘intrapreneurship’ a.k.a. leading innovative projects or new ventures within a larger organisation, creating opportunities for leadership and career growth without leaving the company.
Great climbers are usually doing more than one thing: you won’t get different results by doing the same thing as everyone else. Great ladder climbers are often innovators in disguise, doing things differently and combining ladder climbing with other strategies to make an outsized impact (subscribe to get the whole series & learn about other strategies).

Our favourite highlights from Pano Christou 💡

On imposter syndome:

Identifying him as a potential leader his bosses sent him to Harvard Business School in 2018.

Initially, he felt elements of imposter syndrome until he realised he knew as much if not more than the theoreticians, as he’d actually worked double shifts and got up at 5am to open his store.
“I found that so much that I’d picked up on the hoof over the years was verified in an academic manner. Maybe it professionalised someone who’d been a bit rough around the edges. It boosted my confidence hugely so it was worth it. And the networking was priceless.”
Read more.
On saying yes to opportunity.

On the surface, you could say that Christou's entryway to management was down to being in the right place at the right time.
“Somebody was meant to go on a course to become a shift supervisor. For some reason, they were fired,” the 45-year-old London native says—so he took up the empty spot.
Much to his manager’s surprise, he passed the test to become a supervisor at McDonalds and within a week, he says, he was “rushed” into managing others much more experienced than himself.
“I was 16 and all of a sudden I was managing the person that was training me two or three months ago, who was close to 30,” he says.
In Christou’s eyes, his big break all came down to saying yes to any opportunity that came his way—even if he didn't feel ready for it yet.

Read more.

On not getting ahead of yourself.

Despite having a clear hunger for success from a young age, Christou says he never envisioned becoming Pret’s CEO until “a few months before” he was offered the role in 2019.
“A few months after I became an assistant manager, I said, ‘I want to be a general manager,’ and then when I became store manager, after a couple of years, I thought, ‘I want to become an area manager,’ and so forth,” he says.
Ultimately, looking forward with his feet firmly on the ground, instead of dreaming too big with his head in the clouds, is what he feels has set him up for success.
“I've watched people that have been so fixated on the next role that they really take their eye off the current job they're doing,” Christou says. “My philosophy has always been if you do a great job, people will notice you."
By focusing on excelling in his current job and being the best within his cohort—without “shortcutting" his peers or "stabbing them in the back"—the promotions swiftly followed.

Read more.

Curious about ladder climbing as a strategy?

Check out stories like Pano Christou (CEO of Pret A Manger), Mary Barra (first female CEO of General Motors), Indra Nooyi (first female CEO of PepsiCo), and Lieutenant-General Susan Coyle (first woman to lead war-fighting domain of Australia’s military).

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We’ll be back next week with another career strategy & story - see you then!

🪜Career Strategy #1: Ladder Climbing

And how Pano Christou went from assistant store manager at Pret A Manger to CEO 23 years later.

👋 Reminder: what is a ‘career strategy’?

🪜 Introducing Strategy #1: Ladder Climbing 🪜

Our favourite highlights from Pano Christou 💡

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