Home > Talent > Most promotions change a person’s scale, few change scope
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Most promotions change a person’s scale, few change scope

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If you are the head employment lawyer for EMEA and are promoted to global employment lawyer, certainly your scale of responsibility expands. You have more people reporting to you, a larger budget, more locations to visit, additional laws and regulations to consider, but you are essentially doing the same things in the same area of law although writ larger. Demands are more, but of a like kind.

By contrast, if you are the top corporate litigator and are selected to become the general counsel, your scale certainly enlarges, but far more significantly your scope grows dramatically. Your job involves new activities of qualitatively larger breadth and complexity, such as shareholder meetings, boards of directors, corporate governance concerns, public relations, and being the icon of the legal function.

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One response to “Most promotions change a person’s scale, few change scope”

  1. Steven B. Levy, Author of Legal Project Management says:
    October 27, 2011 at 10:38 am

    Scope should change whenever you get a true promotion/level change in the upper levels of a corporation. At a minimum, the balance between tactics and strategy has to shift noticeably further toward the strategy side with every step up. Otherwise, the company isn’t asking for the kind of additional contribution that makes it worthwhile to promote senior people and groom them as leaders.
    The company, as well as the newly promoted individual, need to increase focus on the long term.