Francesco Ciccolella
A few years after graduating from law school, I was having a long overdue dinner with a friend and former classmate of mine. (We’ll call him Skip.) After trading updates on family and friends, we turned to the preoccupations of our professional lives. Skip told me about the daily grind of being a corporate lawyer—a world of endless memos, legal minutiae, and billing in six-minute increments—and I told him about the courses I was teaching at the University of Chicago.
Skip took a special interest in my leadership class: How exactly did I approach that tricky subject? I told Skip that I focused on helping students develop the self-awareness and empathy necessary to connect with, gain the trust of, and ultimately inspire their peers, all while keeping a close eye on the values they held dear.
As I spoke, my dinner companion grew pensive. “I wish they had taught us those things in law school,” he grumbled. Skip, it seemed, had learned the hard way that the capacity I was describing was far more central to one’s success as a lawyer than he had ever imagined when we were busy cramming for finals. In law school, writing the very best legal brief or most adroitly assembling the facts of a case put you, quite literally, at the head of the class. At the firm, however, these things didn’t seem to matter—at least not as much as they did when we were students.
As a counterpoint to his experience, Skip mentioned one of our classmates. (We’ll call him Artie.) Artie was a swell guy, someone as quick with a quip as a helping hand, but his knack for legal analysis seemed wanting, at least as far as Skip was concerned. The two of them had entered the firm at the same time, and while Skip had struggled, his colleague had soared. “He’s really good at the kinds of things you’re talking about,” Skip admitted. Artie had a gift for gaining the trust of clients, impressing senior partners, and bringing in new business. Yes, Skip could still write a better brief, but unfortunately for him, writing a better brief was clearly no longer key to continued advancement.
The test takers
I’ve had some variety of this conversation several times over the years, so often, in fact, that I have come to describe the mistaken assumption the Skips of the world labor under as the valedictorian’s fallacy. Those who fall victim to it are the people who thrive at tests that sort individuals according to a narrow set of cognitive abilities—you know, the peculiar gift for sprinting through a physics problem set, writing a spotless essay on Oedipus Rex, or reciting on cue every one of Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court picks. (O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy!)
These valedictorians in training often lead a blessed adolescence. Having seduced their teachers and skated through the SATs, they are importuned by top colleges, invited to exclusive internships, and welcomed with open arms into fancy jobs. But then, often not long after an encore performance in graduate school, something shifts, and the mechanism of personal advancement they had so deftly manipulated stops working for them. Yes, they retain the talents they so long possessed, but they increasingly resemble gifted magicians whose tricks suddenly fail to impress. At a loss for solutions, they often double down on what they do best—Hey, everybody, watch me pull another rabbit out of this hat!—but even while they scramble, the Arties of the world steadily stream past them. It’s a bewildering experience, shameful and humiliating. Their tricks haven’t failed them—the world has.
While higher education’s obsession with hair-splitting distinctions can lead one to assume that the logic of the professional world resembles the Olympic trials, most workplaces simply don’t share much in common with the 100-meter dash.
That, of course, is what the valedictorians think. And who can blame them? The conclusion is reassuring and convenient. But rather than being the victims of some cruel, cosmic joke, these individuals are merely passing out of the first stage in a lifelong competition for honors and advancement.
Consider the composition of your average kindergarten class. On the whole, it’s fairly democratic. The range of capabilities is broad because the group’s constitution is a consequence of geographic adjacency and happy accident. But then the rigorous regimes of training and testing begin, and, with them, a winnowing process of academic achievement that gradually narrows the competition. It culminates in the creation of the kind of professional environment one finds at a white-shoe law firm (or a tony consultancy or prestigious investment bank): an extreme version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, a place where all the children are not merely above average but firmly in the top 3 percent.
In such environments, the problem is not that everyone can complete any task with enthusiasm and excellence, but that most any distinction you might observe in their work makes the same impression as a memo written in exquisite cursive: It’s noteworthy but, practically speaking, irrelevant.
In my experience, this is the fact that most infuriates those who have the hardest time shaking the valedictorian’s fallacy. They know their work is superior—their analysis is sturdier, their memos better written—but being slightly better in an environment of exceptional performers no longer makes all the difference.
The truth of the matter is that, while higher education’s obsession with hair-splitting distinctions can lead one to assume that the logic of the professional world resembles the Olympic trials, most workplaces simply don’t share much in common with the 100-meter dash. In such a race, crossing the finish line one-tenth of a second before your nearest competitor is not only meaningful; it makes all the difference in the world. But in most professional settings, success or failure is not determined in a fashion so clean and narrow. There is no discrete task by which one is strictly evaluated, no explicit contest in which the judging is done, and no clear guidelines to measure one’s relative achievement.
As you advance, your responsibilities increasingly involve managing—directly and indirectly—an ever-growing cadre of professionals.
Indeed, if you consider the types of work environments in which the Olympic analogy seems strongest, those that most immediately come to mind involve manual labor, specifically piecework. If I am part of a group where everyone is busy making widgets, not only is it straightforward to evaluate who’s best—I made eight more widgets than anyone else here!—but also the distinction clearly matters in respect to business imperatives and personal advancement.
Outside of sales, however, in a white-collar profession, most of the work you do is part of some common, complex effort, and thus your performance merely needs to cross the threshold of what we might call superior competence. Moreover, in any environment characterized by everyone being in the top 3 percent, such workmanship is commonplace. Those who cannot do the work—the dullards, the screwups, the truants—have been weeded out. Only the exceptional remain. And while the difference in 100-meter dash times between an Usain Bolt and an All-American at the University of Michigan determines their relative achievements absolutely, there are few cases where differences akin to tenths of a second matter so completely in a professional environment, assuming they can even be measured in the first place.
The case of doc review
For the crestfallen head of the class, the problem of differences in workmanship becoming so marginal that they fade into irrelevance is exacerbated by changes in the very work that elite professionals do as they climb the corporate ladder. Let me explain with an example from the tasks assigned to young lawyers: document review.
When I was in law school, doc review was a rite of passage for summer associates at fancy corporate firms. It occurs in the early stages of a civil case during discovery, a proceeding in which adversarial parties exchange information in preparation for trial. These exchanges are subject to highly complex rules of civil procedure that aim to ensure a trial’s expediency and fairness. Their terms are inevitably subject to dispute, but once a judge has ruled on any motions, a legal team must assemble, annotate, and redact the relevant documents they are required to produce consistent with the judge’s rulings. At the same time, they must comb through the new documents they receive for any information that might be relevant to the arguments they intend to make at trial.
To say that doc review is tedious doesn’t begin to do justice to the mind-numbing nature of the work. Let’s say I give you the voluminous tax returns of the richest person in your neighborhood and ask you to rifle through them for seven pieces of information. Now imagine doing the same thing hundreds of times over, and you have a sense of what it is like to do document review in a corporate case where thousands upon thousands of pages (memos, contracts, emails, and so forth) are dropped on your desk.
And I mean dropped, for because of the sensitivity of the material in question, doc review is often conducted on paper copies, a practice that in my time made for a familiar ritual of summer associates spending late nights surrounded by boxes of file folders, swilling Diet Coke and diligently logging data on their legal pads.
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Now, two things should be clear about doc review. First, it’s terrible. Second, for its successful completion, it requires a sharp mind, an eye for detail, and a rigid commitment to strictly limiting mistakes.
In other words, it’s exactly the kind of entry-level work that elite performers are typically assigned. There is a rote, mechanical quality to it. Critical thinking, strategic judgment, creative imagination—you don’t need any of these capacities to do such work well. Instead, your assignment is to look for information that falls into certain categories and organize it accordingly.
And yet, because of the financial stakes involved, doc review must be completed on time and with minimal errors. Therefore, even though the task is more painstaking than especially difficult, you can’t trust it to just anyone. You need those individuals who have shown the kind of superior competence that academic admissions select for.
Moving past power tools
New York Times columnist David Brooks explored the nature of this competency in “The Organization Kid,” an essay he wrote nearly 25 years ago for The Atlantic. The high-achieving kids he reported on were students on Princeton’s campus, and one of them memorably likened his cohort to power tools. “That’s what we call ourselves,” he cheerfully confessed. “We feel like we’re just tools for processing information.”
While hardly the most attractive analogy, the image of a human power tool nicely captures the nature of the work that is rewarded throughout one’s education and early professional career. A junior banker or an entry-level consultant are basically power tools. They are activated and directed by senior colleagues to complete menial tasks that, like document review, are largely mechanical and have little margin for error. The work is unglamorous, uninspiring, and most often deadly dull, but if you are dutiful and precise in dispatching it, you continue climbing the ladder of advancement.
That is, until something changes—namely, the work required of your position.
The easiest way to describe this change is to consider the pie chart of your time. At the beginning of your career, when you are at the very bottom of the professional totem pole, you are effectively a task rabbit. You spend your days completing fairly narrow assignments given to you by others: creating a PowerPoint, organizing a spreadsheet, writing a memo. These chores fill the entire pie chart of your time, and those who most deftly complete them keep advancing.
By contrast, those who have ascended to the top rungs of the corporate ladder do no such work. On the contrary, they spend their days determining tasks for others to do and managing the expectations of all types of parties: board members, shareholders, suppliers, customers, government officials, members of the press, rank-and-file employees, and other senior executives. While they continue to draw on the hard skills that helped them advance in the early part of their careers, they now fill the pie chart of their time with work that bears little resemblance to what gave them the chance for senior-level success in the first place.
Such work undoubtedly requires a kind of sentimental shift. Rather than the rigid clarity of specific directives, senior executives must become comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk. Their work has become the what and the why, while others are left to figure out the how. This means that creative thinking and a capacity for conceptual abstraction become far more important than the kind of high-level box checking reserved for power tools.
Even more important than this, however, is the development of those qualities that lend themselves to inspiring faith, trust, and loyalty in others. Achievement tends to be a solo endeavor early on. You ace the SATs and prove yourself pleasant and reliable, even when saddled with another round of doc review.
But as you advance, your responsibilities increasingly involve managing—directly and indirectly—an ever-growing cadre of professionals. To gain their trust and to be worthy of that trust is not a matter of well-crafted memos and impeccable spreadsheets. Instead, it involves a capacity for leadership, ethics, and communication. These are the skills that a traditional education and the events of one’s early career don’t adequately reward or routinely instill. You are far more likely to learn ethics by playing water polo, communication by moving to East Timor, and leadership by joining the Army than from mastering most any task that is otherwise rewarded before you turn 25. More to the point, you can be an abject failure at all three without imperiling your path to becoming a valedictorian.
Especially at a time when artificial intelligence and machine learning are taking on tasks that have traditionally been assigned to entry-level professionals—ChatGPT will soon take over doc review, if it hasn’t done so already—rewards for superior competence alone will only continue to shrink. I imagine that higher education will eventually adjust to meet these new realities, but in the meantime, the Skips of this world should consider themselves on notice. If the C-suite is in sight, spend a little more time learning to be human and a little less time polishing your memos.
John Paul Rollert is adjunct associate professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth.
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