For most of my career in advertising and marketing, I operated under a single assumption about professional success. The only direction worth moving was up. Senior Account Executive to Account Supervisor. Account Supervisor to Management Supervisor. Management Supervisor to Vice President. Each promotion felt like proof that I was doing something right, that my career was progressing the way careers were supposed to progress.
Then I watched one of the most talented strategists I ever worked with make what seemed like a puzzling choice. She stepped sideways from her strategy role into a creative department position at the same level. No title bump. No salary increase. Just a horizontal shift that left several of us quietly confused.
Two years later, she had become one of the most versatile creative strategists in the agency, commanding projects that none of us ladder climbers could touch. Her lateral move had expanded her capabilities in ways that traditional promotions never would have.
That experience fundamentally changed how I thought about career advancement. The question stopped being simply about climbing higher and became something more nuanced. What actually constitutes career success? And how do we measure whether we are truly advancing, regardless of which direction we move?
Understanding the Two Career Paths
The traditional career ladder represents what most of us were taught to expect. You start at an entry level position, demonstrate competence, receive a promotion to a higher level, and repeat the process until you reach whatever ceiling your ambition and circumstances allow. Each rung brings a new title, typically more responsibility, usually more money, and the visible markers of status that signal success to others.
For introverts who often prefer advancing their careers through demonstrated expertise rather than self promotion, the ladder model can feel like both a blessing and a challenge. The blessing comes from clear expectations and measurable progress. The challenge emerges when climbing requires increasingly public visibility and political maneuvering that drains our energy.
Lateral moves, by contrast, involve transitioning to a role at a similar level of responsibility and compensation but in a different function, department, or area of expertise. Research from Wharton’s Matthew Bidwell and J.R. Keller found that employees who move laterally are actually more likely to be subsequently promoted and achieve substantially higher pay growth than those who remain in their original positions waiting for vertical advancement.
This finding surprised me when I first encountered it. The conventional wisdom suggested that staying put and proving yourself in one role was the surest path to promotion. But the data tells a different story. Lateral movers develop broader skill sets, build wider networks across an organization, and position themselves for opportunities that pure specialists might never access.
Redefining What Success Actually Means
Before we can compare these two approaches, we need to examine how we define career success itself. Researchers have long distinguished between objective career success and subjective career success, and understanding this distinction transforms how we evaluate our professional progress.
Objective career success includes the external markers that others can observe and measure. Your salary level. Your job title. The number of promotions you have received. These are the metrics that show up on your LinkedIn profile and come up at family gatherings when relatives ask what you do for a living. Research published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology demonstrates that these objective indicators influence how others perceive our success and can affect our own sense of achievement when we compare ourselves to peers.
Subjective career success encompasses the internal experience of your work life. Your satisfaction with your job. The sense that your work aligns with your values. The feeling that you are growing and developing. The belief that your work matters. A longitudinal study spanning fifteen years found that both objective and subjective measures of career success develop together over time, with each influencing the other in ways that researchers describe as reciprocal.
For introverts especially, subjective success metrics often matter more than we initially admit. I spent years chasing titles that looked impressive on paper while ignoring how drained and disconnected I felt in roles that required constant external engagement. Real professional development for quiet achievers involves acknowledging what actually energizes us, not just what impresses others.
The Case for Climbing the Ladder
The traditional promotion path offers genuine advantages that deserve acknowledgment. Vertical advancement provides clear signals of progress. When you move from Associate to Manager to Director, both you and everyone around you can point to concrete evidence that your career is advancing. For those of us who sometimes doubt our own accomplishments, these external validations can provide important psychological anchoring.
Climbing the ladder also typically comes with tangible benefits. Each promotion generally brings salary increases, often including access to higher compensation bands that would be difficult to reach through lateral movement alone. Senior positions frequently include benefits like equity participation, executive coaching, and other perks that accumulate over time.
Research from Personnel Psychology indicates that human capital factors like education and experience correlate more strongly with objective career success measures like salary and promotions. If your primary success metric involves maximizing your earning potential over a career, the traditional ladder provides a well established path with predictable milestones.
There is also the reality of organizational power and influence. Higher positions typically come with greater authority to shape decisions, allocate resources, and influence direction. For introverts who want to create meaningful change without constant persuasion and lobbying, positional authority can provide a platform that makes impact easier to achieve.
When I became an agency CEO, my ability to implement policies that protected deep work time and reduced unnecessary meetings came directly from positional authority. The quiet changes I wanted to make for years finally became possible because my role gave me the power to make them happen.
The Case for Moving Sideways
Despite the clear benefits of vertical advancement, lateral moves offer advantages that traditional career thinking often overlooks. Cornell University research found that workers who make lateral moves are more likely to be promoted subsequently and experience greater wage growth compared to workers who remain in place. The mechanism behind this finding involves skill diversification that prepares employees for higher level positions requiring broader capabilities.
Think about what happens at senior levels in most organizations. The Vice President of Marketing does not just need marketing expertise. She needs to understand finance, operations, technology, and human resources well enough to collaborate effectively with peers across functions. A career spent only in marketing progressions might produce deep expertise but limited versatility.
Lateral moves build what researchers call task specific human capital across multiple domains. When you move from marketing strategy to product management at the same level, you are not taking a step backward. You are building a broader foundation that supports future advancement. Research shows that lateral movers have a promotion rate increase of approximately twenty percent compared to those who wait in place for vertical opportunities.
For introverts, lateral moves can provide something equally valuable. They offer opportunities to find roles that better match our natural strengths and energy patterns. I have known introverts who struggled in client facing roles but thrived after moving sideways into analytical positions. The lateral move did not advance them vertically, but it dramatically improved their skill development and professional satisfaction.
MIT Sloan Management Review found that offering employees opportunities for lateral moves is twelve times more effective at predicting retention than offering promotions, and even two and a half times more important than pay. Organizations are beginning to recognize that career lattices, which allow movement in multiple directions, create more engaged and capable workforces than rigid ladder structures.
Building Your Personal Success Metrics Framework
Given that both paths offer distinct advantages, the real question becomes how to evaluate which approach serves your specific situation. I have developed a framework that I wish I had when I was making early career decisions, and I offer it not as a formula but as a starting point for your own reflection.
Start by mapping your current skills against the skills required for roles you find genuinely interesting. If there are significant gaps, a lateral move into a role that builds those missing capabilities might position you better than waiting for a vertical promotion that does not address those gaps. This is particularly relevant for introverts considering senior individual contributor roles that require deep technical expertise across multiple domains.
Consider your energy patterns honestly. Vertical advancement often brings increased visibility, more meetings, broader stakeholder management, and the leadership responsibilities that can drain introverted energy quickly. If the next rung on your ladder involves responsibilities that consistently deplete you, the promotion might not actually represent success by your subjective measures.
Evaluate the learning opportunity each path offers. Research on career development consistently shows that growth and learning contribute significantly to subjective career success and job satisfaction. If a lateral move would expose you to new challenges, technologies, or ways of thinking, it might contribute more to your long term trajectory than a vertical move into increasingly familiar territory.
Assess the organizational context. In some organizations, lateral moves are encouraged and celebrated. In others, they are viewed with suspicion as signs that someone could not handle their previous role. Understanding your organization’s culture around internal mobility matters for predicting how different moves will be perceived and what opportunities they might enable or foreclose.
The Timing Question
When you make a move matters as much as what kind of move you make. Research on career transitions found that horizontal transitions have a stronger impact on salary progression for younger professionals, while vertical transitions show stronger effects for older workers. This suggests that early career might be an optimal time for building breadth through lateral exploration, while mid to late career might benefit more from deepening and ascending.
The data from studies of internal mobility shows that employees who have been in their current role longer and feel they have mastered their current position are more likely to benefit from lateral moves. If you still have significant learning ahead in your current role, a lateral move might be premature. But if you feel you have reached competence and growth has plateaued, a sideways step might restart your development curve.
I made my most strategic lateral move about seven years into my career, shifting from account management into strategic planning at the same level. I had mastered the account role but felt stagnant. The lateral move reignited my engagement and ultimately positioned me for leadership opportunities I never would have accessed from the account path alone.
Consider the timing in terms of organizational cycles as well. Companies going through rapid growth, restructuring, or strategic pivots often create opportunities for lateral moves that would not exist in more stable periods. Paying attention to these windows can help you spot moments when sideways movement might be particularly advantageous.
Measuring Progress Beyond Titles and Salaries
If we accept that career success includes both objective and subjective components, we need metrics that capture the full picture. I track my own professional development across several dimensions that go beyond the traditional markers.
Skill acquisition velocity measures how quickly I am learning new capabilities. In periods following lateral moves, this metric typically spikes as I encounter new challenges and build new expertise. In periods of vertical advancement, the learning often slows as I apply existing skills at higher stakes rather than developing fundamentally new ones.
Network diversification tracks whether my professional relationships span different functions, levels, and types of organizations. Lateral moves across functions dramatically increase this metric, while vertical advancement within a single function can actually narrow it as I spend more time with peers at my level and less time across the organization.
Energy sustainability assesses whether my work patterns leave me depleted or energized over time. For introverts, this metric deserves serious weight. A promotion that brings a fifty percent salary increase but leaves you chronically exhausted might actually represent a net loss in life quality. Understanding how to negotiate compensation while preserving your authentic working style becomes essential as you evaluate opportunities.
Alignment score measures how closely your daily work matches your values and interests. Both vertical and lateral moves can improve or damage this alignment, depending on what the new role actually involves. A promotion into people management might decrease alignment for someone who loves individual contribution. A lateral move into a more meaningful domain might increase it significantly.
Optionality tracks whether your current position opens or closes future possibilities. Sometimes a lateral move dramatically increases your optionality by qualifying you for roles in multiple functions, while a vertical move might lock you more tightly into a single path.
The Introvert Advantage in Career Strategy
Introverts bring particular strengths to strategic career thinking that can inform better decisions about vertical versus lateral movement. Our tendency toward reflection means we are often better at assessing whether a potential move truly aligns with our values and capabilities rather than being seduced by the external markers of success alone.
Our preference for depth over breadth can actually serve us well in either direction. Vertical advancement rewards deep expertise in a domain. Lateral movement allows us to apply that depth orientation to multiple areas sequentially, building layers of expertise that shallow networkers might never develop.
Research shows that introverts often excel at the analytical thinking required for strategic career planning. We can sit with complex tradeoffs, consider long term implications, and resist the social pressure to pursue promotions simply because they are expected. This capacity for independent thinking becomes increasingly valuable as career paths become less linear and more individualized.
The preparation that comes naturally to introverts also serves career transitions well. Whether moving up or across, we tend to research thoroughly, anticipate challenges, and build competence before the move rather than learning publicly on the job. This preparation orientation can make both vertical promotions and lateral transitions more successful. Effective performance reviews for introverts can help document this preparation and the resulting outcomes.
Making the Decision
When you face an actual choice between a vertical promotion and a lateral opportunity, or between waiting for advancement versus creating sideways movement, here is the framework I use.
First, get clear on your current success metrics. What does career success actually mean to you right now? Your answer at thirty might differ from your answer at forty five. If you are primarily optimizing for income maximization, the calculus differs from optimizing for learning or flexibility or impact.
Second, honestly assess the specific opportunities before you rather than the abstract concepts. A particular promotion might be into a role that matches your strengths beautifully, or it might involve responsibilities that drain you. A particular lateral move might build exactly the skills you need, or it might be a sideways step that goes nowhere. The specifics matter more than the category.
Third, consider the reversibility and commitment level. Some career moves are easier to correct than others. A lateral move into a new function typically carries less career risk than declining a significant promotion, even if the promotion would have been wrong for you. Understanding what you can undo helps calibrate how much certainty you need before moving.
Fourth, talk to people who have made similar moves. Not for advice about what you should do, but for information about what they actually experienced. What surprised them? What did they wish they had known? What happened to their career trajectory afterward? First hand accounts provide texture that abstract research cannot capture.
Finally, trust your introverted intuition. After all the analysis, you likely have a gut sense about which direction feels more aligned with who you want to become. That intuition draws on processing you have done below conscious awareness and deserves weight in your decision.
A Both And Approach
The most successful careers I have observed do not commit exclusively to either vertical advancement or lateral movement. They strategically combine both approaches based on circumstance, opportunity, and personal development needs at different stages.
Early career often benefits from lateral exploration that builds broad capabilities and helps you discover what you are genuinely good at and interested in. Mid career might shift toward more vertical movement as you leverage that broad foundation to rise into senior positions. Late career might return to lateral expansion as you share expertise across functions or prepare for transition into different kinds of contribution.
The key insight is that career success is not a single race with one finish line. It is an ongoing journey where different metrics matter at different times, and where both upward and sideways movement can contribute to a rich and satisfying professional life.
That strategist who made the puzzling lateral move years ago went on to become a Chief Creative Officer, a role that required exactly the combined strategy and creative capabilities she built through her unconventional path. Her success metrics included creativity, influence, and impact in addition to the title. By the measures that mattered to her, the lateral move was one of the best decisions she ever made.
Your career path will look different from hers, and it should. The goal is not to copy someone else’s trajectory but to develop clarity about what success means to you and to make moves, whether vertical or horizontal, that genuinely advance you toward that vision.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do lateral moves hurt your chances for future promotions?
Research consistently shows the opposite. Studies from Wharton and Cornell University indicate that lateral movers are actually more likely to receive subsequent promotions and achieve higher compensation growth compared to those who stay in place waiting for vertical advancement. The key is ensuring the lateral move builds skills or experience relevant to your long term goals.
How do I explain a lateral move to future employers without looking like I was demoted?
Frame the lateral move as a strategic choice for skill development rather than a failure to advance. Explain what capabilities you built, what you learned about the organization or industry, and how that broader perspective positions you for greater impact. Most sophisticated employers understand that linear career paths are increasingly rare and that lateral experience often indicates adaptability and strategic thinking.
Is there an ideal number of lateral moves I should make over my career?
There is no magic number, but the research suggests that lateral movement is most beneficial in early to mid career when you are still building your capability foundation. The goal is not to maximize lateral moves but to use them strategically when they build critical skills or break through career stalls. Most successful executives have made at least one or two significant lateral transitions during their careers.
What if my organization does not support internal lateral movement?
If your organization has a rigid structure that discourages lateral moves, you may need to seek that horizontal expansion through external moves between organizations, side projects, cross functional initiatives, or skill building outside your primary role. Some professionals find that changing companies provides the lateral exposure their current employer would not support internally.
How do I know when I should prioritize vertical advancement over lateral exploration?
Prioritize vertical movement when you have developed a clear specialty that positions you for senior roles, when the specific promotion aligns well with your strengths and values, when you have already built the breadth necessary for higher level responsibilities, or when the timing is right for accessing opportunities that may not recur. Prioritize lateral movement when you feel stuck in a narrow specialty, when you need new skills for roles you want eventually, or when your current path no longer energizes or develops you.
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About the Author
Keith Lacy is an introvert who’s learned to embrace his true self later in life. With a background in marketing and a successful career in media and advertising, Keith has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands. As a senior leader in the industry, he has built a wealth of knowledge in marketing strategy. Now, he’s on a mission to educate both introverts and extroverts about the power of introversion and how understanding this personality trait can unlock new levels of productivity, self-awareness, and success.
