Horizontal growth is building a career path which is across multiple functions (like Engineering, Project Management, Sales, Finance) as opposed to spending majority of your professional life in a single function doing monotonous job. I feel people in India are more inclined towards vertical growth prospects and feel insecure when given an option for horizontal growth.
People feel insecure about moving from one function to another (for horizontal growth) because it involves learning new things, it kicks you out of your comfort zone, makes you build relationship with new people, exposes you to re-evaluation, fear of not performing well in your new role and the fear of losing what you have learned in your last function. Non performers who are just holding on to their current positions because of seniority or political edge or favouritism are generally averse to horizontal growth.
Horizontal growth doesn’t always have to do with changing your current role; you can always pickup responsibilities outside your current function while still owning the existing role (like being an engineering and doing project management, being an account manager but spending 2 days a week on new sales, being a project manager and technical architect, owning both HR and organization process).
Being in the same function is fine as long as you are not becoming monotonous, for example being a project manager for a 10 member team is different from managing a 50 member team, managing a SME (small and medium enterprise) customer is different from managing a large enterprise customer, doing a scrum based project is different from waterfall. All of these are different forms of project management and adds to your learning.
But certain times there is only so much an organization can do for an individual’s growth, organization may not have an enterprise account to offer or your boss may not have plans to resign/retire so you can take his position J or top management doesn’t want to restructure things or there may be too many people competing for a single role or you may feel that you have learned a lot in a particular field (like project management), in these cases I would recommend you consider horizontal growth as an option.
It is natural to get worried as to how the world will treat you after this change or how a company would view your profile when you want to switch jobs but trust me instead of doing monotonous work and not being able to learn/grow, you are always better off changing role and learning something new and hope that whatever you are learning will all come together one day for your own benefit and bring exponential growth.
