(FORTUNE Magazine) – They say that sooner or later nearly everyone feels they've topped out -- stopped growing in the job, gone as far as they're going in the company. They also say it isn't whether you win or lose, it's how you played the game, right? Hmm-mm, you bet. The fact is, when you plateau it doesn't matter that others eventually will too -- you feel you're alone in the loser's circle. Worse, you're sure your colleagues are buzzing behind your back about how you fell off the fast track. At the same time, you're convinced you've become invisible. Your ideas are not valued. Jack breezed past you in the hall today without even saying hello. After the paranoia comes the fear: Oh, my God, at my salary I'm a sitting duck. They're gonna lay me off. If you think that, you may be right. Indeed, it's people who have been speeding along on the fast track who are most vulnerable. Says Susan Geisenheimer, senior vice president for human resources at EMI Records Group: "You can move too quickly, and people's expectations for you can become too great. When you can't meet them, you top out." Isn't that what the midterm election results are telling Bill Clinton? The phenomenon used to be associated with portly, silver-haired execs in their 50s rather than portly, silver-haired Presidents in their 40s. No more. Sociologist James E. Rosenbaum at Northwestern University's Center for Urban Affairs spent 13 years looking at patterns of career progress in large industrial companies and came to a rather distressing conclusion. "In your mid- to late 30s, you either make it or not," he says. "After that age, the rate of upward mobility declines quite precipitously." Women top out at the same ages as men, and at the same rates. Topping out differs from the infamous glass ceiling because it affects women at all levels of management, while the glass ceiling appears only over the most senior jobs. Dale Winston at Battalia Winston, an executive search firm in New York City, probably puts it best: "Women hit the glass ceiling. Men just hit the ceiling." The turmoil surrounding reengineering, right-sizing, and other management trends doesn't help. John Geraci, 42, discovered how stymied he was two years ago. He was president of a software division of a large company and a proud member of the Young Presidents Organization. The parent company asked him to sell the division, which he did, only to have the acquirer tell him he could stay on if he'd accept the presidency of a much smaller division. The parent company wasn't offering a great deal either: "They said I could come back but at a lower job level in the hope that something would work out later on." Neither proposal interested him. So there he was on his 40th birthday: four children to support and no job. "I shot the horse I was riding," Geraci says now. "Selling that division was absolutely the right decision for the parent company and for our customers, but a lot of people, including me, were hurt in the short run." After 14 months of soul-searching and figuring out what was important to him in any job he would take, he became the chief operating officer of Blessing White, a human resources consultancy in Princeton, New Jersey. "It takes a while to get over this," he says. "You have to do some grieving. You can't just 'get on with it.'" You can top out for a lot of reasons. Education and talent will get you to middle management. From there the climb is a mixture of mentoring, luck, and your expertise in whatever business the company is betting on right now. How you'll feel when you reach a plateau depends heavily on whether you hold yourself responsible -- in that you realize you made some kind of choice to land in your fix -- or blame the company. You're likely to be very angry and disillusioned if you think it's the company's fault for changing the rules in the middle of the game, if everything you were led to believe about regular promotions and pay increases suddenly no longer holds true -- only nobody told you. When being T.O. leads to being L.O., the consequences can be so devastating you never get over it. Rosalie Wolf, chief investment officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, recalls meeting a man in his early 60s who had been chief financial officer of a sizable company for 15 years before it was taken over. The acquirer had his own team, so the CFO was let go. When Wolf ran into him, he'd been out of work for about five years. "I did everything right," he told her sorrowfully. "Yale. Harvard MBA. Rickover program in the Navy. CFO of ! a major corporation at 42. Look what it's come to." Plateauing may well be easier to accept if you realize it resulted at least partly from decisions you made. Oh, you'll still be jealous as you watch your peers get those promotions, and you'll wonder how come the job went to that bozo. That's what Virgil Wildey, 50, public relations director for AT&T's Southwest region, caught himself thinking after he refused a transfer to headquarters in New Jersey in 1992 when his division-level job was abolished. He wanted to remain in Austin, Texas, where he and his wife were building a house. To do so, he had to accept a downgrade to district-level status. "I saw others whose jobs weren't eliminated, and I thought, 'Why me?' But in the final analysis I did say, 'Sorry, AT&T, Texas is home.'" Now he commutes 200 miles between Austin and AT&T in Dallas in his "virtual office," a Chevy Sport Side pickup truck -- "Every Texas kid wants a pickup truck," he says -- duded out with cellular phone, laptop, and beeper. "If I had gone to New Jersey and then been downgraded, it would have been very hard working with a lot of others who noticed what had happened to me," he says. "Now I'm by myself, just a cowboy riding the lone prairie. I don't see others marching on except via E-mail. It's not in my face because I'm not in the competitive environment." Wildey sold a story to a pulp-fiction magazine when he was in college. When he racks up 30 years' service in three years, he'll retire to try his hand at Westerns and detective yarns.

TOPPING OUT nicks your paycheck as well as your pride, and that biweekly stub is a perpetual reminder of what's happened to you. You are now operating in a world of marginal raises and vanishing bonuses. Says Sally Haver, a managing associate at the Ayers Group, a New York City consultancy: "When corporations go from vertical to horizontal structures, there will be a lot of horizontal, lateral moves. Your pay won't increase significantly because moving sideways is not moving upwards, but it's preferable to moving out if you've got the house in Connecticut and three kids to educate." The party line among human resource folks is that if an executive continues to make a contribution, compensation will be enough to meet that person's needs. But enough-to-meet-your-needs is an elusive concept: Do you have all the money you need? I certainly don't. If money really is your scorecard, you're probably not going to be happy until you start buffing the resume to see if you can command a bigger salary somewhere else. There's another kind of plateauing that should also make you think about quitting. This is the kind where you ask yourself not how high you want to rise in the organization, but what you want to do with your time. Bruce Harreld, 44, encountered it when he was senior vice president for marketing and information at Kraft General Foods. "I kept saying to my bosses, 'What's the next challenge?' And they'd say, 'Why don't you run this division?' I'd say, 'What am I going to learn from this?' And they'd say, 'But it's a bigger division.' My issue wasn't size, it was learning." Harreld quit in January 1993 and went off to consult, play golf, and teach at Northwestern University's Kellogg School. Six months after that, one of his clients, Boston Chicken, the swiftly growing fast-food chain headquartered in Golden, Colorado, persuaded him to join the company full-time as president. "Plateauing is a sign people need something fresh to do," he says. "They need to change their venue." It has become common wisdom that women cope better than men because their self-esteem is not totally a function of how well they are doing at work. Supposedly their roles as mothers, wives, and friends are also important to them, while success on the job is all that matters to men. "Women are frustrated, men are devastated," is the way Morton Shaevitz, director of the Institute for Family and Work Relationships in La Jolla, California, puts it. Well, maybe. It is certainly true that many older women who plateau think they have gone much further than they ever expected to when they started working some 30 years ago. Kathy Whildin, 50, a distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Network Software in Lisle, Illinois, joined Illinois Bell 27 years ago as a directory assistance operator, the lowest rung. Today she holds the company's second-highest technical rank and works in switching systems. She admits she's gone as far as she's going, but she's grateful: "Switching systems is a quantum leap from telephone operator." But when career and midlife crises hit together, women are as crushed as men. There is, after all, the beloved stereotype of the aging spinster regretting the marriage and children she gave up for her career. Now she spends her nights sobbing into the silky fur of her brace of King Charles spaniels. A forceful married woman in her early 50s, who recently realized she had topped out at a very senior level at a packaged-goods company, denies that women have any better coping mechanisms for job disappointments than men do. "I think it's ridiculous to say a guy would be devastated by this and a woman wouldn't be," she snapped. "It denigrates how attached men are to their families, and it denigrates how serious women are about work."

I REMEMBER sitting in the bar of the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh nearly 20 years ago with several male executives from Midwestern manufacturing companies. One, a midlevel manager in his late 40s, knew he had had his last promotion and began talking about how he regretted all the transfers he had accepted for the sake of his career. One of his children turned out to have serious learning disabilities, and the man believed all those moves -- and schools -- had made it difficult to diagnose his son's condition. "It wasn't worth it," the father said. "If I had it to do all over again, I would have refused those transfers." At some point in your life, male or female, you're going to have to ask the question Peggy Lee made famous in her song: Is that all there is? And you are probably not going to like the answer. But before you decide it's all over, think about this. John Quincy Adams topped out as a very unpopular one-term President, then began a second career in the House of Representatives. When it was suggested that being a congressman would degrade a former president, Adams replied with wonderful 19th-century starchiness that a person could not be degraded by serving the people as a representative in Congress or, indeed, as a selectman of his town. There will always be something worthy for you to do.