Welcome to Reframed by Ashley Rudolph. One idea, every week, that changes how you see your career.
Last week, I published part 2 of this series. I talked the nuances of being a Director and why being good at your job isn’t enough if you want to be great as a Director. This one resonated so much that 1200 of you subscribed to Reframed. If you haven’t read it yet, bookmark it and share it with all the Directors in your life.
And if you’re new here, part 1 was about how to nail the Manager level.
This week is about the life of a VP. Enjoy!
I became a VP in 2019 after falling for the seductive trap of being recruited into another company for my skills and expertise. I had just scaled a global operations team that supported 8 locations when I started all the way up to 21 cities all over the world.
My new company was looking to scale and needed the right person to do it. I was itching to get my hands dirty and scale an operation all over again. It felt like kismet.
Then reality hit.
I came in to scale their operations but they weren’t quite there yet. They were mature in years but early stage in practice. If you know startups, you know those stages call for two different operational playbooks.
At my new company, instead of strategizing about things like finding efficiencies across the business, we were laser focused on closing every single deal whether it was a fit or not. We didn’t have the luxury of doing otherwise. Saying no or walking away from a deal made the corporate bank account side eye.
If that shift wasn’t hard enough, the loneliness of being at the VP level hit me hard. The company was smaller and I had fewer peers to lean on (not uncommon when you’re a senior leader). Here, pre-existing relationships were so tight that anything I shared would boomerang right back to my team.
I felt like I had taken a step backwards in more ways than one.
The pandemic took away my coping mechanisms. I had no happy hours to distract myself with, no Saturday night clubbing, no team offsites to convince myself things were working. While working from home at my kitchen table, I remember thinking “If I don’t feel good about doing this work, with these people, during a pandemic, I will never be excited to be here”.
Then came the guilt. On the surface, it was working. Our products were doing well, customers were happy, the team was growing, I had given everyone clear roles and responsibilities - pointing them at the work that suited them best. Demand was booming due to remote learning.
I thought if I just stick it out, I could almost see us delivering everything we’d planned. Maybe in five years instead of three.
Could I wait that long? Could I sacrifice myself, my goals, and my time to get there? Was it worth it?
It wasn’t.
What Being a VP Actually Taught Me
We talked about the Director level last week and how much cross-functional relationships and communicating well with executives matter there.
For VPs, the stakes change: you own a P&L, your partnership with your C-level leader becomes consequential, and your job is to translate corporate goals into reality. You feel board pressures without ever being in the boardroom.
So much of your success as a VP comes down to two things:
understanding what it takes to hit the company's goals, and
how you choose to lead to get there.
I led through people. I needed them to buy into me before they'd buy into my team’s work, and I leveraged the four strategies below to get there.
1. Find your arena
By the time you hit the VP level, three things matter when it comes to your work:
What you excel at (the work you do, your function, your expertise)
Where you do your best work (the company, business stage, and environment)
Why you do it (your principles and core values)
In the example above, I knew what I excelled at and the “why” behind my leadership. It’s why I was a slam dunk for a mission driven company looking for a leader who had experience scaling operations. I checked those boxes.
I had not yet reflected on where I did my best work.
I realized too late that my preferred problems fit squarely in a growth stage setting. When I tried my playbook for leading teams, forming alliances, and scaling up in an early stage environment - it wasn’t seamless. I watched a colleague join the company, full of excitement from Big Tech. He left within 6 months and went back to his preferred arena (Big Tech).
GO DEEPER → HOW TO FIND YOUR ARENA
Grab a pen and paper and do the following exercise:
What: What problems do people come to you to help them solve? Look at your last few roles: what were you doing when you got the most recognition?
Where: Think of a stretch when you felt like you were doing your best work. What kind of company was it? Was it growing, downsizing, just launching? Now do the same for a time you felt off. What was different?
Why: This is a core values reflection. If you've never actually named your values, start with James Clear's list. Scan it and select your top 5. And if you want to go deeper, I met Shelbi Jones last year and she’s who I think of every time the topic comes up. Talk to her.
2. Good people do their best work under good leadership
When I was a VP, I learned to use my authority for good. I remembered what it felt like to do great work and quietly wonder if anyone above me noticed. So I noticed. I took my team’s careers as seriously as I took my own.
If someone was committed and doing great work, they were rewarded. I carved out dollars for raises and promotions during budgeting season for the people I believed were on track. It didn’t always work out the way I planned. Sometimes the business couldn’t allow for it. But I planned for it anyway.
A lot of them came from education and non-profit backgrounds, so executive speak was near impossible to parse at first. So I translated. During every company meeting, I broke down what the exec team actually meant and pointed them to resources ro build their context beyond our department. It made them better cross-functional operators and it told them their experience mattered, not just their output.
There’s tremendous responsibility in being a leader and it stretches well beyond the day-to-day. Sometimes someone on your team is dealing with a loss and you’re behind the scenes with their manager making sure they’re never once tempted to look at their inbox. Sometimes someone hits a milestone and you stop a meeting to celebrate them.
I didn’t do it because it made people want to work for me, though it did. I did it because I finally got to be the leader I always admired.
GO DEEPER → EMPOWER YOUR TEAMS TO TAKE ON MORE AND OWN YOUR ROLE
3. Owning hard decisions matters more than you think
After I became a VP, I got access to my first corporate-sponsored executive coach. She told me the things everyone else had been holding back. She noticed when I was procrastinating on a hard decision. She pushed me to stop worrying so much about whether people liked me.
My job was to give my team clarity about decisions that were made for the business and there were a lot I didn’t agree with.
Early on, I dealt with it by distancing myself from those decisions. I’d say “it’s above me,” the more I led with disempowerment, the more my team operated like a disempowered unit. Your words and actions matter.
Over time I learned that owning a decision I hadn’t made and explaining why it was made, was harder but better for everyone. You can hear the difference between these two statements:
“The exec team and the board decided this” is one way to deliver news about layoffs and why they happened.
“We’re letting people go today and it’s hard. The business hasn’t been doing well for three quarters and this is what companies do when they’re where we are. I don’t have all the details yet, but I wanted you to know that no one on this team is impacted. As soon as I know more, you all will be the first to know it.”
The first one puts distance between you and the decision. The second one doesn’t.
GO DEEPER → HOW TO SHOW UP AS A LEADER DURING CHALLENGING TIMES
The two statements above weren’t hypotheticals. I wrote in detail about my experience with layoffs as a VP in Reframed. It taught me how to lead when I didn't have all the answers. But looking back at it reminded me that my values made knowing the right thing to do obvious.
4. You have to work with people you don’t like
By the time you're a VP, the people who annoy you are usually the ones you need most. Unfortunately, you can't avoid them because people are watching how you deal with them.
I have to be honest, I struggled with this! If you cross me, I turn into an icicle. Elsa has nothing on me!
I had to develop enough professional maturity to know how to navigate this (ahem personality quirk), so that I wouldn’t tank my professional credibility. It was a challenge. When I look back at my career, some of the best leaders that I’ve worked with practiced the art of diplomacy and made it look effortless. I channeled them and eventually learned how to turn down my petty meter in order to keep things moving.
GO DEEPER → HOW TO WORK WITH PEOPLE YOU HATE (HBR)
Amy Gallo’s piece in HBR on How To Work With Someone You Hate (gift link) is fantastic. But please, do not side eye me when you see that one of the recommendations is to “spend more time with them”. Say “woosah” then read the article with an open mind. Also, this goes without saying but this advice applies to normal workplace friction and not mistreatment or harassment.
I remember the very first time I was sitting in a meeting with C-level folks and other VPs and a C-level exec said they were appointing “a deputy” to handle things while they were out on vacation. I had this moment where I was like wait, a deputy? Is that the expectation?
It seems obvious but before that point, getting to VP was a personal achievement, I did not think about the fact that I would potentially be some C-level execs succession plan. That maybe they were auditioning me for a C-level role in the future.
That was the moment I realized I didn’t want that job.
But that was my answer. It doesn’t have to be yours.
People above you are watching and at some point they’ll start seeing you as the next step. Some of you will feel that and think yes, that’s exactly the seat I want. If that’s you, go after it! Wanting it is not something to be shy about.
And some of you will feel it and realize, quietly, that you don’t want the thing you’ve been climbing toward. That’s also great. You’re allowed to walk out of an audition.
As for me, I think it speaks volumes that I’m writing to you as a business owner instead of a C-something.
That concludes part 3 of my series. I’m so happy you joined for the ride and I hope you enjoyed it.
I’d love to learn more about you - please respond and let me know what resonated, I’d love to hear it.
Good luck, see you next week!
Ashley
Join Reframed Insiders
As an Insider, you’ll:
Have access to assessments that tell you whether you’ve got a visibility problem, a performance problem, or a role you’ve outgrown.
Unlock my playbook and scripts for important conversations: raises, promotions, and the times you have to advocate for yourself or your team.
Join a live call with me every month. Recent calls have covered compensation, burnout, onboarding into a new team, speaking up when you’re outranked, and dealing with managers who won’t give you clear direction.