What Changes at Each Stage of Your Career Journey
“I got promoted from Manager to Director, of course I know what it takes to be successful as a Director!”
This seems like a really solid assumption, but it is one of the most common misconceptions that people have when climbing the corporate ladder.
I recently spoke to
over at The Corporate Sloth. We spent time discussing my career, lessons learned, and my journey starting Work with Ashley R. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead, click here to read it, and I’ll be waiting right here when you get back :)One of the things that came up for me during our conversation was how I shifted my priorities with each career move. Early on, I realized that what made me successful at the previous level was likely not going to lead to success at the next level. So I spent a lot of time adjusting my approach at each level, either with the help and support of a manager or HR or reading up on my own and experimenting. Here’s the shifts that I made (or wished I made) at each level.
Manager
The shift to manager from an individual contributor role can be a tough one. Sometimes it requires moving to managing your peers, sometimes it requires inheriting and leading a team that you had no hand in hiring, and sometimes it requires building an entire team from the ground up while doing all the work (or some of the work) yourself. If you’re going through that right now and it feels hard, that’s okay. It IS hard.
Here’s my advice for successfully navigating the shift from an IC to a Manager:
Managing work: In my experience, you’ll probably spend 50-60% of your time managing your own and your team’s work product. To do this well, you need to focus on understanding your team’s work but not on executing their tasks. You’ll be the most successful as a manager if you start to establish an accountability culture. One where you assign work, share your detailed criteria for what success looks like, and hold them accountable to asking for help if they need it and meeting their deadlines. If you have more junior team members or teammates who are doing this work for the first time, you may have to help them with execution in the beginning to set them up for success. Once you’ve done that, you have to get comfortable with the fact that your team won’t always meet your expectations or hit their deadlines — it’s what you do about it as a manger that makes all the difference.
Building relationships with your team: As a manager, you have the opportunity to build deep relationships with your team. Trust is key here. It’s your job to get to know them, their motivators, their career aspirations, and how they work best. Having strong professional relationships will make managing their work easier. Have boundaries with your team and respect them. This guide is helpful resource for setting boundaries with work friends.
Building relationships with your (new) peers in management: This goes without saying but some of your relationships will need to change. If you are making a “peer to boss” transition, your relationships with your former peers will need to change. As a manager, you will have to establish certain lines at work. There’s information that you can no longer share with your teams and you should not complain about the company with your team (find another outlet). Both of those things can unnecessarily damage your ability to lead your team successfully.
Director
The shift from Manager to Director is another pivotal moment. Your focus starts to shift to strategy development and, depending on the size of your organization, you’ll have more frequent interactions with executives. Up until this point, you may have had the opportunity to weigh in on a few strategic projects with the support of your manager or more senior peers, but maybe you haven’t yet been in the driver’s seat. Now it’s time to buckle up. Here’s how I would recommend changing your approach when moving from a Manager to a Director:
Optimizing for results: As a Manager, you were still fairly close to your team’s work (aka their output) because you were expected to focus on execution (and optimizing and/or scaling your team’s output). If you’ve been promoted to Director, you’re probably great at the aforementioned. As a Director, you’ll need to transition your team from a push style of management to a blended push/pull style. Most people choose one or the other, the best leaders are good at both. According to the WEF, “Telling people what to do, setting a deadline and holding others accountable are all examples of pushing. Pulling involves expressing to employees that certain tasks are necessary, explaining the reason for it, seeking their input on how to best do it, [explaining] how it benefits them.”
Researchers used push and pull data from more than 100,000 leaders and discovered that 76% of the leaders were judged as more proficient at pushing than pulling by their peers. Only 22% of the leaders were assessed as stronger at pulling, and only 2% were evaluated as equally good at both.
They also asked the people who rated those leaders (a total of over 1.6 million people) which skill was more meaningful for a leader to excel at enacting organizational change. The most significant factor was pulling (inspiring others), while pushing (driving for results) was the fifth most important factor.
Developing relationships with executives: This will be new territory for a lot of managers. There’s a necessary mindset shift that needs to happen when interacting with execs. One where you can demonstrate that you’re adept at big picture thinking and one where it’s clear you know how to add business value. Most people make the mistake of wanting to pull executives into the weeds and show off the details of their work thinking that it will impress them, don’t do that. What you’ll want to do is start familiarizing yourself with your company’s strategy and start tying your team’s results directly to it. Once you have results to speak of, start sharing those with your manager, in meetings, in Slack channels where execs are present, or in a (very brief) email update to an executive that you know, etc.
Forming alliances with your peers: I’m purposely using the word alliance here and not relationship to highlight that if you want to be effective as a Director, your relationships need to evolve strategically. Who would you want to work for? The leader that’s always at odds with other departments and therefore can never get anything done (aka no peer alliances) OR the leader that has relationships with other departments and can leverage those to get work done (aka strong peer alliances)? Most people would rather work for the latter. If you’ve ever been the former or worked for a leader who was the former, you know how downright exhausting it is. I have made the mistake of being the former and I can now say confidently that alliances make getting your work done much easier.
VP
Finally, let’s talk about ascending the ranks to VP. This is where you need to start acting like an executive. Here’s some key shifts:
Managing managers: At this level you are likely only managing other managers. You’re completely removed from the IC ranks. Your team’s success is directly related to your ability to inspire others to deliver. If you have a large team, your perception of how your team is doing is going to based on their results and their manager’s impression of them (and in some cases, that could lead to a misrepresentation of an individual’s true abilities). So my advice is focus on setting a clear standard for achievement (high bar), having strong relationships with your middle management layer (which also holds them accountable to being strong leaders to their team - no blaming down), and create a channel for direct connection with your entire org (office hours, semi annual 1:1s, etc).
Decision-making & problem solving: Since you’re not deeply involved in the day to day, people are more likely to come to you with problems or thorny issues. You need to be good at making (good) decisions. You don’t always have to make the right decisions, but you have to have a good mental models for making good data driven decisions if you want to be a strong leader. Why mental models? According to James Clear, “Mental models also guide your perception and behavior. They are the thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems. Learning a new mental model gives you a new way to see the world—like Richard Feynman learning a new math technique.” Your ability to make decisions in context, on behalf of the company, and solve the right problems at the right time will make you stand out from others. Anyone can pinpoint a problem, some people are capable of finding solutions, the best leaders are able to solve the right problems that result in the company winning.
Presence: The final piece of the puzzle is your presence. In my experience, presence comes down to 3 things: polish, public speaking, (net) positive.
Polish: I’m not in the camp that will tell you that you need to wear a blazer or a power suit to advance. You don’t have to. I hate suits, don’t own a business suit, never wore one. But this is more than what you wear. Successful leaders do everything with a bit of polish. Ever notice how their presentations are well laid out and easy to follow? Their documents are formatted well? It looks like they put effort into what they wear? Putting a bit more effort into how you present yourself and your work really matters at this level.
Public speaking: Public speaking is a top 10 fear for a reason. Speaking in front of rooms and/or crowds can be scary. Figuring out how you, specifically, are going to navigate that successfully matters at the executive level. Things like learning how to speak clearly, concisely, and with conviction are important. You don’t have to innately have these skills, but knowing where you stand and working to improve them will take you far. Try practicing with a trusted friend or hiring a coach if this is a really big hurdle for you.
(Net) positive: Try to be the person that others want to invite to the conversation. Now, I’m not going to pretend that really systemic barriers to inclusion do not exist, they do. But, when you are invited to a conversation or brainstorming meeting think about it? Are you lifting everyone up around you? Or are you an energy drain? Do you contribute ideas? Or do you shoot them down? Do people dread being in spaces with you? Or do they seek you out? Aim to be a net positive force to those around you. If you are constantly in net negative mode and can’t seem to shake it, you might be on the brink of burning out (this happened to me and I didn’t notice the signs).
Good luck!
I’m Ashley, a Performance Coach & Leadership Consultant. I help my clients successfully navigate the leadership transitions listed above in my 1:1 coaching programs. Schedule time with me if you need help.