Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
4people
2014–2022years
80% recommend20% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yes, and …
If you want career growth, consider these three simple* tricks:
1. Grok CircleCI’s engineering competency matrix, be honest with yourself, and work on your technical “level ups” across the board. These alone will generally not get you promoted without step 2.
https://circleci.com/blog/why-we-re-designed-our-engineering...
2. Buy the book “The Leadership Pipeline”, again be honest with yourself, and work on your management toolbelt progression. Level up within your company inside two years (an internal transfer can make this step easier).
https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Build-Powered-C...
3. After leveling up, and within the two years, accept a role for 20% to 40% higher comp at a new company, or the next leadership level up, or both. (Preferably both.)
Repeat.
- - - - - - - - -
Footnotes:
* Simple doesn’t mean without deliberate attention or work.
** Keep LinkedIn updated with every title or responsibility growth (new role same employer), as well adding to the key valuable outcome you delivered in that role’s bullets, so (a) it’s apparent to recruiters and employers that you are seen as promotable, (b) you are not updating it only when looking for a job.
*** The Leadership Pipeline book implies it’s for a company. On the contrary, use the framework to work on yourself.
- Highly recommend the book “The Leadership Pipeline” written by Ram Charan. The book focuses on developing a pipeline through which leaders within an organization move and describes accountabilities at each level, along with red flags that indicate that a manager at a given level isn’t operating correctly at said level. Very helpful in understanding what happens (or should be happening) at each level.
Ram Charan is a well respected author and consultant, who has according to Wikipedia consulted with some of the largest businesses in the US.
- In addition to others already mentioned, "Becoming a Manager," by Linda Hill: follows a group of new managers for a year, discussing how their understanding of their role changes. Absolutely great - for a long time I kept a home copy and a work copy. Follow-up "Being the Boss" is also good. And "The Leadership Pipeline," by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, James Noel: what you need to learn/change to succeed at each different level of management.
- while i agree with much of what bdfh42 said, there's one glaring mistake above:
> There is very little available advice on starting out in management.
i disagree. there's a shitload: go to any bookstore, real or virtual, and go to the business section. TONS of stuff on being a manager. the trouble is finding USEFUL, WORTHWHILE stuff. most of it - the vast majority of it - is drivel and derivative. find the gems.
myself, when i first became a manager i studied hard, i read tons of material and haven't stopped because it's a constant learning process. i studied three major subjects: managing people, managing projects, and leadership. they're all core skills to being an effective manager. a fourth one - managing yourself - is often overlooked, but don't skimp on it. self discipline and management will help you and the people who report to you immeasurably.
management is not about command but about responsibility: to the organization, to your boss, and to your staff. bdfh42 gets much of that right in his nutshell above. communication is a core concept, learn it and continually work on it. learn to delegate, learn to train, learn to plan, learn to trust - and earn trust. learn to lead.
a lot of my leadership lessons have come from military books lately, and one lesson i learned a long time ago from that field has stayed with me: complaints go up. never let your team hear you complain. you set the tone, you keep a positive attitude about things and people even if you're grinding your teeth when you do. your example reverberates with your team, never forget that. it's part of the responsibility.
harvard business review has a press and they have tons of books on management essentials worth studying. myself, i recommend their "essentials" books. they cherry pick articles from their magazine (which is also worth subscribing to) and put them together in a book. well worth it, and you can often find them cheap and used on amazon. here's one example:
http://hbr.org/product/harvard-managementor-management-essen...
i read a ton of peter drucker - and recommend his books wholeheartedly - and here's his books i suggest:
- The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done - just because you're not (yet) an executive doesn't mean you can't learn how to manage like one. this book taught me tons, and i recommend it to nearly any and all new managers i can.
- Managing Oneself - learn how to manage yourself, your time, your projects and everything else will come naturally.
- Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices - this is a tome but is the premier book of his, well worth the time you spend on it.
as for common pitfalls on being a first time manager they include failure to delegate, being too "hands on", and not setting expectations right. a lot of this is covered in "The Leadership Pipeline" by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter and James Noel. while a book about big orgs building succession pipelines, for a manager it's really valuable because it teaches you what's expected of you by your superiors, and common pitfalls - and how to avoid them.
one of my favorite early books on leadership was "It's Your Ship" by D. Michael Abrashoff, a former navy captain. tons of great stuff in there that dovetails with the above well.
these are just some of the things i've read and shared with people over the years, and they've been extremely valuable. i spent my own money to read these and hours every night on my own and it has helped me become effective and grow. none of us are born knowing how to manage people, so study it like you would anything else new.
finally: ask for training. if your org has promoted you, ask for management training for yourself and the others around you. a couple of two day seminars will do wonders for your organization. the price is pretty reasonable, too.
> Stand by all of your team
too true: be a shit umbrella, not a shit funnel. when things happen, be the shield between your part of the org and the problem. follow up - with the individual(s), the team, and yourself - to see what went wrong and what you can learn. but never forget you should be a shit umbrella and shield your org from crap above.
- At first blush, this feels a little like the many blog blurbs for “The Leadership Pipeline” by Charan and Drotter. To be fair, this is richer than most, an independent take on something intrinsic.
For comparison, a couple other generic watered down summaries of the book:
https://www.mudamasters.com/en/change-management-leadership/...
https://www.cleverism.com/leadership-pipeline-model/
As there are dozens of these, maybe it’s some sort of right of passage for blogging on LinkedIn?
The main takeaway for me from the book that doesn’t seem captured by the re-blogs, but is in the second paragraph here, is that the transitions are discontinuous. The leader is not sharpening tools in a tool belt, but changing out tool belts.
In this piece, author writes, “shift your mindset, and focus on building new skills that are often very different from the skills that made you successful in your previous role.”
To put more bluntly:
The leader must stop doing things that worked well when adjusting the system at a different scope, and now intervene completely differently.
Source, for Kindle:
https://smile.amazon.com/Leadership-Pipeline-Powered-Company...
