Are you Leading or Winning? You Can't Win a Promotion.
Focusing on leading, rather than winning, creates significantly better results for you and your team.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
The first version of this article was written 6 years ago. I’ve repeatedly wanted to write more on this topic, as I feel it’s a huge career growth blocker for many people (engineers in particular). It was time to update it to my current writing style and get it out to all of you readers.
I walked into the conference room for a design review from one of my teams. A new feature for our product had required some large changes for one of the teams that reported to me.
Two engineers had split the planning work on the project. Julius, a relatively junior SDE-2, and Estelle, an SDE-2 close to promotion. In fact, I’d had a few conversations with Estelle recently regarding expectations for both functional and leadership skills for promotion. The two engineers had met privately and created a single presentation from their designs.
As a side note, their manager was fairly junior, so I was taking a more active role in this process. Usually, I’d expect their manager to handle at least the initial design review for a change of this magnitude.
The presentation by both engineers went fine. As we entered into the questions segment of the meeting, I asked Julius a question.
“If this feature works out well, we’re going to need to launch it on our mobile app as well. Will that be an issue?” I asked.
Julius looked like a deer caught in headlights. Which I’ve unfortunately seen before. Stupid deer.
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“Oh. I didn’t think about that. This won’t scale in that way.” he said.
Estelle sighed a bit dramatically. “Julius, I considered the mobile app in my design. I’m sorry you didn’t think about it. I’ll help you later on getting this fixed.”
At that moment, I was disappointed in a couple of ways.
First, when Julius and Estelle combined their work into a single design, I was disappointed that Estelle didn’t realize Julius’s design wasn’t correct. Second, Estelle’s comment would be embarrassing to Julius. There were better ways to offer help.
Later in the day, I had a one-on-one scheduled with Estelle.
Estelle began by saying that she was disappointed in Julius’s skills. She said that his designs over the past few months weren’t great, and she’d noticed during their planning session that his designs had a few core deficiencies.
“I’m glad you noticed that issue because I saw it when we created that presentation.” she said. “It’s precisely the type of deficiency I keep discovering in Julius’s work.”
I did a mental double take.
“Are you saying that you identified the issue before the meeting?” I asked.
Estelle nodded. She didn’t seem to notice my reaction. I’m pretty good at neutral expressions.
“Yes.” she said. “I noticed that his design had several issues. I knew we’d end up having to change quite a few things.”
I sighed.
“Estelle, are you interested in being the best SDE-2 in our group, or do you want to be a leader?” I asked.
Without waiting for a reply (she looked a bit surprised), I continued.
“I don’t need you to find your teammates’ failures. I need you to make them successful.” I said. “You pointed out Julius’s failure in public, which leads me to believe that you wanted to point out that you’re better than he is. Being a leader isn’t about winning by making your peers look bad. The best way you could have shown me that you’re a leader would have been to help Julius have a successful presentation.”
Estelle frowned.
“I understand. I should have helped him fix it.” she said. “But if I just fixed it, you wouldn’t know that he was not doing his job well.”
“If you helped him learn, he wouldn’t necessarily do his job poorly. And if you had to keep helping him, you could certainly give me feedback on his performance.” I said. “But your number one goal should be to help your teammates.”
The core issue is that your functional skills are only one half of the expectations for a higher level position.