Fake It Till You Make It — To Become a Leader, Act Like One
I found, rather than waiting for my promotions at Amazon, I was more fulfilled and grew myself as a leader by pretending I had already been promoted.
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.
Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member! Today’s article was originally written and published in 2019. But I loved the topic, so I’m updating it to today’s standards, and sharing it with you all.
Shortly after my first promotion at Amazon, I noticed something odd. I felt a difference in how I interacted with my peers, how I allocated my time, and how I tackled projects. This wasn’t a gradual change. It absolutely began on the day I was promoted.
And this wasn’t a surprise promotion. I knew I had a well-written document, I had the support of my leadership team, and a wealth of feedback providers. I assumed my promotion would go through, and I wasn’t anxious.
Still, starting the day my promotion was official, I subconsciously started acting how I believed a more senior person should act. I did not expect the title to matter. I’d verbally told close co-workers that I was “essentially promoted”, yet I noticed an immediate difference.
Part of the reason I noticed this immediate change is that I liked the change. I was proud of how I spoke up better in meetings. I appreciated that I started looking past the immediate risks in projects, and was thinking a bit longer term.
At the same time, it was frustrating to realize how much influence my job title had held over my behavior. If I’d just acted this way to begin with, I remember thinking, I could have gotten that promotion much faster. I also have an ego. I repeatedly told people that the title didn’t matter to me. It bothered me that I had let external feedback control my internal image of who I was. I guess I’m proud that I had enough self awareness to identify what had happened.
When I thought about it, I realized that I had subconsciously waited for the external validation of that promotion to label what type of leader I was, rather than relying on my internal self-image.
On the positive side, I have rarely received such a clear signal of a successful way I could hack my behavior. As a health related digression of what I’m talking about:
I figured out once that I ate less if I was standing. So I built a habit (for a while) of eating my meals standing up.
I also found it significantly easier to eat healthy if I worked out hard enough to feel sore. The soreness in my muscles somehow reminds my brain not to eat junk food because I don’t want to “ruin” the hard work.
It’s significantly easier to do my long runs when I have great audiobooks to listen to. When I’m really into my current book, I look forward to my hour+ long runs because it’s essentially a chance to quietly read.
Anyway, once I realized what was going on (and got over my annoyance), I realized I could potentially take advantage of this thinking quirk.
Going forward, I would pretend. Since my promotion had clearly helped me act in a way which would help my career, I would force the same effect again. I told myself to mentally add one level to my job title at all times.
In other words, as long as I was a Level 6 (Software Development Manager at Amazon) manager, I would instead mentally tell myself I was a Level 7 (Senior Software Development Manager).
I did this repeatedly. I had long since been convinced that your inner voice can create change. So over and over I told myself that I was a Senior Manager. Very purposefully beating it into my subconscious.
“Dave, you’re the only Senior Manager in the room.”
“As a Level 7, you need to figure out how to calm down this email thread, it’s getting out of control.”
“As a Senior manager, you really need to figure out how to stop using emergency patches for this problem.”
In every reasonable situation, I repeatedly used my inner dialogue to remind myself that I was a senior leader.
It sounds like a silly thing to do. But it absolutely made a drastic difference in my behavior. When I suggested this trick to my mentees at Amazon, many came back saying that it changed their career trajectory for the better. Although I’m sure plenty of others thought I was just being a weirdo.
Of course, it’s not terribly useful to you (the reader) to say, “Hey, just act more senior.” So here are a few ways you can make this work for you.
Observe senior leaders
To get yourself in the right headspace, pay attention to the people above you in the workplace hierarchy. At least, if the people above you seem competent. While I’ll say that there were plenty of senior leaders at Amazon I thought were jerks, or had big weaknesses, I still felt on average that they were pretty brilliant people. Watching them closely was my first tool.
Now, I don’t mean that you need to take mental notes on how to impress them. I also don’t mean to listen closely to what they’re telling you to do. Because what they want is something they have intentionally tried to communicate to you.
Instead, I want you to watch closely to see if you can tell how their behavior is different from normal employees. If you had no idea they were the senior person in the room, what is different? What types of questions do they ask? How do they interact with others? What are they worried about?
In my case, this practice started when my manager said that a peer of mine had an impressive “executive presence”. I asked what that meant — because it sounds like fluff consultant speak. And Amazon is allergic to fluff consultant speak. Zero people have synergy or alignment at Amazon. Because we’ll beat up anyone who uses those words.
Heck, I think that’s the biggest reason consultants fail their Amazon interviews. Not that they necessarily lack skills to be successful. But because the way they spoke rubbed us all the wrong way. “We created cross-organizational synergy by enabling collaboration and increasing empowerment.” Holy smokes, let me out of this interview room — not inclined! Anyway. Getting side tracked.
What my manager said they meant was that my peer acted like a senior leader in meetings. That’s it. Simple as that. And I wondered what they meant. I asked. They said to watch my co-worker and figure it out on my own. So I did. I began paying attention to my peer, and other senior leaders. What the heck was the difference? And soon enough, I began to form a mental picture of what differentiated the senior leaders from everyone else. The four things senior leaders do (among other things) are:
1. Invest more for long-term success.
Senior leaders focus their effort on ensuring positive long-term success. They invest early to ensure later success. For example, imagine we’re in a meeting to review fall promotions. A more junior manager might say, “Susan isn’t ready for promotion this cycle, so there’s no need to review her in this meeting.” Why? Because the junior manager is looking at today’s calendar, and is worried that they have too much to do today.
A senior leader in the meeting might say, “Let’s also review everyone we don’t expect to promote within the next 18 months and discuss why we don’t believe that person is on track to grow.”
The senior leader is investing more time in this activity, but it potentially avoids some long-term problems. Their attention puts organizational energy behind important (but not urgent) goals. In the absence of senior leadership, only our immediate needs would get attention.
One phrase we would use at Amazon is that senior leaders “look around corners”. Picture it as senior leaders peeking around virtual corners, looking for what might be a big deal later.
2. Focus more on strategy than execution.
Senior leaders tend to be much more concerned with “why” than “how”. Now, let’s be fair. Junior employees are literally in charge of “how”, so it makes sense that they look at how we’ll accomplish something. But there’s a time and place for everything.
Imagine you’re in an operational review meeting, and a graph shows that a specific data screen is slow updating for customers.
A junior employee might jump to the execution problem, “How do we change the refresh rate of the data on that screen?”
A senior leader might first ask some important questions to understand the situation. “Why do customers use this dashboard? What are they trying to accomplish? Is this the most useful way to present this information? Is this data updating fast critical to customers?”
Frequently the answer is “Yes, we know everything about this, and it needs to be fast”, and that’s fine. We just need to execute. But it’s amazing how often the answer is, “Huh… well, that’s an interesting question.”
In the Amazon AWS meeting (a shockingly expensive and valuable meeting with all the VPs and Directors and Principals in AWS in attendance), this dynamic was continually visible. Someone would ask about a problem. A team member would speak up about the specific thing they were going to fix. “We’ll increase the number of available connections.”
Then someone super senior would ask an insightful question, and everyone would take one virtual huge step backwards to ask some critical “why” questions.