Growing Your Career: What Would You Do Differently?
When looking to advance and grow in your career, it’s sometimes easy to get fixated on the small things. It’s easy to hyper focus on little steps and when you do step back, it can feel like the next level is hopelessly far or unattainable. If you’re anything like me, you feel like you’re capable of the next level or even two levels up, but it can feel impossibly hard to figure out how to prove that to everyone else. It is easy to get bogged down in waiting for that perfect opportunity or waiting for someone else to give you that golden piece of coaching. A little piece of advice: those rarely come.
I was recently in a panel discussion about how to write a promotion case (part of the promotion process at Box) and as a part of that, one of the women there started talking about envisioning yourself in the next role. One of the big insights for her was to think about advancement in terms of ‘what would you do if you were ___?’ The key here is to pick a role one or two above where you are and really think about if you had that role today, what would you do differently? She talked about envisioning herself as a director and thinking through the tasks or approaches that she would do that she wasn’t already doing at the time. What was stopping her from doing those things? In a few cases, you actually can’t do those things, but in many cases, we just don’t think to do them or we feel we lack the authority or we’re subtly stopping ourselves. If we want to get there, though, why not start doing as much of what we can do now? I like this framing because it focuses less on what I lack and more on doing what I might be stopping myself from doing otherwise. It isn’t about fixing me but instead about empowering me.
Empowerment can be a powerful thing. Before becoming a manager, it took me a long time to set up 1:1s with the people on the team I was leading. It felt awkward and like I didn’t have the authority. Eventually I realized that there was no reason I couldn’t — checking in with people would give me a better pulse on how everything was going and there was no reason things needed to be formal or awkward. Over time, as I’ve gone back and re-evaluated or after I’ve changed roles, the list of what I would do differently has changed. What some of those things are for me now are different from what they have been in the past and this list will of course vary for each person. I hope to continue to discover more of these as I continue in my career, but a few of the more pivotal realizations I’ve reached so far include taking ownership, following through and constantly evaluating impact.
Take Ownership
Over time I learned the importance of taking ownership of my team and my project, not just my own work. A lot of things come up for my team outside of the main project and daily tasks. These situations could be anything from a bug coming in, to someone coming to the team with a question or request, to someone asking for advice. It’s easy, especially when you’re more junior, to just assume that someone else will take care of these things. Maybe you’re not the best person to answer the question or fix the bug. Maybe it’s a bug in some functionality that you don’t know very well or actually just don’t want to deal with. When it comes down to it though, someone has to take care of it. Why shouldn’t it be you? I’m not trying to say that you should always interrupt your work to handle whatever happens to walk through the door. That’s not actually productive for you or anyone else. The key here is to really take responsibility for the project — if you don’t make sure something gets addressed or fixed, who will? Does it need to be handled? Delegating or setting up processes to make sure things get handled is also perfectly acceptable — the main key here is to make sure the project succeeds and important things aren’t dropped or forgotten.
I found for me, a big part of this was every time I find myself not addressing something, I’ll ask myself, why am I not addressing it? Is it better handled by someone else who’s already involved? Maybe I should ping them and verify that they are handling it. Is it simply not that important? Fine, let it slide. Is it because I’m not comfortable with that part of the system? This is a good opportunity for me to learn. Is it something I can easily handle but don’t really have time for? Maybe this is a good learning opportunity for someone else. By better triaging things, I not only make sure that things aren’t slipping through the cracks, but I create opportunities for myself to learn something and even better, I make sure that the team as a whole is set up for success.
Include the Follow Through
Similarly to taking ownership for my team, I found it useful to also ask myself what I can do. I have often found myself seeing issues and just assuming that management or someone higher up would take care of them. This could be anything from a meeting being useless, to wanting to change some process, to clashes with another individual or team. I found myself talking to my manager to tell them about the situation and assuming that my job was done. They’d take care of everything. In some cases this is true, and there are definitely situations that may require a management solution, but this is rarer than you might think. Even if I may not be able to have quite as big an impact as my manager, they may not have the time to work on it, so what can I do? If I don’t know what should be done, who can I brainstorm with to find solutions? Everyone appreciates someone who comes to them with both the problem and the solution and they like it even more if you can just solve things without them having to get involved. I’m not saying not to bring things up with your manager, they can be a good sounding board and they often want a pulse on what’s going on anyway. That said, they only have so much time and may not have time to fix the things you raise, so what can you do?
At Box, we encourage people to fix larger organizational issues and reward it. This is part of both our rubrics and engineering values. I have, at times, struggled when looking for these big projects. I want to do things that impact other teams, but what? It’s easy to be pointed at successful examples of big initiatives and assume that people came at these with fully formed ideas of something big to do that would help everyone. While that may occasionally happen, I think the more common route is that someone sees something small that’s broken and they brainstorm with a few other people, try a few easy solutions and go from there. Eventually, if the idea is good, it becomes that big solution. The key is not to go looking for some big problem with a big solution. Instead, the key is to look for something small you can do to make your life and others’ lives a little bit better. If you pick something useful, this will likely grow into something bigger. If not, you haven’t spent a lot of time.
Constantly Evaluate Impact
A lot of what I’ve talked about involves doing more things, but there’s only so much time in a day and you have to get your actual day job done too. The other important thing I’ve learned over time is to constantly reevaluate what you’re spending your time on and evaluate the impact of each thing. Now some things you might have to do — like spending time as the on-call person for your team is probably not optional (nor should it be). That said, what do you spend your time on? What value do you get out of each task? Is it teaching me something? Do I enjoy doing it? Is it helping me develop a skill? What is the impact of that task? What would happen if someone else did that task? What if no one did the task? Would the task be a good learning opportunity for someone else? Are the tasks that no one wants getting spread evenly across the team? I recently talked with my skip level manager about how this is a normal part of growing within your role. You pick up a lot more things until you start to be spread too thin, then you evaluate what you can delegate or cut and you start over. You keep only the things that are the best use of your time allowing you to have more time so that you can pick up more tasks and repeat the whole cycle.
Sometimes it can feel to me like I’m just giving someone else the useless work when I pass off what I consider to be my easiest or most boring tasks. The harder part to remember is that just because they’re the easiest tasks or the boring tasks for me, doesn’t mean that they’re not valuable to someone else. If the person is a lower level, by slowly passing off the easier parts of my job, I may be allowing them to pick up harder tasks than what they’re currently doing. Even if the person is at or above my level, the tasks may be a chance for that person to learn skills in a new area or it may be in an area they want to focus on growing. It’s also worth evaluating if the task is even worth doing or if it can be automated or if there is a more efficient way to accomplish the same thing. If it really is a grunt work task that’s not useful to anyone, is there a way to minimize the amount of time anyone has to spend on it?
As I mentioned before, the list of what you might do differently in your job will be different for everyone and is likely also always be in flux. These are a few of the approaches to my job that I’ve changed over time. I’ve taken ownership for my team, I’ve starting asking what I can do and I’ve started evaluating the impact of my tasks. As I continue to grow as an engineer, I will keep focusing on these things, but I will also keep asking the question: What would I do differently if I already had that next role or promotion? What’s stopping me from doing that now?