Transcript

Thiago Ghisi: I’m really excited to show you guys the journey for me to get to an engineering org that’s over 100 people. I’m going to be, of course, talking about the ups and downs, and also about some lessons that I learned along the way. I’m Thiago Ghisi. I’m an engineering director at Nubank. Before Nubank, I worked at Apple and American Express, and then even Thoughtworks. I’m going to be talking about my org growth history and the lessons learned, especially over the last 3 years or so that went in scale.

1. My Personal and Org Growth: As an Eng Leader Across Companies

I will start with my personal and org growth, to show you guys the context and where all these ideas are coming from.

How many of you are ICs? It can be architects and staffs. It can be developers. How many of you are people managers? You manage ICs? How many of you are managing other managers?

Before I go to my org size growth, there is a whole lot that comes before I actually get into people management. This is like all the ups and downs. I think Sophie was talking about the squiggly career and what is called the Tarzan Method. Like, you try to swing about the opportunities that come your way. I think this is my trajectory. I have done everything from sales engineering to project management.

Org Size and Structure

I’m going to jump into the org structure and size. I will go back to 2019. 2019, was actually my first time managing managers, but I was already on the engineering management path for close to 3 years. Then, 2020, the pandemic came and I started to manage a third engineering manager on my org and also contractors and TPMs and other things that came along. I think the one thing that’s important to mention here is that even though I was already with an org close to 30, I still was doing pretty much the same things. I still was acting the same way.

Then 2021 came and I decided that I was exhausted of fintech and I want to try big tech. I actually took a scope reduction, a big one. I went from being a director managing almost 30 people to going down to manager directing. That was actually much tougher than I thought. Even though I said that I was almost acting the same way as a director, when I had to go and build trust, almost like restart my career growth in a different company, that was a lot tougher than I imagined.

The big chunk of the talk is going to be on the last 3 years, mostly. When I joined Nubank, Nubank had just gone to IPO and was scaling up very quickly. I joined when my org was about 30, but approximately at the end of the year, it had 49 engineers in 2022. Then 2023 came and I actually decided to do an internal transfer to another org. I moved from more product to platforms and infra and actually took another scope reduction.

Then 2024 came and then there was a big scale-up, a big consolidation. A lot of areas got merged into my org and a lot of the things that I think I set the foundations to be able to absorb and to have more people. Also, I think this was when I went above engineering director and I also become the general manager, managing budget, headcount, and many other things that came along the way. Also, managing beyond engineering. I had PMs, designers, even BAs and analytics engineers reporting into my org and some reporting to me. I think that’s important context. I don’t think that changed much the leadership, especially when you have mostly like engineering technical org. Now 2025 already we’re getting close to 100 people, but I’m pretty sure by the end of the year, we’re going to be much larger than that. A few highlights here.

First of all, it took nearly 8 years only on the management track to get to this size, and a lot of ups and downs. As you can see, it was not overnight. Then the talk we’re going to be focusing especially on the last high growth that I experienced. That’s the core. We’re going to go year by year. I’m going to tell you the lessons and the things that I did that I think helped me. Also, at the end, I will show some of the framework and the patterns that I found.

Establishing Operational Cadence and Managing Low/High Performance

2022 was the moment that I mentioned my org went from joining about 30 and then getting close to 50. If I could boil down to two things, what are the things that I think I did right in terms of foundationals or skills, or things that helped me? One was establishing the operational cadence. Establishing the operational cadence is basically setting up the operational system of like how you want your org to operate from one-on-ones to stand-ups to plannings to knowledge sharing meetings. It’s setting that right foundation because it is something that’s often overlooked, like everybody knows how to run a stand-up. Everybody knows how to do one-on-ones, but often that’s the thing that breaks the org because people start to diverge, people start to be very ineffective on that.

The second thing that I think was also a foundational block was managing low and high performance. When I say managing low and high performance here, it’s not that I don’t care about the solid meet expectations, but I think you have a lot more leverage as an engineering leader when you manage the peaks and the valleys. When you focus on the people that are really growing and give them opportunities for them to stay, and for the low performers. Because I think that’s where a lot of the problems start to go badly very quickly if you’re not on top of things. Keep in mind those two big themes, because we’re going to go back to them as I go through the talk. Order to chaos is basically the moment you join an org, you have to establish your operating system. You have to give cadence to things. Otherwise, you need to have meetings that run on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a biweekly. You need to find gaps and find rituals that could fill those gaps. I think that’s the first thing. Cadence is the operation system. That’s the first note here.

The second one is, it’s almost never too early to start a performance improvement plan. I don’t mean to let people go without notice, but I mean to put them on a structure plan when things are already not working. One mistake that a lot of, especially first-time managing managers face is that they delegate people management and they stop looking on the high and low performers. Another thing that I did that I think was foundational for me to scale, even though I had like 30 to 50 people, I was always looking on the high and low performers and making calls when I saw that the first level managers didn’t have the experience to manage the people under them. I think that is almost like acting as a safety net for the organization. I think that’s very important.

The thing that I want to highlight is like, managing throughout the organization, managing performance throughout, not only your direct reports, going deep, one, two levels if needed. Then, third, in 2022, the thing that keeps making things fail again and again is that progress is better than perfection. You need to make decisions, you need to cut scope, but you need to ship. The moment you start making progress is the moment that you start failing is the moment that you get questions. I think velocity and shipping is a constant, almost humbling leadership skill that keeps you grounded. I think that’s a very important thing. If you’re not shipping, if you’re not iterating, the whole reason why the org exists will go under.

Building Leadership Teams and Shaping Culture and Long-Term View

Then going on 2023. What are the two big things that, looking back, I found were the foundational elements for me to scale? Number one, and by far, I think the highest thing that I could have ever done was creating the leadership team under me. The leadership team was the highest leverage fee because it not only allowed me to grow from 30 to 50, but from 30 to 100. Without the leadership team, I would not have scaled. There is also an element that comes before that, that’s like, in order to get to what I call a cohesive and opinionated leadership team, you need to invest a lot of time cultivating the psychological safety for people to not fear saying their opinions.

The other thing that’s the big theme of 2023 was shaping the culture, and especially the long-term view. Here there is a lot of meat when it comes to shaping the culture. Shaping the culture is like, how do you create the long-term view? Most of what it is, it is about clustering the problems that the organization has and starting to talk about them in almost patterns instead of individual problems, and then finding solutions that are able to knock as many of those things as possible. When I think about long-term view and thinking about the next 2 to 3 years, it’s mostly about seeing what other companies that have already solved that are doing, and trying to apply to your context and to your reality. I think a lot of the things that I did here, for example, like observability was the thing that was missing, and I went to do a book club on that. I went to talk to people in the industry that were doing very good things with OpenTelemetry, and try to build that in the culture, so people are continuously caring about that.

The next thing about the leadership team actually, is that they need to be cohesive. It’s very hard to have a strong leadership team, if you have people from completely different levels, if you have a principal engineer and a senior engineer on the leadership team. Over time, you need to have people that have around the same level of experience to be able to argue, to be able to understand what others are doing. Otherwise, it’s going to be very hard for that team to gel and to get along together.

The next thing that I said about shaping the long game is exactly what I mentioned, is about trying to consolidate ideas, is about being the vision, giving ideas, planting some seeds. Third was about unlocking the cultural levers. Here, it can come in many ways. For example, you can unlock the culture by, again, setting the rituals or by being the example, by even like what kind of things do you value? What kind of things do you give space in your org? What is the culture that you want the org to have? I think there are many things that come into what I mean by cultural levers, but here it can be even the articles you share on the Slack channel. It can be even how you treat the people you work with. You have book clubs, like what things are you trying to change and what you give space.

Strategic Reorgs and Leveling Up the Organization

Then I want to go to last year, and that was the year that I had the highest growth. I think you guys have to remember that there were all these foundational blocks that I just went through that were instrumental to get here. 2024, the first thing that I did and I’m still doing is what I call leveling up people, teams, and systems. I think that applies to, for example, calibrating the expectations to make sure that our engineers at the same level are reaching the same things, are operating under the same scope with the same complexity. It also means looking at the different squads that I have under the org and seeing which one has a lot more seniority, which one has a lot more profiles of people that question versus people that help to shape. It’s your role and one of your crucial jobs as an engineering leader to balance those things. It’s almost a balance of multiple measures that you can never get right. You’re never going to be able to say, ok, now I have a perfect balanced org. It’s a constant struggle to be able to like, ok, now if I move this person here, and there is one opportunity for this person to grow in their career and there’s also a way that helps to balance the organization more in one foundational skill, that’s going to help you to grow a lot.

The second thing is about what I call strategic reorgs. Strategic reorgs is almost seeing the org chart as a tool. I know this is shady or like, what do you mean by that? It’s like the org chart is not about how close I am from the CEO, nothing like that, but it’s about, do I have the right structure, and the right people in the right place? Because once you are able to reflect the priorities, reflect the talent in the places that you have more complexity or the places that are under-invested and you want to invest more, I would say 80% of your problems will go away. It’s about continuously fine-tuning the org chart, almost the same way that we do continuous deployment. It’s almost moving one piece at a time, but doing this continuously and towards a strategic goal in a way that’s not only aligned for the organization, but also there is incentives and interest from the people to do those moves because they’re going to grow, because they’re going to get what they want in their career or in their personal lives. I think it’s about trying to find the balance.

The last one actually is about operating as a driving bar raiser. I hate the term bar raiser because it’s an Amazon term, but I think it’s a very good one for the kind of behavior that you need once you go to a level of leadership. It’s less about using authority, it’s more about influencing, and influencing by being the role model, by being the sponsor, by being the catalyst of things throughout the org. It’s by picking up one thing, one issue that is impacting the company and being almost the ambassador, being the one that’s instigating or is helping the organization to level that up. That was also something that I did. I’m not going to go over the details. I think it is the very last thing to get the organization to move to the next level.

2. Lessons Learned – Managing People and Scaling Organizations

Then now going to the lessons learned. I talked about those 3 years, the years that I had the highest growth and those foundational blocks. Now I want to go to some lessons that I wish I knew or some of the things that I failed that I want to almost encode it. The first one goes back to one thing that I said about 2002, that is, a bad decision is better than no decision at all. If you think about this, it’s like, we make decisions every day that can break production or that can affect customers or that can create irreversible damage. That’s true. There is the whole like type 1 decision, type 2 decision. I think in 99% of the cases, just making a decision and moving on and iterating on that is much better than keeping on researching, like weeks and weeks, because no one is moving in any direction because we have not agreed on the right way to do it.

The right way to do it is actually to try something to get feedback and to iterate after. In leadership positions, being wrong is much better than being vague. Being wishy-washy is not helpful in a leadership position. It’s better for you to be aiming at something that might be wrong, but at least you’re clear and you’re being intentional. It’s like, doing something is better than doing nothing, a hundred percent. Having a position is better than sitting on the fence. I don’t know if I agree or not. I think like, if you don’t have opinions, if you’re not moving, if you’re not iterating, that’s going to damage your core. That’s like execution, shipping, and getting things moving.

The second lesson, this one is about the performance management. As I said before, it’s like, it’s almost never too early to start a performance improvement plan. Why? Because the patterns of low performance are almost the same. I have a collection of issues almost like a dozen, here are just 10, that almost every single low performer that I have experienced in my 8-year career managing people, boil down to one of those 10 things. Rarely do you find something else that’s not there. The lesson that I learned is like, if you spot that there is an issue over more than a couple of weeks, it’s never too early to start a performance improvement plan and be clear about those expectations. Again, I’m not saying about letting people go in an unstructured way, but putting the structure soon helps you a lot, because the patterns of low performance are usually super narrow.

Then the other thing, the patterns of high performance are broad, and it’s very hard for you to encode into a list of a dozen items. Here, the lesson that I have is, for years, I had this almost passive-aggressiveness feeling towards my leadership, my managers, my skip levels, because they were not doing something well. Because like, how comes this person is at one, two levels, is at C level, and is not seeing this problem? I often would treat them as if they were incompetent.

Reflecting back, it’s like, what gets someone to the top level is not necessarily because they are well-rounded, but because they had very few things that they do extremely well, they had high leverage, and allow them to scale. Instead of hammering on this, you should actually find what is the sweet spot, and you go in that direction, because it’s going to be much better for everyone. Maybe even you should be the driving bar raiser of the skill that your skip level doesn’t have, rather than trying to expect that they’re going to find magical solutions for the problems that you’re seeing, but they’re not seeing.

Number three here. This is foundational for the leadership team that I was saying. If you start to push for delivery, or add pressure, but you don’t have psychological safety, a lot of people are going to burn out. You’re going to end up with a very inconcise org. I think the very first thing to do when you feel that there is a mistrust between one people manager and one IC, or between you and one of your direct reports, is to address that. Because like, everything would become easier after that, or everything is becoming harder after that. Our problems are just people problems, but it is not just. They are the problem, and they are the solution as well. This is another thing to keep in mind.

Number four, treat your peers as your first team, and try to make your leadership team to do the same. Here’s the idea. It’s like, how easy is it in your organization, let’s say if you have other peers, managers, if your CEO comes and says, we would have to staff a new engineering team, a new squad, but we don’t have headcount. You’re going to have to find the best people and move them towards this goal, because it’s more important for the company. How long is it going to take for you and your peers to get aligned? When I say here like, treat your peers as your first level team, and make your leadership team to do the same, it’s about, do you have enough context about what your peers are doing? Do they have enough context about your work that you feel that you can almost inspect and get suggestions from one another?

In this kind of situation where you have to staff a new squad for whatever reason, you would feel very good about doing that, because by doing that, you’re going to be leveraging up, and you’re going to be showing a lot more maturity and moving things. Or, do you have more almost the kingdom mentality, “Here’s my kingdom. I don’t want to touch it. I’m not going to give any of my people to this project, because I manage now. That’s my protection”. This is very hard. This is one of the hardest things. If you get your org to have managers to think about their first level team is not necessarily the team that they have, the ICs they have, but their peers, and they’re acting that way, a lot of the scaling up problems are going to go away.

Then number five is about culture. Nothing speaks louder than who you fire or who you promote. That’s why I said about the cultural levers, it’s like, you could do a meeting. You could do book club. Nothing will change the culture if you’re not backing that by your actions. I think it’s almost like, talk the talk, walk the walk. I think when it comes to culture, it’s about, what do you tolerate? Who do you give space? Who do you promote? Who do you hire? What behaviors? How do you act when something is not ideal, but you know is going on the right direction. If a team that’s under you is going on the right direction, but caused a production incident, how do you act? How do you cut the noise to them so they don’t get burned because they’re doing the right thing. It’s just a temporary bump on the road.

Number six, managerial cost is real. I think this was another mistake that I made that was about trying to create a lot of squads or enabling teams of two to three engineers, and thinking a manager and a PM would be able to manage two or three squads. That never works. In my experience, it’s much better to have bigger teams with an engineering manager that’s fully allocated, full-time thinking about this and optimizing for that than trying to create a lot of small squads, a lot of small things here and there. Because, again, if there is one lesson that I learned is that teams that had less than five engineers, they had big issues and I had to almost revert their decisions.

Then, write it down. I think this is another one that is so important. Often, as an engineering leader, you’re going to say something in a meeting, then you’re going to repeat that same thing in another meeting, and then you’re going to ask your team to do something, and when you see you have the big telephone game playing, and the message gets distorted almost every time. If there is something that you want to guarantee that’s going to have some consistency, and also for your own sake, so you can revisit what we’re trying to do or what was the goal of that thing, write it down. It doesn’t need to be a big doc. It can be a draft that you only share with your leadership team. Having that thing written down has saved me so many times, especially when you’re doing reorgs, or, the goal of the reorg is optimized for this, this, and this. I have done the experience, one, talking about what we’re trying to optimize and seeing where the org chart was going, and another one writing and constantly reminding folks, “Folks, I like this idea of this move on the org chart, but look, we’re trying to optimize for this”.

Then it’s much easier for people to roll back, because they know, what was the decision point? What was the goal? Then next one is, when it comes to reorg, dry run it first, then roll things out in waves. What I mean by that is the same way that you don’t make an internal candidate the next C level. You place them on an interim position. They are temporarily filling that gap. If things start to go well, we might officialize that, and it would be much easier than trying to bring someone external. It’s the same thing with reorgs. Of course, I will explain the two kinds of reorgs next. The thing that gets here is you should not do something out of thin air, without having at least some small sign that that thing is going to work. Dry run it, try it out, create a task force, put the people to work together on a small thing and see how it goes. It’s going to give you a lot more backing, a lot more information for you to make the decision. Roll out in waves. Don’t do it all at once. Start to add responsibilities a few at a time.

Number nine, not everything needs consensus, and that’s a good thing. There is a difference between alignment and consensus. For years, I tried to make sure everything was decided by consensus, everybody was cool with everything. One thing that I learned is that once you have trust, once people trust you, once you have a relationship, you can actually make a few decisions not based on full consensus, and most people are going to be ok with that. There are two types of reorgs. There is the external-bounded reorgs and there is internal-bounded reorgs.

If there is one thing that I learned is that if you are constantly optimizing the internal bounded, if you are proactively finding problems and optimizing and changing your org chart to make sure the friction, the problems are getting solved, the external-bounded reorgs are going to be very rare. If you never change, if you keep your org chart static and just keep growing things, you’re going to have delivery problems. Then you’re going to have a lot of external-bounded reorgs, because if your team is not working, someone is going to try to make it work for you. Another thing that’s important is like, not all reorgs are bad. If you are continuously fine-tuning, it’s not going to be traumatic and it’s going to keep improving the org.

Then the last one that was again a very controversial lesson that I learned is to manage your skip levels or your levels up, C level, almost the same way you manage your down levels. The most junior engineer on your team and the C level who is active in your company, you would think that, you should manage the C level on super executive notes, only sending updates and numbers. What I found is that that’s not really effective because you’re not building a relationship there.

Instead, what you should do is almost the same way you do with the most junior engineers, like that person is not even sure if they want to have a one-on-one with you because they’re scared. What you want there is you want to inspire, you want to create a connection, you want to find what are their hobbies. What I have found is if you do that with the most senior levels, you’re going to be in a lot of bad waters than if you only keep the superficial exec business relationship with them. Again, it goes back to the other thing that I was saying about being passive-aggressive towards those people or being more confrontational. Like, it’s them versus us. Being like, “No, we are on the same page”, and treating them as humans. I think that is revolutionary.

3. The Three Levels of Impact: Evolving Leadership as the Org Scales

Now let me go to the framework. This will connect everything that I said together. There is one idea that helped me a lot in the last 2 years, especially, to frame how I operate and the order that I should do things, is the framework, the three levels of impact. The framework is basically to think about this. It’s like, you have your org, you have your skip level org or business unit or department, and you have your entire company. Think about this. It’s like almost every week you should be trying to hit something into each one of those levels. There is one thing here. Even though you have, as I was saying, your org, your skip level, your entire company, before you actually start acting there, you should understand things outside-in first.

What I mean by that is if you don’t understand the customer, and I think Mark was saying like, everything comes back from the customer down. It’s like, if you don’t understand what the company is trying to achieve, what customers are trying to get, like what investors are trying to get, whatever it is, it’s going to be very hard for you to act at your level. There is one thing that you need to keep in mind, at the entire company level, usually you as a manager, or a manager of manager, middle management, you don’t have any influence or any authority over what the company is going to do. On your skip level org, you don’t have direct influence and authority, but you have indirect, meaning that it is someone that you already have a relationship and you can influence them and they have the authority to make changes or to do things there.

On your own org, you have direct influence and direct authority to what you change, what you don’t change. Keep that in mind. You must understand things outside-in, so at the outer boundaries, the senior leaders, stakeholders, or indirect peers, peers that you have that are in different departments. Two is your boss and your direct peers, all the managers at the same level as you, like your peers in the org. Number one is yourself, your style, your org, your culture, your leadership team is also there. There is another thing, you must always act inside-out. What I mean by that is like, it’s very hard for you to try to implement a change on the entire company without you trying to do first in your org, your skip level, and then in the company.

Another mistake a lot of people have or make is that they try to boil the ocean almost, like, I’m going to go and solve this problem for the whole company, without warming the water before and going in phases. You must always start from your org because then you have data, you have cases, you have stories to share. Then you go to your skip level. Finally, then, you go to the entire company. Keep those things in mind.

How do you do that? Here’s how I connect back the patterns that I was saying to this framework. It’s like, you have your org, your skip level in the entire company, and you have at least the things that allow me to scale to different sizes. Pretty much, this is the heart of that level. Managing low and high performance, was like when you have an org of 30, delivery, cadence, and managing performance is the core of what you need to do. When you get to an org of 50, you can no longer do that. It is about creating the leadership teams, shaping the culture and long-term view. Once you go beyond that, it’s about optimizing the org chart and also leveling up the organization as well. How do you do that? You must understand things outside-in, you must act inside-out, and you must do that at the same time. I think that’s very important. How do you do that? You start with yourself, your org, your leadership team.

The first thing you do is you ask the question, how are you managing performance? Do we have a standard performance calibration process? Do we have low performers that are not performing for a long time in the org? Are the high performers getting enough opportunity to grow? Are they being challenged? You establish the operational cadence. How are our rituals? How are our meetings? How are our shipping cadence almost? Then, once you solve that, you go like, do I have a leadership team? How is the culture? Do we have a long-term view? Then after that, you start asking, is our org chart optimized for what we need to do? Looking at the outside-in, like, is the org chart aligned with the direction the company wants to go? What are the things, what are the skills, or what are the technologies, or what are the patterns that I want to level up the whole organization, my whole organization? Is it quality code? Is it performance management? Is it cycle time? What is the thing that you want your whole org to be almost a role model of?

Once you do that, then you go to your skip level. You pretty much did all those things in your org. You go to a skip level, and you ask the same question, but with different lengths. What is the idea here? It’s like, you cannot go and change things, because you don’t have direct authority, but you have indirect authority. When it comes to establishing operational cadence, what should you do if you want to influence your skip level?

One thing you can do is you can have someone on your team presenting something they did and how they improved. You can lead by influence. Like, how are they managing low and high performance? “I have been doing this expectation calibration ritual among all my staff engineers, and that has been great for us to make sure we’re all calibrated for the expectations of the year for everyone”. How do you sell that to your skip level? It’s much easier to sell to a skip level than to sell to the whole company. Then you go again, like, how is the leadership team of my manager? Do we have a clear leadership team? Do we treat each other as peers? Do we know what’s happening here? Do we have time? Do we have meetings where we get to talk about our challenges and get input from one another? Or, we’re basically just peers on the org chart, but I don’t care. I only care about my team, though. I think this is about helping to level up the organization of your boss. Like, how is the org chart? Is there any skill, is there any area that the organization could consistently improve as a whole?

Then the final level is the company. You go again. If I want the company to improve the operational cadence, the operational system, the whole engineering org to use something that I found super helpful and super important, and that’s aligned with where the org wants to go, what do you do? What can you do? Can you present to the whole engineering? Can you write blog posts in the engineering blog posts? What about managing low and high performance? Can you talk to HR to see what they can do for the next performance cycle to incorporate some ideas you have been trying. It’s about exactly the same questions, but trying to influence one level up. Long-term view, that’s very hard.

Then, you’re no longer thinking about what your group and your squad and your manager should be doing. What is the direction the company wants to go? I think Mark said in his talk, you need to look at what channels are the execs looking at? What kinds of issues are getting high priority at the moment? Then you get goodwill to be able to get there. Then leveling up, looking at the org chart. That’s very high level. For you to be able to get to think about those three things without any authority or pretty much no influence there, is very hard. Then you would think, once I got there, everything is solved. All the problems are addressed. The reality is, it’s never solved. Even though I put this in a sequence, you have to go back and forth. You are trying to improve your org chart at the same time that you’re trying to help your manager, your peers to manage high performance, to manage low performance. In reality, you’re never done.

Final Note on Leadership

There is one more thing that I think is important, is like, don’t forget about yourself and your career as a leader. Because it’s so easy to be almost immersed into the chaos and constantly pinged and having so many things under your responsibility that you forget about yourself and your career. I think it’s very important to remember this, is like, at the senior level, impact is not enough. Peer influence is not enough. Organizational influence is not enough. What is enough, then? What are the things that can help you to crack promotions at the very high level? Those are the five things that I’m going to talk about. Number one is about goodwill.

At the end of the day, what is going to get you promoted or what is going to increase your chances of getting promoted is not necessarily only the impact you had or only the influence you have. It is the amount of goodwill you have with the people that are going to be in your calibration room. Here, goodwill and real relationships, they’re almost synonymous in some way. Because in one way, having goodwill is having credit, almost, and building relationships is having that personal connection. It is the constant reminder that if you don’t have relationships, if you don’t treat people with respect, they are going to feel that even if you have impact and influence. That’s going to come back to bite you, if you want it or not. The other thing to remember here is that every time you move, you change jobs, your goodwill resets. You have to reconquer that.

Number two, you need to understand what’s called the 10-30-50 rule. It’s like, at the senior levels, if you are below the top 50 percentile in one core skill, that’s probably going to hold you. If you’re a junior and you have a communication gap, that’s probably not what’s going to hold you from promotion. At the senior level, you have to remember the top 50, 30, and 10. It’s like, you should be the top 10% in one core skill for your whole organization. Ideally, the top 30% for something else. You should have nothing under the top 50 percentile, otherwise that’s going to be the reason why you’re held forever on the same level.

Then, number three is set expectations in writing, tied to a specific rating. That’s another mistake that I made is like, you have a lot of expectations, a lot of things that you want to do in the year, but you never align with your manager’s skip level. Those are expectations that I’m expecting to get to get this frequently exceeds or the transformational rate. Not only write it down, but write it down with a very specific goal. Is that enough to get the transformational rating, the redefined expectation? If you don’t do that, you’re going to miss.

The other thing is, stay calibrated. It’s like, not only do that, but continuously check with your mentors and skip level and your manager, especially, how you’re doing towards the goals that you set, continuously. Because as a senior engineering manager, or senior engineering leader, it’s very easy for things to completely change, the priorities to change, and you’re operating under something that’s not up to date.

Finally, be the driving bar raiser. We always start our careers as implementers. We are given a task and we do something. Then we move into being solvers. Solver is like, you’re given a problem and you find a solution for that. Then you’re moving to finder. You’re not only able to implement, able to solve problems. You find the next set of problems that the organization needs to fix. The right thing that moves the needle is the driver. It’s someone that’s capable of operating on those three levels, but someone that’s driving the initiative forward. It’s someone that is constantly moving in the direction that the company needs. That’s why I mentioned that execution, shipping is the key. Because if you’re just on finding mode, you’re not going to have much impact. Those are the five tips that I want to give on how to crack promotions at the higher levels. Some of those are very hard lessons for my own career.

Conclusion

Great leadership is about distilling complexity, establishing cadence, and driving accountable execution. It’s about sharing the vision, being the vision, driving the vision. Ultimately, it’s about building organizational resilience. If there is a thing about continuous succession planning, is that it starts with you, but you’re more-so preparing your org to survive without you. At the very high levels, you’re not only filling gaps. You’re saying, what if I’m not here? I just want to give you guys this article that I read last year that was very mind-blowing for me, “The Seven Transformations of Leadership”.

The two main points that I want to leave here, is that the ability to reinvent oneself is what defines success at the leadership level. You should be constantly reminding yourself, what got you here won’t necessarily be what will get you there. If you see on my own trajectory and the things that I did when I had the org of 30, then when I had the org of 50, then now with an org of 100, they’re completely different, the way that I operate, the way that I act. If I was still acting the same way that I acted with the org of 30, I would be burned out, and everybody would be pissed at me. It’s about finding, what is the highest leverage, what is your next level of reinvention?

 

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