So you want to be a director in a tier one technology company?

Some thoughts to remember as you step onto the corporate ladder

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

Probably, you are currently a high performing manager considering your options, or you have recently started a director role. In either situation, the transition from engineering management to technology directorship isn’t a natural progression —at some point, consciously or not, you’ve made a career decision to step onto the corporate ladder.

The previous point in your career when you transitioned from individual contributor to your first management role was probably a horizontal shift. It is similar but different. Generally, there is a lot of advice and support available for that horizontal transition, but surprising little for the first big vertical one. This blog will share some insights on that.

What is the technology director expectation at a tier one company?

Obviously, this will have nuances depending on the particular company. That said, there are some common factors.

• Consistent delivery via people & technology in a fast-paced and ever-changing environment
• Decision maker with accountability for results
• Diverse people management skills that transcend any situation that gets thrown at you (remote workers, non-engineering reports, establishing culture across country borders, performance management of peers etc.)
• Champion of your area within the company with an ability to support your leader with executive demands through your network, domain knowledge or commitment to excellence

These are the major expectations but there is usually a much more detailed role profile that applies to you. My current role profile includes 44 expectations to meet on a consistent basis.

Why is it a challenge to step up into this role?

That’s a lot of expectation on you. It can feel like somebody climbed the ladder ahead of you and then kicked the damn thing out from behind themselves!

Photo by Katya Austin on Unsplash

As an engineering manager, you demonstrate(d) some of these expectations. However, some of them are new. Take the example of your key engineer resigning at a pinch point in a product enhancement. As an engineering manager, you would identify the risk and raise it to your director. Your director would then come back to you with a hire or no-hire decision. That’s magic until you are the director. Now, you need to consider all the factors that go into that decision and make the decision. What is the current appetite for risk? Which location do we re-hire in? Do we need to use that head count to trade for another situation somewhere else in our organisation? What is the current company talent plan? It quickly becomes a very new set of skills you need. Moreover, this was a fairly non-controversial example. What happens if the resignation was on a product that was lagging in effectiveness and you aren’t really sure why?

Decision making in this situation is an example of a skill you need to develop very quickly to be successful in the step up. Granted, you are probably very good at learning new skills — it’s why you are thinking of the step up in the first place. But here is the catch: You previously learned with guide-rails and mistakes were managed by your director. Learning new skills while meeting the new role profile expectations can create a pressure cooker situation if you don’t know what to look out for.

Avoiding the pressure cooker

Here are some insights that you might consider to avoid that pressure cooker situation.

1. Ruthlessly reduce the number of new variables you need to deal with. Some of the new variables you may be dealing with are, a new team, a new domain, a new supervisor, or a new location. Remember that each of those are on top of your own new role. You are accountable to be successful in your own role and I caution you to get that right before taking on other new variables to master. Remember, those other directors you compare yourself to have probably been doing this for years already — you need to walk before you can run. Talking to several newly appointed directors, I have noticed a strong correlation between success in the role and the length of time with the team. Having deep domain experience, not to mention established allies around you, is a huge advantage when you step up.
2. Your portfolio has increased in scope & diversity and your supervisor’s portfolio is enormous, maintaining leadership alignment through iterations of effort and/or pivots becomes a large focus for you. The challenge here is that small deviations to your leadership narrative (i.e.: plan) add up across that larger scope. You simply don’t have time to explain each little thing and instead need to rely on summaries and narratives. You want to keep that process as streamline and close-knit with your leader as possible. Too much information on changes becomes noise and appears as a lack of direction while not enough information creates a trust concern. This is sometimes called managing up.
3. Welcome to a whole new world of business processes and jargon. In the first week of my new role, we were doing a large scale restructure and in almost every leadership call I was hearing people talk about our “tick tock”. That was not as fun as it sounded. It turns out that this was the (internal?) jargon we use to describe large change management processes where we need to step different parts of the organisation through different concerns at different times and getting out of sync with that opened big business risk. It’s likely that your company will recognise this need and there will be some training / mentorship available. In my personal case, I took the initiative myself a few years earlier and completed an MBA (MBA’s get a bad wrap sometimes, but it did help me here). Either way, be prepared to do some serious learning in business functions outside technology. Some examples are contract law, accounting, strategy and business enablement.
4. You are now a global leader. This can be one of the most exciting perks of the new role because you get the opportunity to meet new people, learn about other countries and to generally broaden your experience. That said, it can also be a big challenge for you in unexpected ways. For example, how procurement works in one region can be very different to another region and you will need to adapt quickly to maintain performance in a new environment. An area of particular nuance to be cautious of is the various HR rules. It is probable that your supervisor will be based in the US, or you yourself will be based in the US, and HR processes are known to move quicker there. Remember, to check the rules in other regions and then learn how to build these into your strategies. One I recently learned was where in the world to hire Full Time Employees and where to hire Contractors can make a big difference to your company risk in the first 12–24 months of employment.
5. The global nature of the role will also impact your work-life balance and remember that means that it will impact the work-life balance of everybody in your family. Stepping up the ladder is a decision you should make with your family’s support.
6. Managing managers is not the same as managing engineers. Firstly, some of your managers may have been your peers or even supervisors previously. Secondly, you can feel very blind to what the team is doing because you need to rely on second-hand information now instead of your previous first-hand information (when you were a part of the team). These and other factors create a complex trust and accountability problem. You need to build trust in your manager, and trust from your manager, while still maintaining accountability for outcomes. I think the best, and most wonderfully American, advice I’ve received on this was “nose in, fingers out… unless you smell a problem, then put whatever damn body part wherever it’s damn well needed!”.

Conclusion

Technology leadership in tier one companies is an exciting place to be with potentially large rewards. However, getting there can a challenging, long and sometimes stressful process. Be prepared to run a marathon with intermittent sprints needed.

Finally, if you would like a formal structure to this process, I recommend a book called First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. This book presents a conceptual overview of how to accelerate successful transitions but leaves the application of that up to you and your supervisor.