The Four Stages of Career Development in Tech: Where are You?

Don't make the mistake of confusing managing, leading and representing.

Career growth in tech is challenging because there’s a lot of confusion around how roles evolve as titles climb higher. You need to acquire new skills. I think there are four important stages:

1. Contributing

2. Managing

3. Leading

4. Representing

Contributing

Contributing is straightforward. Produce work, on-time, at quality in individual and team settings. I’m not suggesting that contributing is easy, I’m suggesting that the task is relatively unambiguous. Sure, there’s the perennial problem of requirements being unclear, but the role of the engineer is not difficult to explain. You can have a fantastic career doing nothing but contributing, although to achieve high titles as a contributor, you have to distinguish yourself as a truly outstanding one.

Managing

Managing, in its simplest definition, is being responsible for more than your own work. What makes for a good manager? Entire books have been written on this subject and I’m sure I’ll have much to say on this in future blogs, but the point I want to make is that management is not the same thing as leadership. To paraphrase Peter Drucker:

Management is doing this right and leadership is doing the right things

Management can be further divided in to project management and people management. In tech, it’s incredibly common for people who exhibit the ability to guide large multi-person projects to be thrust in to people management, like this:

“Hey Jane, you’re doing such a great job leading this scrum team, how about just doing the performance reviews, too!”

Project management skills are often mastered by engineers. The analytical skills carry the day.

As for people management? That’s a different story. There are wildly different outcomes here. Much depends on whether they themselves are fortunate enough to have good managers to act as mentors. More on this in a future blog.

Leading

I like to define leading as creating the conditions where people can do their best work. You are neither producing or managing the work but you are responsible for the environment where that work happens. For example, leadership means designing an org structure that minimizes friction and maximizes opportunities. Leadership requires vision. It is not the same skillset as managing.

Most engineers never get to this level because they’re stuck in what I call the production trap. They cannot let go of managing the day-to-day activities of the team. Or perhaps more accurately—they are not sure what to do with themselves if they are not managing or producing.

Representing

Representing is the tough one. It’s the elusive fourth level of development. There are many extremely qualified, impressive leaders that are nonetheless not good representatives.

Representing means you can can speak about about and position your team in the larger world.

As an example, the role of the President of the United States is largely to represent America. I’m not suggesting there is zero leadership or management in that position, but let’s face it, their job is primarily to represent the interests of a nation.

That’s certainly true of C-suite roles (CEO’s spend much of their time representing their companies to investors, politicians and the media). Again, they also have to lead, but that’s not sufficient. They must lead and represent.

Those who seek VP, SVP and C-suite roles must build their ability to represent. I can usually tell who needs to build those skills by simply reading the resume of someone applying to a high level job. I coached a client who sought a CTO job whose resume was nothing more than a series of teams and projects they’d led. I was an impressive list but there was no mention of their personal values and no professional mission statement.

Companies in search of top-level leaders are trying to match the company’s current or desired values to that of their future leader.

You will therefore need to show what you stand for. That often takes some soul-searching, but the results can be very rewarding.