Or: the importance of good managers and 1-1s

When I was a Program Manager with no Senior title, I went through a period where I didn’t get promoted, not being promoted made me more and more impatient and even resentful, and that in turn prevented me from making progress towards being promoted.

I’ll paraphrase how I started one of my weekly 1-1s with my manager (Brian Keffeler!):

“Wahhhhhh! Why aren’t I a Senior Program Manager? Look at what I’m doing! It’s amazing! Look at these (n) people who are Senior Program Managers and they aren’t working on as big stuff or doing as well! Wah wah wah!”

And Brian, bless him, listened to me until I’d run out of rant and said:

“I’m not going to argue whether you’re doing better than (person) or (person). Set that aside for a second. None of that matters. You’re not going to be promoted because people look at you and think ‘he’s better than a couple of people who already have the title.'”

I thought “Fuck, he’s right.”

He kept on.

“If you want to be a leader, if you want to be promoted because you’re deserving, you need to stop comparing yourself to them. You need to be so good people assume you’re already in that role. You need people to be surprised to find out you’re not a Senior. When title reviews come up, you want everyone in the room to say ‘He’s not already a Senior? What the hell?’ Right? You want your promotion to be a recognition that you’re already successful operating at that level.”

It was one of the moments in my career where the skies parted, sun shone down on me, and trumpets sounded. I knew immediately that not only was he absolutely correct, that if I was ever to be promoted I needed to prove that demonstrating potential wasn’t enough — that I needed to be operating on this next level. But also, and just as importantly, that me being hung up in the petty bullshit of whether I was the best in my pay-grade and whether I was better than some people in the next pay-grade was fucking up my relationships and career, and that I needed to let go of it.

I might have spent years in that destructive spiral, burning myself out generating my own frustration, with a different manager, or if they’d delivered the message at a different time, or in a different manner.

So I went out and did great work, and people started to assume I was already a Senior Program Manager, and then I got promoted.

Brian’s awesome, and I owe him a great debt.