Welcome to episode 246 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_) – two technology professionals with backgrounds in IT Operations and Sales Engineering on a mission to help others accelerate career progression and increase job satisfaction by bringing listeners the advice we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 2 of an interview with Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, detailing Sirisha’s progression from team lead into people management, the responsibilities of a manager, ways Sirisha built a culture of excellence, and a framework for evaluating new career opportunities.

Original Recording Date: 09-16-2023

Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi is an entrepreneur who started her career working for a semiconductor manufacturer in the tech industry which resulted in 17 years of experience. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Sirisha, check out Episode 245.

Topics – Gaining Leadership Skills, Team Lead vs. Manager, What Good Looks Like, Exposure to and Evaluation of New Opportunities, Leadership Metrics and a Culture of Excellence

2:59 – Gaining Leadership Skills

• Looking back, Sirisha feels she has moved jobs about every 3 years. She also knows how to gauge her level of boredom.
• Before moving on to a next job, Sirisha remembers meeting a friend for coffee who asked her, “why do you keep moving laterally? Why would you not try for a management job?”
  • Like many others, Sirisha was having trouble answering this question. She didn’t have people management experience and was not sure if she could lead people. Most of the managers Sirisha had encountered had great ideas, and she felt she did not have any great ideas.
  • After being asked this question and initially dismissing it as a no, Sirisha thought more deeply about it.
  • Sirisha had gained some supervisory experience by this time, feeling like the person she was supervising may not have needed much from her.
  • “Being a manager is a hard job.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
  • While we can acknowledge there are both good / average / bad managers out there, we need to understand the role of a manager is quite difficult. They are getting feedback and communicating information both up to their management and down to their reports. They have to filter the information and keep things on track. There is more heavy lifting involved than you might realize looking from an outside perspective.
  • After thinking about the discussion with her friend for a while, Sirisha told her boss in the next 1-1 that she wanted his kind of job one day. Sirisha saw how spectacular her manager was in the role (feeling there was no doubt he was going to progress and move up the chain), and she felt comfortable sharing her aspirations with him. She had worked in some different organizations and understood the spectrum of roles available to her as a possible next step.
• By the next 1-1 meeting, Sirisha’s manager shared some things she would need to do to begin pursuing a role as a manager.
  • She would need serious leadership experience such as leading disparate teams where you have to influence without authority (i.e. no one works for you).
  • Even managers still have to influence people who report to them and get the people to take action and make progress in different areas.
• The next part of the journey was about gaining certain skills and experience.
  • Sirisha’s manager had to use his political capital to vouch for her and get her certain roles to gain the necessary experience. Some of these roles were part of a different organization within the company (with Sirisha being part of a support organization).
  • Sirisha recounts one specific experience leading a team. Something had changed related to manufacturing compliance, and experts were encouraging the team to handle the situation in a certain way. Sirisha was new to leading the team and was planning to do things the way experts recommended.
    • At one point, Sirisha met with her peers and asked the question, “what if we don’t do it the way they are telling us? What if we do it a certain way and just push back and say these are the reasons?”
    • Sirisha had kept her boss in the loop but had to go seek out his help after her team reached an alternate solution to what experts had recommended. While what the experts were recommending looked good on paper, the alternate solution would actually be better for running manufacturing processes.
    • Sirisha remembers having to pull in her skip-level manager into some of the negotiations and feels it allowed him (her skip-level manager) to see a different side of her. She tells us this became more critical later on in her story.
  • Around this same time there was a role in a peer organization that opened up, and Sirisha told her boss she had applied for it.
    • Her boss thought about it, and in one of their next conversations he recommended Sirisha highlight certain skills in her upcoming interviews since she did not have exact experience.
    • Sirisha leveraged professional connections she had within the organization that had the opening (people who would be peers if she got the job) asking if they might be willing to share some of their last few presentations.
    • After preparing for the interview process (which included a panel interview) and completing it, the hiring manager reached out to Sirisha to provide some extremely valuable feedback.
    • Sirisha tells us hiring managers know who they want to hire for a role whether it’s published or not because they know the skillset needed. For those looking at job sites, Sirisha feels 40% or more of job openings for the company in question will never show up there.
    • It’s critical to remember the importance of networking with others and communicating what our skills are (in the proper way) so that they will think of us when opportunities come up.
    • “She chose the other person, but she chose to give me feedback.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on getting feedback from a hiring manager who chose not to hire her
    • The hiring manager mentioned above had trouble deciding between Sirisha and one other candidate through all of this. But, this hiring process helped Sirisha gain indirect exposure to people at higher levels in the organization (i.e. the hiring manager’s boss, for example). The hiring manager shared what people thought of Sirisha at these levels and their perception of her, which Sirisha feels was extremely valuable to know (and gave her things to improve upon).
    • Once Sirisha’s boss was promoted, everything above intersected. The exposure she had gained with her skip level, the hiring manager who gave her feedback, and others was pivotal to her success in interviewing for the role left open when her boss was promoted.
  • “All these things become very important, where you show up and how you show up in these meetings.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on meetings she was in which got her exposure to other leaders
    • Sirisha’s skip-level manager was now the hiring manager and distinctly remembered the way the team she was leading handled coming to a consensus in the compliance situation we mentioned earlier, suggesting this method be used in other situations.
    • “When there are strong experts and opinions how do you navigate a space and still reach a consensus?” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on the team situation she had previously navigated which her skip level saw
    • Sirisha’s style is collaborate with others on decisions and understand the why behind what is being done.
    • Sirisha stresses the importance of giving people feedback quickly on what they did really well and what we feel should be done differently. This applies to peers and direct reports.
    • “If we don’t hear it we do not know what to do, and you’ll be completely blind.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on the importance of feedback

11:45 – Team Lead vs. Manager

• Nick stresses that feedback from others is a gift.
• Was Sirisha’s role leading a team more of a tech lead (i.e. lead without role power) or a full on people manager role?
  • The team lead role was NOT a people maanger role. Sirisha mentions in the sectors where she worked there was no concept of tech lead. Those who are not managers that lead a team are considered team leaders with a focus on a specific project. This responsibility includes managing the people, the project goals, driving and reporting on progress until the project is complete.
    • “You are essentially holding the bag, and you have to carry it through to the finish line.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
• What was the difference in leading a team as Sirisha did and being a manager?
  • Managers have people responsibilities and have huge KPIs (key performance indicators) that they manage.
  • Sirisha gives the example of a team of 5 people. Each person would have well defined roles and responsibilities, and the manager would ensure each person is meeting their responsibilities, providing necessary support when team members need it.
  • A manager has to filter what is important to share with the team and help drive strategy and execution.
  • Mangers have a different level of responsibility. They are driving projects but not just at the team level. Sirisha shares an example of what she would do toward the end of the year with her team.
    • Sirisha would send everyone on the team an e-mail asking them to send their project ideas directly to her without talking to each other, regardless of which group inside the company the project might affect.
    • She would then aggregate and classify items in the list and take it to a staff meeting to get everyone’s input on the focus items for the team.
    • The manager of a team like this would know what does and does not make sense in terms of projects to pursue / not pursue. Managers are driving projects at levels beyond just the team level.
    • There can be silos within teams where certain people do not interact. Sharing the projects in this way encouraged team members to collaborate.
    • Sirisha emphasizes the importance of not putting people on the spot in this process so they will be more comfortable engaging. If the project would require working with another team, Sirisha offers to help team members connect with the right people.
    • “I think we should never underestimate the people in your team. Think about it. The people in your team did not come only with this job experience. They have sometimes 5 / 10 / 20 years of something else they’ve done before, so why would you not leverage it?” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on the importance of not underestimating your people
    • When someone on the team came to Sirisha with a project idea, she would let them run it, providing ideas and suggestions for the person but expecting to get updates and understand what the person is doing. Allowing people to run with an idea (or empowering them) gives them a sense of freedom, accomplishment, and makes them want to come to work. Empowering a team as much as you can makes it better for the manager.
  • Sirisha says in many ways she wants to walk herself out of a job. If you are some kind of linchpin for a job or the only one who can do something the company will likely keep you where you are.

15:32 – What Good Looks Like

• Nick mentioned that Sirisha learned what good looks like to some extent from her managers and was able to demonstrate that to her skip level and to other leaders in different organizations.
• Sirisha says we should understand it is likely that a skip level manager would call your manager to have a conversation about you before you meet with the skip level manager. The skip level manager may want more details on why you want to meet with them, what you want, and how you’re performing in advance.
  • There can be many reasons we would seek to meet with a skip-level manager.
  • There are also HR systems and support networks in place should one need to use them.
  • Sirisha has had friends who have worked for very trying managers but have still learned things from it, referencing one of her earliest podcasts that discusses this.
    • We sometimes will have managers who will push us, even after sharing that we’ve done something we feel was phenomenal / that we are quite proud of.
    • “But then you realize that maybe they see something in you when you look back. They’re challenging you because they think you can do more.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on managers who challenge us
    • Some managers could be intimidating in the way they show up. Sirisha says she has worked with some of them really well.
    • “I’ve had to stand my ground for what I thought was important. I don’t think I realized at that point that that’s what I was doing….There was a reason I made a decision or I did something the way I did or when they ask ‘will you come back and say this to me again the next time?’ I will be like ‘yes I would because I still think it’s the right thing to do.’” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on standing up for decisions as a manager
    • We should remember everyone has a boss, even a CEO. People have to justify why they are making decisions and why it is in the best interest of the company. If you can tie the justification to performance, revenue, or overall priorities (or perhaps all of these), it supports the reasoning to do something.
    • Sirisha encourages listeners to do their due diligence when making decisions. This will help you build rapport with your management, even if you are not friends with them.
  • We never know who we might interact with. Sirisha tells the story of connecting with someone whose organization she worked in 20 years ago. Despite the person not really knowing her and Sirisha not interfacing with him back then, the work connection gave her the recent opportunity to ask for a conversation to get his perspective on something.
    • “You never know who you’ll intersect where and when.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
• Nick suggests managers have to own the budget for time and people just as they would for spending.
  • Sirisha says meetings have a cost, and if we have highly compensated and talented people sitting in meetings we should have a good agenda for the meeting to drive desired outcomes. Send that agenda to meeting attendees!
  • Sirisha’s staff meetings had specific agendas. Sometimes they would look at metrics. Other times team members might present something to the rest of the group. It was hard to keep the team engaged during COVID, so they might discuss fun topics related to their background, foods they liked, vacations, etc.
  • If Sirisha was in a meeting without her team and could share something from that meeting with the team she would do it to help the team understand the role their work played.
    • Managers often ask their team for reports and other information, and team members don’t always know how that information is used once they provide it to their manager.
    • Sirisha tells us it is important to come back and let the team know what you did with the information they provided to you, the feedback you received on it, and what people might be saying about it. This helps team members better understand how what they are doing maps to priorities and elevates team members at the same time.
    • Sirisha says this sharing of information helps build collaboration and trust. Once of the first few times she shared how information the team gave her had been used, a senior engineer stopped by to tell Sirisha that it was the first time he had ever been told this kind of thing. That engineer felt it was a good thing Sirisha was able to share it with them. This was an eye opening experience for Sirisha.
    • “If my boss is taking my report, I’m curious to know what he did with it.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on how managers use information they get from employees
    • As someone preparing the information, you may wonder why you don’t get to present it. Sirisha would encourage us to ask our managers if we can present it in their meeting.
    • Once Sirisha got to know her team of peers and was comfortable with them (a group she calls the leadership team), instead of presenting in these meetings herself she would often have members of her team present, citing this as the opportunity for them to get visibility in front of the leadership team. This allows team members to talk about work they are doing and for people to get to know them.
    • “Think of ways to, while you’re elevating yourself as a manager, as an individual contributor…don’t forget to elevate the people in your organizations or your peers or someone who is working with you or somebody in a completely different organization.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on elevating others
    • Nick says the additional context managers can bring back to us is so helpful and can often help employees see that their work has a purpose. We may not often see the impact of leaving out this kind of context.
    • Sirisha says no matter our level at a company, there will be closed door meetings to which we just do not have access. We should consider sharing the things that we can which are not confidential. There are likely alternate ways to report on some of these things or discuss them than what we’ve discussed.
    • Regardless of the job we do, we are often seeking to hit a revenue target, a customer target, a product target, etc. We should think about which of these buckets our work falls into and how we contribute to the bottom line.

24:13 – Exposure to and Evaluation of New Opportunities

• As you get different roles, you may be tapped on the shoulder and asked to pursue opportunities. Sirisha shares a story of interaction with her boss right after someone else got promoted. When he asked Sirisha who would be a good person for that role and heard her feedback, the boss asked if she wanted to apply for the role.
• As much as she would encourage all of us to learn to advocate, everyone learns through the process. Many of the things Sirisha speaks about on her podcast are from personal experiences, things she has seen with others, or just conversations.
• Sirisha realized other people will see your capabilities (what you are and are not capable of, what you do well and what you do not) differently than you do.
  • Sirisha spoke to many of her peers because she knew the role her boss had asked her about was quite challenging, wanting to determine if it was right for her. She also spoke to former bosses and co-workers to get ideas for interviews.
• “If someone taps you on the shoulder for a role…in hindsight I would almost always say yes for two reasons. One is they thought of you, and they thought that you could do the job. You may not have thought you could have done the job, but they have thought of it and used their social capital. If they have put your name in the hat, they are usually going to have your back. They are not going to leave you out there and let you just figure it out.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
  • You may fail at a role someone puts you up for, and worst case you get demoted. You learn something no matter what and can build a network.
  • “Only reason you should say no is there’s a concrete reason you do not want the job….Be very sure why you are saying no.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on when to say no to a role that is suggested to you
    • Sirisha encourages us not to say no if we feel we are not ready or fear of not being able to do the job, especially since someone asked you. Saying no may be a personal reason like timing or truly feeling like it is not the right role for you, for example. We should say no for the right reasons, and sometimes it could burn bridges.
    • You will only be asked so many times. Sirisha has said no / backed out at times because she could not articulate what she wanted to her manager clearly.
    • Sirisha says as a manager, she might ask someone once, twice, or even 3 times about a new role. If the answer is always no she would likely stop asking.
  • “Don’t not take a job because you think you’re not capable of it….If you think there is even a drive to do it, do it.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
• Sirisha recounts talking to a friend about what they each wanted to do next. Sometimes in these conversations they would assess the risk of moves to specific teams (some teams doing well, some seem like they may not last).
  • Sirisha mentioned even if she was offered a role on a team whose future seemed risky she would take it.
  • Getting a level up gets you access to different levels of conversations you did not previously have and presents new networking opportunities. For example, Sirisha did not get more exposure to finance teams until she took a certain role at a certain level.
• We should think about what a role will get us and where it will get us to next (i.e. the potential pathways) if we accept it. Think about the pros and cons of accepting it.
  • This is different from accepting a project. We’re specifically talking about a role (a job).
  • “If it is overwhelmingly positive, then think about doing that role. If not, maybe there’s a good reason for declining it. But be sure why you are declining it.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on when to take a role after looking at pros and cons
  • Sirisha mentions she has looked at roles at different levels (beginning manager or other) and not seen a path forward from it. They seemed like dead ends.
  • Sirisha tends to use SWOT Analysis to consider a new role, something she learned about when managing cost budget for a specific group. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
    • After spending a year talking to various groups, Sirisha wrote down the experience she wanted, opportunities she was looking for, and looked at the greater ecosystem.
    • Sirisha shares the story of being fixated on a specific role when another opportunity came her way. After using the SWOT tool to truly look at both jobs, the second one would leverage a lot of her expertise instead of needing to learn everything from scratch (which the first role would).
    • “It’s not about a 3-year plan or a 5-year plan or a title even. I’m usually looking to see what skills do I want to learn or what do I want to know, and then it kind of transforms that way.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
• You get support when someone taps you on the shoulder. Maybe it gets you past self-doubt?
  • Sirisha tells us to expect things will be hard and that we will have highs and lows no matter what level we are.
    • “There are going to be days when you feel this huge pit in your stomach.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on what to expect in any job
  • People issues are hard. Sirisha was lucky to have a HR partner who helped her navigate a lot of this when she first became a manager.
    • “That is the reason people don’t want to be managers more than anything. It’s the people challenges that they dread. And I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be easy by any means.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
    • Sirisha says the HR partner helped with constructing conversations and input to learn how to handle situations.
    • It’s important not to drag things on but to address them quickly.
    • Find the mentors you need to help you through these kinds of things, and those mentors could come from a variety of places (a peer, a former manager, etc.).
    • Managing people is a tough job. There will be different people with different personalities. People will be unhappy. Managers may not be able to do everything they would like to do for an employee or do everything an employee wants.
      • Managers should try to listen and share why something cannot be done (which in all cases cannot be shared).
      • Sirisha would encourage us to find peers to share things with, realizing that in an office professional setting we may only want to share so much.

34:03 – Leadership Metrics and a Culture of Excellence

• Nick references the metric on LinkedIn that 25% of Sirisha’s team were promoted, asking how she learned to showcase the metrics in this way.

  • There are different measurements as you progress up the leadership chain like followership, strategy, and execution. There is also one that relates to bringing up / developing people on your team. It cannot just be about you.
  • Sirisha says it is exciting when someone gets promoted and becomes your peer, but it is a different relationship to navigate for both them and for you.
  • Sirisha has in the past had about 40% of her team turn over because they got promoted or wanted to do something different, for example.
    • “I know you have to be cautious as a manager that if you are losing a lot of people it can be a very bad thing. It’s a reflection upon you. But if they are doing it for the right reasons and you can see where they are going, I think it really helps to be able to speak to it and why there’s this sort of navigation process.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on keeping track of the right kind of turnover
    • When Sirisha looked back and reflected on where her team went she realized about 25% of them were promoted from her team into more technical roles or manager roles.

• How does one create a culture of excellence?

  • This is about being as transparent as you can and building trust.
    • This goes back to the example of Sirisha bringing the team’s ideas for projects to a staffing meeting for deciding priorities for the year. That action gave everyone a way to contribute, regardless of their level within the organization.
    • Managers with a large number of reports may have to think of the appropriate way to do something like this (i.e. some methods will not work for teams of a certain size).
  • Another thing is empowering people on your team to make a lot of the decisions, which is something Sirisha ended up doing.
    • Over time, Sirisha had her team step in to make certain decisions. She needed time to work on certain projects.
    • Once Sirisha empowered team members to make decisions she did not take them back from the team but made herself available to answer questions they had.
    • Sirisha mentions one particular summer not long before she quit her job she went to India for 2 months.
    • “Sitting in a leadership team in kind of a manufacturing environment you don’t step out for 2 months and be completely unplugged from a role.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
    • When someone asked whether Sirisha would respond to messages or be completely unplug, it gave her pause. She said she would be completely unplugged and would only respond to emergency messages via text message (i.e. she would not be checking e-mail).
    • Sirisha says her team did an amazing job while she was away and even asked them if they could manage before she decided to take the trip to India. The team said they could.
  • Sirisha says her time off was not a last minute scramble for which everyone needed to prepare. Sirisha’s first act as a manager of this team had been a roles and responsibility chart that she presented back to her team (really for her own knowledge of what people did). After digesting the initial chart, Sirisha asked her team for 2nd and 3rd level backups for certain responsibilities based on people’s skillsets.
    • This allowed people on the team to cover for one another.
    • “It becomes very hard as a manager to manage all these moving pieces.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on keeping track of team members and staffing levels
    • The team members were to designate a backup for themselves and let her know if she needed to manage an escalation or issue that no one else could cover in their absence.
    • As a culture we are so plugged in to work. It took time for Sirisha to learn to unplug and was not an easy transition.
    • “I tell my team, ‘if you’re out I would prefer you not show up at work and not respond to any messages. The expectation is you are out at work. Your team should be covering for you. You will tell somebody who your counterpart is. If you think your counterpart cannot manage or is already overwhelmed, you tell me what the job is, what needs to be covered, and it’s my responsibility to manage what that escalation is.’” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on the expectation of her team to be off work
    • Sirisha says there may be times when she needs to call team members while they are away, but the intention is not to have to call them.
  • Over time Sirisha would check e-mail intermittently throughout the day (learned to do this). She tells us managers are often sitting in meetings all day and have to work on their own things in the evening.
    • Sirisha communicated to the team that sending them an e-mail after hours does not indicate an urgent need for a response unless she is texting them.
    • As Sirisha got even better at this she would schedule sending messages to balance with people’s out of office. This way it would show up when people need to see it.
  • Sirisha would let her team know if there is something going on and something urgent they need her to do, they should text her. E-mails might not be seen in time to take an urgent action.
    • “I still do read my e-mail. It’s just I am not a slave to my e-mail. Because otherwise e-mail is going to manage my life. I don’t need it to manage my life. I want to manage it.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi
  • As mentioned earlier, Sirisha would give her team members power to make decisions, and in this team’s case it had to do with manufacturing and quality.
    • Team members would own certain decisions and the responsibility for the decision. Sirisha expected team members to detect when something was not being done right and to let her know.
    • Managers who worked for Sirisha would be able to decide the way their team worked, the projects the team would work on, etc.
  • Sirisha once heard the quote “every organization will take everything you can give it.” We have to decide how much we want to give. There are job expectations, and the higher you go the more expectations are there, including lots of pressure and likely more hours. We need to determine how we will draw boundary conditions around the expectations, figuring out what we will give and when.
    • Sirisha remembers managing a specific crisis and working with a young engineer who would provide a nightly update. But she learned for this engineer it meant he would send something at 3 AM. Rather than putting extra pressure on the engineer Sirisha would wake up and see what he sent at 3 AM and then follow her process in the morning. She adapted herself to his style of working.
    • “There was no point me stressing him out when he was already going way beyond and doing some amazing stuff.” – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi, on learning to collaborate with others
    • Sirisha’s way of doing things is talking to people and trying to collaborate with them.
  • Nick feels giving someone ownership of the decisions engages people more to do the work.
    • The maanger still owns the outcome of the decisions made. They do not delegate authority and just walk away. The manager still has oversight responsibilities.
    • Sirisha tells us there will be mistakes and says things did not always go right for her. For example, when someone makes a mistake because they were not trained, it is as much on the manager to ensure team members are trained and necessary processes are in place to prevent future mistakes.
  • Sirisha spent a lot of her time driving productivity and optimizing processes. Ensuring data integrity is one example.
    • As part of the roles and responsibility exercise, every member of the team was asked to create training documents and keep the ones that existed up to date. The intent was that new members o thr team could read the training documents and get an idea of what the role is. Roles were very different on Sirisha’s team, but the documents were to contain a general idea of what to do.

• If you want to follow up with Sirisha, you can find her:

  • On her website sirishakuchimanchi.com – this contains information on her background, her radio show, her podcast, the keynote speaking engagements she does
  • Connect with Sirisha on LinkedIn and send her a message – Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi

• Mentioned in the outro

  • People management is not always your idea, which is a pattern with our guests. This was true for Sirisha too (i.e. someone else brought it up to her). Nick sites Yvette Edwards and Charlie Nichol as 2 examples that come to mind immediately (though there are many others). Those episodes can be found here if you would like to listen to them:
    • Episode 51 – Individual Contributor to Manager with Charlie Nichol
    • Episode 52 – Considering a Management Career and Learning to Develop Teams with Charlie Nichol
    • Episode 201 – Generate Depth On-Demand with Yvette Edwards (1/2)
    • Episode 202 – Having Some Career Zigzags with Yvette Edwards (2/2)
  • Nick wonders if there is any correlation in the type of leader you get when someone has had a goal to pursue leadership for a long time compared to someone who is told they ought to consider it / pursue it by someone else and then decides to do it.
    • Maybe we should ask a future guest!
  • Managers have the power to advocate for the careers of their employees.
    • Sirisha demonstrated we need to ask for what we want. Different managers helped her prepare for the roles she wanted.
  • Remember, based on Sirisha’s experience we can look for opportunities to get team leadership experience even if not a manager (i.e. team lead for a project). And a team lead can still empower team members in ways similar to what a manager does.
  • Employees need to hear the message that it’s ok to not work when they are taking time off. For whatever reason, people need to hear it. Nick has had managers tell him this, and John gives an example of a similar situation.
    • Thinking we “need” to work almost like a superman syndrome or hero complex can lead us down the road to burnout!
    • Sometimes we need our managers to help us tend to our own self-care. It’s one thing for them to tell us what they expect in terms of us not working when we are out of office taking time off but another entirely when they also model it themselves.
    • Part of the culture of excellence was documenting team member responsibilities and designating backups as a way to empower the team and have coverage when people are out of office.
    • Add to the above Sirisha’s scheduling of e-mails to align with employee working hours so no one feels pressure to respond when they are not working. John calls this black belt level cultivation of the culture of excellence.
    • Sharing where information provided to your manager goes and why the ask came in can be extremely impactful.
  • Sirisha’s approach to new career opportunities was about leveling up in some way, gaining professional relationships, and getting access to conversations she was not privy to before making the move.
    • One way to get the thoughts in your brain on paper is to use the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis tool Sirisha mentioned. Nick admits to not using this tool in the past for career moves but will remember it for the next time he’s evaluating opportunities.

Contact us if you need help on the journey.