To anyone out there embedded in a corporate environment, any tips and tricks to getting ahead? I’m a developer embedded within the business part of a tech organization. I’ve only been there a little while though. I’m wondering how I can foster medium-term career growth (and shorter-term, optimize performance reviews).
Of course “Do your job and do it well” tops the list, but I wouldn’t be asking here if I wanted the advice I could read in WSJ.
most emphatically does not top the list. Certainly you have to do an adequate job, but your success in a corporate environment depends on your interpersonal skills more than on anything else. You depend on other people to get noticed and promoted, so you need to be good at playing the game. If you haven’t taken a Dale Carnegie course or similar, do so. Toastmasters are useful, too. In general, learning to project a bit more status and competence than you think you merit likely means that people would go along with it.
Just to give an example, I have seen a few competent but unexceptional engineers become CEOs and CTOs over a few short years in a growing company, while other, better engineers never advanced beyond a team lead, if that.
If you are an above average engineer/programmer etc. but not a natural at playing politics, consider exploring your own projects. If you haven’t read Patrick McKenzie’s blog about it, do so. On the other hand, if striking out on your own is not your dream, and you already have enough drive, social skills and charisma to get noticed, you are not likely to benefit from whatever people on this site can tell you.
Perhaps we could be more specific about the social / political skills. I am probably not good at these skills, but here are a few things I have noticed:
Some of your colleagues have a connection between them unrelated to the work, usually preceding it. (Former classmates. Relatives; not necessarily having the same surname. Dating each other. Dating the other person’s family member. Members of the same religious group. Etc.) This can be a strong emotional bond which may override their judgement of the other person’s competence. So for example, if one of them is your superior, and the other is your incompetent colleague you have to cooperate with, that’s a dangerous situation, and you may not even be aware of it. -- I wish I knew the recommended solution. My approach is to pay attention to company gossip, and to be careful around people who are clearly incompetent and yet not fired. And then I try to take roles where I don’t need their outputs as inputs for my work (which can be difficult, because incompetent people are very likely to be in positions where they don’t deliver the final product, as if either they or the company were aware of the situation on some level).
If someone complains about everything, that is a red flag; this person probably causes the problems, or at least contributes to them. On the other hand, if someone says everything is great and seems like they mean it, that’s possibly also a red flag; it could be a person whose mistakes have to be fixed by someone else (e.g. because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph), and that someone else could become you.
Extra red flag is a person who makes a lot of decisions and yet refuses to provide any of them in a written form. (Here, “written form” includes a company e-mail, or generally anything that you could later show to a third party. For example in the case when the person insists on something really stupid, things get horribly wrong, and then suddenly the person says it was actually your idea.) -- One nice trick is to send them an e-mail containing the decisions they gave you, and say something like “here is the summary of our meeting; please confirm if it’s correct, or please correct me if I’m not”.
Sometimes a person becomes an informational bottleneck between two parts of the company. That could happen naturally, or could be a strategy on their part. In such case, try to find some informal parallel channels to the other part of the graph. Do it especially if you are discouraged by the given person from doing so. For example, if they say the other part is stupid and blames them for all troubles of your part. (Guess what: He is probably telling them the same thing about your part. So now he is the only person the whole company trusts to fight for their best interests against the other stupid part.)
Okay, this was all the dark side. From the light side, being nice to people and having small talk with them is generally useful. Remember facts about them, make notes if necessary (not in front of them). Make sure you connect with everyone at least once in a while, instead of staying within your small circle of comfort.
I’d beware conflating “interpersonal skills” with “playing politics.” For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn’t have those skills.
Second, I think that the “playing politics” part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates.
My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn’t make that much of a difference, because they’re sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.
I’d beware conflating “interpersonal skills” with “playing politics.”
Certainly there is a spectrum there.
The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles
I did not mean it that way in general, but in one particular case both ran the company into the ground, one by picking a wrong (dying) market, the other by picking a poor acquisition target (the code base hiding behind a flashy facade sucked). I am not claiming that if the company promoted someone else they would have done a better job.
Second, I think that the “playing politics” part is true at some organizations but not at others.
If we define “playing politics as “using interpersonal relationships to one’s own advantage and others’ detriment”, then I am yet to see a company with more than a dozen employees where this wasn’t commonplace.
If we define “interpersonal skills” as “the art of presenting oneself in the best possible light”, then some people are naturally more skilled at it than others and techies rarely top the list.
As for trusting the management to accurately figure out who actually deserves credit, I am not as optimistic. Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common. I’m glad that you managed to avoid getting stuck in one.
Yes, definitely agree that politicians can dupe people into hiring them. Just wanted to raise the point that it’s very workplace-dependent. The takeaway is probably “investigate your own corporate environment and figure out whether doing your job well is actually rewarded, because it may not be”.
Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common.
I have a working hypothesis that it is, to a large degree, a function of size. Pretty much all huge companies are Dilbertian, very few tiny one are. It’s more complicated than just that because in large companies people often manage to create small semi-isolated islands or enclaves with culture different from the surroundings, but I think the general rule that the concentration of PHBs is correlated with the company size holds.
I worked mostly for small companies, and Dilbert resonates with me strongly.
It probably depends on power differences and communication taboos, which in turn correlate with the company size. In a large company, having a power structure is almost unaviodable; but you can also have a dictator making stupid decisions in a small company.
Just to give an example, I have seen a few competent but unexceptional engineers become CEOs and CTOs over a few short years in a growing company, while other, better engineers never advanced beyond a team lead, if that.
Being a manager is a radically different job from being an engineer. In fact, I think that (generalization warning!) good engineers make bad managers. Different attitudes, different personalities, different skill sets.
One particular simple and easy to follow tip, to add to the Toastmasters and taking leadership type courses advice, is that you should also you signal to those around you of your interest in these things as well. Some of the other advice here can take time and be hard to achieve, you don’t just turn a switch become charismatic or a great public speaker. So in the meantime while you work on all those awesome skills, don’t forget to just simply let others know about your drive, ambitions, and competency.
This is easier to pull off than the fake-it-till-you-make-it trick. It’s more about show-your-ambition-till-you-make-it. It’s easy to do because you don’t have to fake anything. It reminds me of this seduction advice I read from Mystery’s first book that went something along the lines of, you don’t have to be already rich to seduce somebody, you just have to let them know you have ambition and desire to one day be rich/successful.
I recently read this piece on meritocracy—rung quite true to me from personal experience. I work with a guy of similar ability to me, but I think I would beat him on most technical and simple people skills. However, he still gets ahead from being more ambitious and upfront than I am, and while he’s a bit more qualified on paper it’s used to far better effect. (No bitterness, he’s still a good guy to work with and I know it’s up to me to be better. Also I’m in kind of mid-level finance rather than coding.)
I think that article is a bit bitter. It probably applies to some organizations, but I think most places at least manage to consider competence as a substantial part of the mix in promotion decisions.
Which is not to say signaling ambition isn’t valuable (I absolutely believe it is). Just that the article is bitter.
To anyone out there embedded in a corporate environment, any tips and tricks to getting ahead? I’m a developer embedded within the business part of a tech organization. I’ve only been there a little while though. I’m wondering how I can foster medium-term career growth (and shorter-term, optimize performance reviews).
Of course “Do your job and do it well” tops the list, but I wouldn’t be asking here if I wanted the advice I could read in WSJ.
From personal observations
most emphatically does not top the list. Certainly you have to do an adequate job, but your success in a corporate environment depends on your interpersonal skills more than on anything else. You depend on other people to get noticed and promoted, so you need to be good at playing the game. If you haven’t taken a Dale Carnegie course or similar, do so. Toastmasters are useful, too. In general, learning to project a bit more status and competence than you think you merit likely means that people would go along with it.
Just to give an example, I have seen a few competent but unexceptional engineers become CEOs and CTOs over a few short years in a growing company, while other, better engineers never advanced beyond a team lead, if that.
If you are an above average engineer/programmer etc. but not a natural at playing politics, consider exploring your own projects. If you haven’t read Patrick McKenzie’s blog about it, do so. On the other hand, if striking out on your own is not your dream, and you already have enough drive, social skills and charisma to get noticed, you are not likely to benefit from whatever people on this site can tell you.
Perhaps we could be more specific about the social / political skills. I am probably not good at these skills, but here are a few things I have noticed:
Some of your colleagues have a connection between them unrelated to the work, usually preceding it. (Former classmates. Relatives; not necessarily having the same surname. Dating each other. Dating the other person’s family member. Members of the same religious group. Etc.) This can be a strong emotional bond which may override their judgement of the other person’s competence. So for example, if one of them is your superior, and the other is your incompetent colleague you have to cooperate with, that’s a dangerous situation, and you may not even be aware of it. -- I wish I knew the recommended solution. My approach is to pay attention to company gossip, and to be careful around people who are clearly incompetent and yet not fired. And then I try to take roles where I don’t need their outputs as inputs for my work (which can be difficult, because incompetent people are very likely to be in positions where they don’t deliver the final product, as if either they or the company were aware of the situation on some level).
If someone complains about everything, that is a red flag; this person probably causes the problems, or at least contributes to them. On the other hand, if someone says everything is great and seems like they mean it, that’s possibly also a red flag; it could be a person whose mistakes have to be fixed by someone else (e.g. because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph), and that someone else could become you.
Extra red flag is a person who makes a lot of decisions and yet refuses to provide any of them in a written form. (Here, “written form” includes a company e-mail, or generally anything that you could later show to a third party. For example in the case when the person insists on something really stupid, things get horribly wrong, and then suddenly the person says it was actually your idea.) -- One nice trick is to send them an e-mail containing the decisions they gave you, and say something like “here is the summary of our meeting; please confirm if it’s correct, or please correct me if I’m not”.
Sometimes a person becomes an informational bottleneck between two parts of the company. That could happen naturally, or could be a strategy on their part. In such case, try to find some informal parallel channels to the other part of the graph. Do it especially if you are discouraged by the given person from doing so. For example, if they say the other part is stupid and blames them for all troubles of your part. (Guess what: He is probably telling them the same thing about your part. So now he is the only person the whole company trusts to fight for their best interests against the other stupid part.)
Okay, this was all the dark side. From the light side, being nice to people and having small talk with them is generally useful. Remember facts about them, make notes if necessary (not in front of them). Make sure you connect with everyone at least once in a while, instead of staying within your small circle of comfort.
I’d beware conflating “interpersonal skills” with “playing politics.” For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn’t have those skills.
Second, I think that the “playing politics” part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates.
My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn’t make that much of a difference, because they’re sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.
Certainly there is a spectrum there.
I did not mean it that way in general, but in one particular case both ran the company into the ground, one by picking a wrong (dying) market, the other by picking a poor acquisition target (the code base hiding behind a flashy facade sucked). I am not claiming that if the company promoted someone else they would have done a better job.
If we define “playing politics as “using interpersonal relationships to one’s own advantage and others’ detriment”, then I am yet to see a company with more than a dozen employees where this wasn’t commonplace.
If we define “interpersonal skills” as “the art of presenting oneself in the best possible light”, then some people are naturally more skilled at it than others and techies rarely top the list.
As for trusting the management to accurately figure out who actually deserves credit, I am not as optimistic. Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common. I’m glad that you managed to avoid getting stuck in one.
Yes, definitely agree that politicians can dupe people into hiring them. Just wanted to raise the point that it’s very workplace-dependent. The takeaway is probably “investigate your own corporate environment and figure out whether doing your job well is actually rewarded, because it may not be”.
I have a working hypothesis that it is, to a large degree, a function of size. Pretty much all huge companies are Dilbertian, very few tiny one are. It’s more complicated than just that because in large companies people often manage to create small semi-isolated islands or enclaves with culture different from the surroundings, but I think the general rule that the concentration of PHBs is correlated with the company size holds.
I worked mostly for small companies, and Dilbert resonates with me strongly.
It probably depends on power differences and communication taboos, which in turn correlate with the company size. In a large company, having a power structure is almost unaviodable; but you can also have a dictator making stupid decisions in a small company.
Being a manager is a radically different job from being an engineer. In fact, I think that (generalization warning!) good engineers make bad managers. Different attitudes, different personalities, different skill sets.
One particular simple and easy to follow tip, to add to the Toastmasters and taking leadership type courses advice, is that you should also you signal to those around you of your interest in these things as well. Some of the other advice here can take time and be hard to achieve, you don’t just turn a switch become charismatic or a great public speaker. So in the meantime while you work on all those awesome skills, don’t forget to just simply let others know about your drive, ambitions, and competency.
This is easier to pull off than the fake-it-till-you-make-it trick. It’s more about show-your-ambition-till-you-make-it. It’s easy to do because you don’t have to fake anything. It reminds me of this seduction advice I read from Mystery’s first book that went something along the lines of, you don’t have to be already rich to seduce somebody, you just have to let them know you have ambition and desire to one day be rich/successful.
I recently read this piece on meritocracy—rung quite true to me from personal experience. I work with a guy of similar ability to me, but I think I would beat him on most technical and simple people skills. However, he still gets ahead from being more ambitious and upfront than I am, and while he’s a bit more qualified on paper it’s used to far better effect. (No bitterness, he’s still a good guy to work with and I know it’s up to me to be better. Also I’m in kind of mid-level finance rather than coding.)
I think that article is a bit bitter. It probably applies to some organizations, but I think most places at least manage to consider competence as a substantial part of the mix in promotion decisions.
Which is not to say signaling ambition isn’t valuable (I absolutely believe it is). Just that the article is bitter.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jsp/political_skills_which_increase_income/ is an article by a LessWrong person that lists factors. Political abilities are important. That means signal modesty, making apologies when necessary and flattering people above you in the chain of command.