One of the reasons people have flocked to tech is to quickly build their careers. Tech companies tend to grow faster than they can hire, which means many newly opened leadership positions are filled from within. This need to move quickly also necessitates discarding one of corporate America’s favorite unwritten rules, that promotions come on timelines. If a person is ready to lead, they’re given the opportunity to do so regardless of their tenure.
But how do you show you’re ready to lead?
One way is to take advantage of mentorship programs. Janie Liu, development manager at InterSystems, was both a mentee and mentor and told Built In Boston this experience was key to moving into leadership.
“My mentors helped cultivate my whole thought process and didn’t just give me the answers,” Liu said. “This sparked a real appreciation for mentorship that helped me develop skills for being a manager.”
There are also more informal ways to demonstrate your capabilities as a leader. Tommy Hurley, senior category manager at Klaviyo, recommends raising your hand literally and figuratively when opportunities to lead — no matter how small — arise.
“You control your destiny and can lead projects, take initiative in team meetings and demonstrate the skill set of leading people even if it’s not through being a manager,” Hurley said.
Becoming a manager isn’t something that just happens with time. You’ve got to make your ambition known and show that you can lead. Here’s how you can do just that according to Liu, Hurley and three other Boston-based managers.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is the New England-based branch of the United States central bank and works to promote sound economic growth in the region through economic research, monetary policymaking, providing financial services and more.
Describe your growth journey from individual contributor to manager.
My career journey started in a small company where I learned the foundations that allowed my climb up the professional ladder to where I am today. During this time, I graduated with a master’s degree in managing information systems at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, where I later graduated with an MBA. Both my early work and schooling helped me understand that the purpose of being a leader is not the title but to be an inspiration. When I transitioned from an individual contributor to a leader, I started to observe and learn more from other leaders, peers and myself.
I attended leadership cohort sessions that aided me in my transition from an individual contributor to a leader. A year ago, I moved to a senior manager position at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where I am empowered and given more opportunities to learn and grow by the leadership team. Although I incorporate ideas from articles and books to be a better leader, my main source of learning is, undoubtedly, working with my team.
The purpose of being a leader is not the title but to be an inspiration.”
What is the biggest challenge of transitioning into management, and how are you overcoming that challenge?
Unlearning the tasks that I previously performed as an individual contributor proved to be my biggest challenge. Unlearning is not forgetting everything that you have learned before but selectively forgetting the past by changing your mindset to think in a different paradigm, a growth mindset. I had to learn that taking the reins meant I could not solve and do everything by myself. Rather, I took a step back and thought of how I could empower and delegate work to my team in a way that adds value to their roles. Over time, I learned to be present but not interfere unless my guidance was needed. In my experience, this ability to delegate and pave a path for others to learn and grow comes only with practice.
What advice do you have for individual contributors who have recently been promoted to a management role or hope to be in the future?
When individual contributors move to leadership roles, mistakes and failures may happen. Don’t beat yourself up and don’t blame yourself. You are not alone in this. Struggling is part of learning and growing. We learn a lot from our own mistakes and should strive to be better until we get it right. Being your authentic self is key to gaining the trust of the people around you and enables you to find your own style of leadership.
Companies in healthcare, the financial sector, logistics and more use InterSystems’ cloud data and analytics platform to build applications and manage databases.
Describe your growth journey from individual contributor to manager.
It felt really natural because I’ve always been very people oriented. My interest in people guided my management skills and technological development. My mentor, Yoonji Choe, was tuned into this and always looked for opportunities for me to grow and be challenged.
There are so many people here who are very smart and friendly and somehow make it seem like they have all the time in the world to answer your questions and help you grow. They are genuinely interested in your growth. My mentors helped cultivate my whole thought process and didn’t just give me the answers. This sparked a real appreciation for mentorship that helped me develop skills for being a manager.
Within a year of being at InterSystems, I volunteered to be a mentor for the same onboarding program that I was in and became the primary mentor the following year. I really liked my experience with the mentorship program, and when a development manager position opened up I went for it and got the role.
When someone is struggling with a problem, the solution is rarely to get your hands dirty.”
What is the biggest challenge of transitioning into management, and how are you overcoming that challenge?
One lesson that Yoonji taught me, and that I had to learn again, is that when someone is struggling with a problem, the solution is rarely to get your hands dirty. It’s easy to want to jump in, but it’s better to help the other person get to the point where they’re ready to take it on. You talk with them and the goal is to leave them feeling like they can handle solving it. The need for those conversations becomes less frequent as people gain experience. The onboarding process is also a big part of how I’m overcoming this challenge.
We have set up our teams with paths and onboarding processes that involve experienced developers and have tried to do things in a way that should scale well and work long term. At a high level, I’m constantly striving to find the right balance of involvement. If I get too hands-on, I get in people’s way or they miss out on opportunities to grow. If I do too little, things can go off the rails and problems get harder. Through experience, I’m getting better at finding this balance. Empowering others and getting them involved always helps.
What advice do you have for individual contributors who have recently been promoted to a management role or hope to be in the future?
If you think you’d like to be a manager someday, go for it. You can trust that the people interviewing you have a good idea of what they’re looking for, and if it doesn’t work out you can just become a developer again. If you have an interest in people, serving that interest won’t lead you astray. It also helps to have an interest in problem-solving and listening skills. Those are the three skills I use almost every day.
Also, keep in mind that there are two parts to management: people management and technical management. I have 13 direct reports and they average just under two years of experience. I have zero capacity for anything other than the people management portion of the job. On the other hand, we have three dev managers in Sydney and most of the people they manage are very senior. In their role, they can write more code, do more hands-on technical stuff and drive a lot of high-level technology changes. It’s the same job title, but it can look very different depending on who you’re managing and what the context is.
E-commerce companies use Klaviyo’s marketing software to conduct targeted and automated customer outreach via email and SMS.
Describe your growth journey from individual contributor to manager.
It’s always been a goal of mine to be a manager. I’m very much a people person and like to help people identify their career goals and find opportunities to leverage their skill set to grow toward those goals. Prior to stepping into a managerial role, I had opportunities to practice managing interns and co-ops and informally mentoring others on my team.
I also did a lot of observation of my own managers and have been lucky to have a lot of great leaders with very different styles. This was really beneficial because I could take the good from each of them to develop my own style. I’ve found that you really can’t have a cookie-cutter approach to managing people; you need to be flexible.
Being in a role where I have more influence but am not always able to execute can be challenging.”
What is the biggest challenge of transitioning into management, and how are you overcoming that challenge?
Being in a role where I have more influence but am not always able to execute can be challenging. For instance, when I have feedback sessions with my direct report and they have a question I can’t immediately answer or name a roadblock I can’t remove. When you’re an IC you don’t bear the same responsibility. You can voice your opinions, but it’s on your manager to carry those through. Now that I’m in that role, it can be frustrating when I can’t turn around and provide an answer or change a process the way I’d like to.
The positive side of this is that my team and I have gotten really good at coming up with creative, alternate solutions. Instead of just accepting the fact that we can’t change something, we come together to think of unique ways to accomplish what we’re ultimately trying to achieve.
What advice do you have for individual contributors who have recently been promoted to a management role or hope to be in the future?
Don’t wait for the title. You control your destiny and can lead projects, take initiative in team meetings and demonstrate the skill set of leading people even if it’s not through being a manager. Take advantage of opportunities like managing an intern or co-op. Make sure you are communicating upward because if you’re not talking to your manager or skip level they may not know you have leadership aspirations. All these things will set you up for success so you’re ready when the moment arises.
For new managers, I would encourage you to ask for feedback from your direct report as well as your manager. Ask them how you’ve been doing and where you can improve. The more you do this, the more comfortable your direct reports will get with sharing.
Gradient AI uses artificial intelligence and a data set with information on millions of insurance policies and claims to help insurance underwriters get a clearer picture of risk and agents prioritize claims work.
Describe your growth journey from individual contributor to manager.
One of the benefits of working at a relatively young company is that you may need to wear many hats. I was initially brought in to augment the growing data engineering needs of the company, working on a product in a line of business I knew little about. However, I also knew that one of the proverbial hats I wanted to wear was that of management. My team was extremely helpful in getting me up to speed on the domain knowledge of how our product worked and how the industry operated.
As time progressed I found myself in a position where it was mutually beneficial to step into a role that involved being scrum master and manager for several teams. The best resource I’ve had are the other managers who have been terrific role models. Experienced managers often have great answers to questions, sometimes even to questions I hadn’t thought of, and peers often go through similar issues or have already solved an identical problem you are struggling with. I also draw on the skills and artifacts I acquired in my degrees in education and business.
Unstructured work can be brought into focus with a concise set of diagrams and broken down into smaller, easy-to-understand chunks.”
What is the biggest challenge of transitioning into management, and how are you overcoming that challenge?
As you leave independent contribution behind, you become responsible for a broader range of tasks — many of which are unrefined or unstructured — and lose some of the direct influence you have over the success of specific tasks. Learning to let go and instead rely on effective delegation is critical. However, it can be challenging because you aren’t always in a position to understand every aspect of the project completely. I’m working on overcoming this by building processes that make communicating easier and automatically highlight when something is an issue.
Having a formalized set of procedures for how and what to do when certain conditions are met reduces friction, resulting in more lead time to solve problems and more time to plan when the inevitable issue arises. You also face the prospect of problems that do not have a well-defined outcome, nor are they prescriptive of the best long-term solution. I talk with various stakeholders and try to understand the “why” of the work. Then, I map the work, look at where the most effort is being spent and try to consolidate effort with the highest return on time spent.
What advice do you have for individual contributors who have recently been promoted to a management role or hope to be in the future?
Know what you are getting into. Management isn’t the only way to advance your career, and being a good independent contributor doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll enjoy or succeed at management. Just as being a good manager doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be able to slot into the role of an IC and succeed. Management often involves building coalitions where people may have competing interests, unstructured work and constant prioritization of what to do based on different timelines and the returns of time invested.
If you want to succeed in management, effective communication is at the core of what you do. Unstructured work can be brought into focus with a concise set of diagrams and broken down into smaller, easy-to-understand chunks. Articulating short- and long-run costs and benefits can make the choice of what to pursue obvious. And coalitions can be formed when you can demonstrate the benefit of collaboration to all parties.
Galatea Associates is a consulting firm that specializes in building software for Wall Street investment banks.
Describe your growth journey from individual contributor to manager.
My transition from an individual contributor to managing a team has been a long-term process. As a new hire, I initially had small tasks to work on as I was adjusting to the project landscape. Through frequent one-on-one meetings and consistent coaching, my team leads helped me expand my impact and become a solid individual contributor. Similarly, when given the opportunity to manage the work of others, I started by first managing the work of our team’s summer intern before managing my first official direct report, in both instances with my team leads available for support.
This opportunity to ease in and “soft manage” with my team lead nearby to help provide advice, encouragement, feedback and support allowed me to test my management skills in a lower-stakes environment. This approach of building skills through practical learning over time and modeling the best leadership standards from strong managers has been invaluable in shaping me into the manager I am today, and I am continuing this process with the direct reports on my team.
Those aspiring to management should show their ability to teach and mentor others in a non-management environment and expand their sphere of influence.”
What is the biggest challenge of transitioning into management, and how are you overcoming that challenge?
The biggest challenge I have faced has been learning to delegate responsibilities to my team. Rather than completing tasks independently, even if I could complete the task in a shorter time frame, I can simultaneously free up my own time and contribute to the growth of my direct reports. As an individual contributor, my added value to the team was solely through my contributions. Now, I must change my mindset to be aware of the growth objectives of my direct reports and seek to give them opportunities that enable their growth and are challenging. After all, the ultimate goal for everyone is for the team to become completely self-sufficient so I can venture off to my next challenge knowing that the project is in good hands.
What advice do you have for individual contributors who have recently been promoted to a management role or hope to be in the future?
As a manager, your most crucial resource is your team, and your success is determined by the success of your team as a whole and not just your personal accomplishments. A strong learning environment full of trust and open communication is a pillar of a successful and cohesive team. So long as your direct reports have faith in you and you in turn trust in their abilities, there won’t be any problem that your team can’t navigate. Those aspiring to management should show their ability to teach and mentor others in a non-management environment and expand their sphere of influence.
