Career Progression Through Ownership

“How can I get promoted?”

Through coaching, mentoring and managing, I’ve fielded this question frequently. It usually comes when some starts feeling comfortable in their level. They got their head above water and are becoming restless, as if something is missing. My answer lately has been trimmed down to ownership. When you start into a new position, you are given more or less clear expectations of what you should be doing, of the scope of your accountability. If you want to progress in your career, you need to grow that scope.

• If you’re mostly concerned with tasks in your day to day, take an interest into how they are tied together into milestones you and your team are working on.

• If you are familiar with the milestones, think about how they form the project that someone decided to invest your time in.

• You’re already leading a project? What value is this driving for the business and its customers? In what direction should the organization take it? Is this really the right next step for the product?

• If you’re already on top of the value streams of your product, is this the product that offers the most leverage for the resources of the business?

That last two points represent a shift in most people’s career. We stop thinking only in terms of the technical aspects of the work and start integrating the business aspects into our decisions. This is when you would go from a senior engineer to a staff engineer or when you would start thinking about going into management. Further levels are usually linked to bigger, more impactful and more expensive scopes. Depending on the size of the organization you work at, there might be another aggregation level, but the hierarchy metaphor starts breaking down at that level as it becomes hard for anyone to really own that whole level.

Finally, and perhaps more importantly, ownership is distinct from accountability. You don’t need someone from higher up to give you the permission to get interested into the next level of concern. A good manager should push you to start thinking about it more and more to nurture your growth. Ownership is about taking personal responsibility, not being given authority to make decisions. Organizations I’ve worked at tend to expect people to show they can handle the next level of ownership before transforming that into an expectation through a formal promotion process. Work with your manager to make this a transparent process rather than an adversarial one.

Interestingly, I figure that business owners go through the same steps, though their growth is dictated by the size of the business they command. Interestingly, this means that businesses can outpace (or fall behind) the professional growth of their owners.

A lot of you in my network are managers, does that resonate with you? Anything missing?