Leading From Any Position

I’ve worked with many people through the years both as a design leader in tech and now as a leadership coach. Many people continue to associate leadership with management, believing that you’re only a “real leader” when you have direct reports. This is a common limiting belief that we put on ourselves when we’re individual contributors. And on the other side of the coin, there’s been many years of my life when I’ve been a terrible manager of people. I had zero skills or training on how to lead and that negatively impacted the lives of people reporting to me.

One distinction I make between the two is that management is getting things done through others, namely your direct reports, however, leadership in its simplest form is influence. It's both influencing yourself and the people around you to achieve maximum impact.

With this definition of leadership, you truly can lead from any position and I’m sharing four stories to illustrate this truth.

Story 1: Moving from Individual Contributor to Manager

There is a prevailing belief that after you spend some years as an individual contributor (IC), then the next obvious step up the career ladder is to move into management. I’ve spoken with hundreds of people who have this desire, and it resonates with me, because this is how I felt after working for about five years and not knowing where to go next. Management seems like the next logical career progression.

At the same time, I know many design managers who after having tried managing people for years, switched back to being an individual contributor—they wanted to be more hands-on and in closer touch with the craft of design, while still maintaining their influence on the organization. There’s no judgement about what is the right or the wrong path. You may not know because you’ve only had one experience, that of being an IC. It’s perfectly fine to try management next to see if you’ll like being a manager.

The most common question I get when I speak at conferences and to a broader audience in tech is:

“I’m an individual contributor. How to I move into management?”

I ask the same two questions as a response to this inquiry:

What are your current strengths?
Why do you want to be a manager?

Make sure that you have an answer to these two questions and practice the answer because your managers will ask this of you. There is no right or wrong answer, simply look at answering them honestly and with self-reflection & curiosity.

The advice I give runs along these same lines:

“Don’t wait for someone to give you the manager title. Instead start leading right now. Claim your autonomy and step in to do the work of a manager. Raise your hand and volunteer for the extra tasks, sometimes they will be glamorous and more often they may be trivial grunt-work. Step up and take on the administrative responsibilities of a team lead.

Look around and see who you can help and mentor. Start having 1–1s with them. Teach what you know—share your knowledge and learnings in a lunch-and-learn presentation. See if you can try on management by working with an intern for a summer.”

Try on being a manager by doing the parts of the role that you can. Do things that map to your strengths and do things that stretch you in unfamiliar ways. Treat it like a experiment. But above all, jump in and start playing the role, and soon enough you will have the official title.

Story 2: Scaling up as a Startup Founder / CEO

I work with many startup founders, especially in early seed or pre-seed stages. At the beginning, they have to be a jack- or jill- of-all-trades, taking on many different roles and doing the work themselves. At some point in time when the startup is ready to scale and add more people, the founder realizes that they can’t do all the work. The founder needs to delegate and be the leader who creates more leaders.

Carla Harris is an accomplished financial leader, author, and singer. I first heard the story behind Carla’s Pearls, her lessons of wisdom, from Margaret Stewart Gould one of the first design VPs at Facebook. Carla shares that as you first start out in your career your currency is based on the work you do, whether it’s creating spreadsheets, project plans, design prototypes, or code. This is your performance currency. As you rise in your career, this currency starts to evolve and performance matter less. As a leader who influences others, what becomes important is relationship currency, or the strength of the bonds and trust that you build with other people, whether it’s peers, people above you in the hierarchy, or people on your team.

Startup founders need to learn this lesson when their company transitions to scale. That it’s no longer a small enough company that they can do everything by themselves or with their trusted co-founders. Everything performance currency related, whether it’s operational, sales & marketing, or product development needs to be delegated to other people. Instead, founders need to move towards relationship currency, to ensure that they’ve set up the right processes and culture for their teams to be autonomous and succeed, to build the right network of advisors, and to cultivate external partnerships.

Story 3: Quiet Leadership

I work with many leaders who don’t fit the traditional mold of a confident, extroverted leader who’s comfortable in the spotlight. Many women, people of color, and/or immigrants seek to work with me to learn the secret of leadership. They want to be more confident, louder, and make sure that their voice is heard. That feels like the path towards influencing others. Many people feel that there is only one flavor of leadership or one way that’s most commonly accepted. In some way, we all seek to emulate this traditional archetype of white, male command-and-control leadership (this is an archetype, not reality). So if you’re a quiet leader, it can feel that you’re not right, you don’t belong, and your leadership is different.

The genius of leadership is that it can and should be uniquely yours. It’s terribly difficult to put on the armor of someone else’s leadership. I should know, I’ve been doing it for years.

The path towards defining your own leadership starts with your strengths and values. And the first experiment is to live in to where you feel safe.

Many quiet leaders feel more comfortable in 1–1 meetings. There’s only one other person to relate to. It’s easier to get airtime and make sure your voice is heard. It’s easier to build a trusting relationship. It’s easier to read body language and emotions (even when on a Zoom meeting) when there’s only one other person. As a quiet leader, live into what works for you. How do you show up in a 1–1 meeting? Remember what gives you energy and confidence from this safe setting and bump it up a little to play in other settings. Play with turning up your loud leadership by 10% when you’re in a small group setting.

Another trend I’ve seen with quiet leaders is feeling more comfortable with writing and taking more time to respond rather than being put on-the-spot in-person (or on a video call) to come up with a brilliant verbal solution. Live into where you feel safe and where you can, say, “Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll give it some thoughts and share a response on email.” Instead of presenting live via video in an all-hands, instead write out a blog post or an essay outlining your vision and strategy.

Lean into your leadership strengths and build upon the areas where you feel safe. From that core of strength, you can then experiment with turning it up a little bit, perhaps just by 10%. You can lead from any position. It’s easiest to lead from your core of strength and safety.

Story 4: Leadership Starts With Me

One of my clients had been an overachiever her entire life. She did well in school, in her first jobs, and quickly got promoted to the coveted position of managing teams. She worked at name-brand companies and kept climbing the career ladder. She was always running fast, comparing herself to others, and was driven by the external success metrics of achieving another raise, more people on her team, more projects, and the next promotion. There’s nothing wrong at all with external validation. It’s useful feedback to let us know how we’re doing and how other people see us, which is what we all care about as humans. Yet there can be a danger in always indexing to external measures of success.

When COVID-19 hit last year, the entire world went on pause. Everything was different. We all had to deal with disrupted plans, sheltering-in-place, the emotional toil of sick loved ones, working from home, and taking on the second shift of being our children’s teachers, all while undergoing the stress of our first global pandemic together. Amidst this giant pause, something shifted for my client. Because the entire world went on pause, she didn’t have to play this hyper-achiever game any more. For the first time in her life, she had freedom from the constant climbing up the ladder and comparison of how she was doing against others. Everyone was on pause, so she could take the time to go inward and think about what she really wanted.

Leadership starts with me. Inside-out leadership had her stop to think about how to be the best version of herself. She dove deep into understanding her strengths, what gives her energy, what type of work she really wanted to do, and how she wanted to show up as a leader. Yes, the external achievements still mattered, but it was more about learning what would give her internal validation. The pandemic pause, the lost year of 2020, finally gave her the freedom to look within and realize that leadership starts with her.

Bottom-Line

It doesn’t matter what title you have, anyone can be a leader who influences others and lead from any position. I’ve shared four stories of leadership, whether you’re an IC, a startup founder looking to scale, a quiet leader, or someone who has the courage to start looking at embracing leadership from the inside-out. We can all lead and know that leadership starts with me.

Tutti TaygerlyMarch 17, 2021