Dante Alighieri is the author of a masterpiece of Italian literature called The Divine Comedy, a book full of allegories that perfectly describes the Italian society of the 13th century.
The opera describes Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven and the word "comedy" is oddly used in opposition to "tragedy" since there is nothing comic about Dante's adventure.
The Divine Comedy is part of the mandatory high school program in Italy and the thing that I always found hilarious about it, is that the excitement of the average student decreases with Dante getting closer to Heaven.
Every teenager likes Hell, a corrupted place full of sinners where people get constantly and painfully punished by monsters, devils, and demons.
I can understand the excitement, to be honest, Dante's imagination tank never gets empty and, circle after circle, he comes out with a new idea, a new torture, or a new creative way to inflict pain.
The gluttonous, for example, have to wallow in a dirty and icy swamp while a Cerberus ravenously eat their flesh. The thieves live in a pit and are continuously tortured by snakes. There is probably a circle for software developers too, where folks who never make a code review have to print the code they wrote during the last months to get it reviewed by the new cocky CEO.
Heaven, on the flip side, is the perfect description of boredom, especially for a teenage student caught in the middle of the storm of adolescence.
This place is full of folks who never did anything wrong in their life and plan to remain immaculate even in the afterworld. They never fight, never gossip at the coffee machine, make their bed in the morning, eat plenty of veggies, and always get at least eight hours of sleep, every night. The exciting folks in Heaven do nothing but contemplate God, surrounded by a bright and shining light, forever and ever.
Purgatory, in the end, is the level between Hell and Heaven. This is the place where people have to spend a couple of decades to purify themself before being admitted to the top level, yes, kind of a washing machine for your soul. In other words, folks in Purgatory are good enough not to end up in Hell but not that good to jump straight away to Heaven.
Talking with aspiring managers, I realized that a lot of folks are living the same reality in their job. Many people are in a position where they would like to get promoted, they work hard to get there but, for some reason, can't make it.
I love to call this phase the "almost manager" purgatory.
Leaving the almost manager zone is not easy but there are a couple of aspects that an individual contributor can focus on to make this transition smoother and, hopefully, faster.
Not having a deadline
There is one mantra that I keep repeating in my coaching sessions.
The difference between a dream and a goal, is a date
A lot of individual contributors out there would like to become a manager or are thinking about moving into management or could see themself in a leadership role in the future.
The only missing thing here is a clear when.
It's never clear if they wanna be promoted in the next six months or the next three years.
Setting a date in stone allows us to prioritize the skills that have to be acquired to get the result we want to get and forces us to commit to a date.
This is a lesson I learned while studying music. At the beginning of the year, I already knew that I had to play at the end-of-year concert. The date was already set and the invites were sent at least six months in advance. No need to say that this was an extremely powerful (and a bit frightening) move, especially from a psychological perspective.
Knowing the target sharpened my focus. I suddenly found myself working with my teacher on cutting out parts of the program and optimizing the lessons to reach concert day in the best possible shape.
Committing on a date will even give you a fixed time frame to consider for a retrospective.
After my end-of-year concert, I used to invest one music lesson on the outcome of the performance. I and my teacher would go through the things that went well and the ones we should have managed differently. This was a retrospective of the concert and, indirectly, about the whole year before the concert.
The first thing to plan in a career move is a date, without a date it's just daydreaming.
Not growing out of your team
I mentor many amazing individual contributors, I'm talking about people with above-the-average technical skills who are adored by their teammates.
The problem is that they shine inside of their team but are mostly unknown outside of this island.
Expanding your influence outside of your team will let other people know what you are doing and will give you a completely different perspective on what is going on in the company.
A good future leader will have to think and act strategically. Building those bridges and getting that information will give you a lot of the context that would be missed while focusing exclusively on your team.
Growing a small community around you is one of the best things you can do to get the visibility needed for a promotion. Those are a couple of hints activities that put me in the right spot:
- Shadowing: spending a couple of days shadowing someone from another department works great if you wanna get some visibility and learn more about other business areas. Try to shadow someone from the customer care department, for example, if you want to be more product focused and better understand what the final users are struggling with.
- Mentoring: do you know something that would be beneficial for other colleagues? Schedule a brown bag session and share your knowledge.
Is there someone that would like to learn a skill you already master? Great, mentor them! Mentoring and sharing your knowledge with an audience will put you in the spotlight and will allow you to practice important skills that will definitely come in handy as a manager. - Adopting a product owner: I used to have a "lunch and learn" with a product owner from another team. Every Friday we'd meet for lunch and share five topics we wanted to learn from each other. I asked product-related questions and, at the same time, I answered their questions about technical topics. It worked like a charm, we learned from each other and I became the go-to person when our teams had to collaborate. This is a great opportunity to extend your reach and grow your stakeholder management muscles.
Not doing enough glue work
I've been an individual contributor for more than a decade, I know, most of us like to enter our bubble and code the whole day. (Un)fortunately, this is the worst thing you can do if you wanna successfully get a leadership role.
Becoming a manager is not a real promotion but rather a career shift, therefore you'll need to learn and master a completely different skill set to excel. The bad news is that you won't learn those skills coding the whole day, as an individual contributor does.
Being the most technical person in the team is highly rewarded and very much needed if you wanna climb up the career ladder as a software engineer. Many companies are finally changing the calibration process to include soft skills in the individual contributor evaluation, but this is still not a common practice in the industry.
On the flip side, as a manager, you will have to deal with people and nurture a team to make it grow. You will be involved in recruiting, performance reviews, 1:1 meetings and you'll probably have to spend a lot of time collaborating with your product counterpart. Onboarding and mentoring will take a lot of your time as well, especially if you plan to hire less experienced engineers.
The best way to get management experience without being in a leadership position is to focus more on "glue work". Under the umbrella of glue work falls all the less glamorous tasks that are extremely important for the effectiveness of the team but are not purely based on coding. Glue work is, in other words, the oil that makes the team engine run smoothly.
This work is something that your manager is hopefully already doing and investing in getting better at it will pay dividends later on, when you'll try to get promoted. Other than that, your manager will be extremely happy to have someone on their team who is willing to share the load.
Those tasks are a good example of glue work:
- Writing documentation
- Cleaning up the test suites
- Creating monitoring dashboards
- Onboarding new joiners
- Taking care of the team calendars
- Improving or simplifying processes
- Automating time-consuming tasks
What I love about glue work is that it's perfect for pairing and building some good relationships with colleagues. Working with other people on tasks like these will stretch your communication and mentoring skills while getting important work done.
Doing too much glue work
If acting as a glue can skyrocket your visibility, focusing too much on less glamorous tasks can make you miss a promotion and push you back, especially at the beginning of your career.
Tanya Reilly perfectly describes the issue in this article. Glue work tends to be less rewarded than pure technical work, even if its impact is often bigger. This is one of the many fallacies of an industry that rewards pure technical skills more than general problem-solving ability.
The rule of thumb is to let the glue work complement and enrich your main job without becoming your primary activity. This work should be the icing on the cake to stand out in a calibration round and it should ideally take 10-20% of your working time.
Investing too much in glue work can dangerously turn you into the "unofficial" glue worker of the team. This means that you might slowly become the person who takes care of tasks that are important but not technically exciting and, generally speaking, less likely to lead to a promotion.
Don't forget to discuss glue work with your manager. This will guarantee that the person who is evaluating you is aware of what you are doing and approves the time investment that comes with it.
Having buy-in from your manager will even ensure that the work is perceived as a valuable activity that gives you additional points in a calibration round.
It's absolutely worth mentioning that women tend to volunteer more than men for tasks that usually don't lead to a promotion, as described in this article. Managers should assess this bias and pay more attention to it, especially during the evaluation phase. To keep the team engines properly oiled, everybody must take care of some glue work, this is something that every manager should remember.
Fighting the windmills
Fighting against a windmill is, unfortunately, a very common scenario. You want to get promoted, you set a deadline with your manager, enlarge your influence outside the team, act as a glue and pick some work that nobody wants to do to support your colleagues. But still, the promotion doesn't come.
Every time the topic is brought up there is always something more that has to be done. Your manager is never fully convinced, the answer is always "next time" and, sadly, this time never arrives.
Just to add insult to injury, the company might even decide to hire someone externally to fill the role, instead of investing in an internal candidate like you.
I've seen this happening quite often and, most of the time, there are a couple of explanations for this behavior.
Sometimes people are too good at getting important but unpleasant work done.
It happened to me in one of my first jobs when my team agreed to fix at least 20 bugs every sprint. I was able to complete roughly 70% of the sprint goal alone, with a bug count of ~14 issues resolved and shipped to production each and every sprint.
When I asked my manager to get promoted my request got rejected, since I was "very much needed" in my team at that moment and things were not supposed to change in the foreseeable future. I became the "unofficial" glue worker of the team, and trust me, this is not a great place to be.
Sometimes the person who wants to get promoted is dealing with a biased manager who will never change their mind. This happened to a friend of mine, just a couple of years ago. She was working as a developer and shipping functioning code, on top of it she was mentoring others, sharing knowledge, and directly supporting our product owner.
Despite all the effort, she was never enough to get a promotion. Never visible enough, never enough involved, never enough product-oriented, or, according to the last review, never enough technical even if she built alone a good part of the production code maintained by her team.
A couple of months after the last review, she joined a company that gave her the senior role she was looking for, with a big salary raise on top of it.
Office politics and biases might play a big role here as well. Being the best candidate is not enough if the promotion was already promised to an influential person who spent more time than you in the company or plays golf with the manager during the weekend while you are rightfully enjoying your private time. Sometimes positions are opened with a name already attached to them. Sometimes top managers promote people directly, without having a calibration round to fairly evaluate potential candidates. Those things are unfortunately quite common in many workplaces so better to grow a thicker skin and be prepared.
Fighting against a windmill can be a dreadful experience that drains your energy and destroys your mental health, alongside your self-esteem.
If you end up in this situation, do yourself a favor, focus on what you can control, set a reasonable deadline and be ready to start a job search or try at least to change team. The skills you practiced while getting a promotion will not vanish, so they can be leveraged in the upcoming interviews.
Conclusion
Leaving the "almost manager" purgatory is not easy but it's definitely an achievable goal.
Even in this case, a supportive and unbiased manager can make a huge difference in the transition into a leadership role. Therefore, choosing someone able to support our growth is still the best investment we can make.
It's worth remembering that there are different paths to the top of the mountain and lateral moves should be considered when we feel like hitting a wall.