Adjusting to a new manager

When you get a new manager in your existing role, it is important to spend time in making some adjustments; otherwise your career may get adversely impacted. This is because relationship with your manager impact career the most. This relationship will be built only when you and your manager know enough about each other and act on them. Since it is your career that is at stake, it is important that you make sure that your manager knows you well, in addition to you knowing her well.

Here are a few articles on this topic that focus on tactical activities that may help in this: same job, new boss, surviving new boss, adjust to a new boss, new boss? 5 ways to adjust

In this post, I want to focus on a few strategic aspects of building relationships with a new manager so that you can apply these (or other) tactics more effectively.

Here are the really important things to know about the manager:

1. Goals and motivations – Everyone in a new role comes with a set of career goals and organizational goals. They also have specific likes/dislikes which motivate them to work everyday. Knowing these will help you make sense of their day to day actions.
2. Leadership style (hands-on, hands-off, trusting, non-trusting, etc.) – Leadership Styles, Management Styles

Personal Excellence

Why do some individuals always try to do their best in a situation, while others don’t? At work, why do some people bemoan their work, and still do an outstanding job, while others seem happy with their work, and still produce mediocre results? In my experience, this can be traced to one of the important traits of an individual: desire to seek excellence in whatever they do.

Everyone wants to be best at what they do, but it is not always easy to do so. Those with a healthy dose of this trait will continue to pursue excellence even when given a boring assignment or challenging environment, while others will give up and settle for mediocrity. So why do some people pursue excellence? Vince Lombardi (great football coach) suggests, “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”. For Indian movie fans, Amir Khan character in 3 Idiots says, “seek excellence, success will follow” (more on 3 Idiots).

New Managers: moving from 1 report to 5 reports effectively

You were a management understudy and had a report (or 2) to test your management abilities. Now your manager thinks you are now ready to be a manager and you now have 5 reports. Congratulations!

Once celebrations are over, you start thinking: is this going to be any different than before? Do my strategies for managing my 1 report extend to managing these 4? And you start getting some doubts. Are there some reasons to worry?

In a previous post about industry newbie as manager, I pointed to perils of getting promoted to management position too early in the career. This is a very real problem and newbie managers should guard against this by spending enough time to master these skills and getting good at dealing with ambiguities and achieving results through others. Having 1 or 2 reports to start a management career is a good way to start practicing these.

In another post about management challenges, I discussed major aspects of management that become critical when you have too many reports (my example had 9 reports). All those are very valid for managers having any number of reports, and if you are a new manager, you will do good to review them.

However, when you move from 1 report to 4-5 reports, there is a big pitfall that you will do well to avoid. This is the art of time management.

Career Paths for engineers – Being a Phase 2 IC

When I received my first performance review in as an individual contributor last month, after having been a manager for 7 years before that, it was revealing, to say the least. This prompted me to talk to a few other individual contributors I knew in the company, these discussions were very insightful.

I also reviewed my post last year on Management Track vs. Individual Contributor Track where I had written the following:

“… skills needed to succeed and measures of success for each track are very different and sometimes unclear. To succeed in management track, one needs to be good at dealing with ambiguities, taking decisions based on partial data, and be able to deal to managing regular management challenges; measure of success most of the time is very indirect (mostly through the success of the team members) and hence can be very subjective and debatable. To succeed in IC track, one needs to have deep technical and domain expertise, should be good at solving complex technical problems, and be able to provide technical and thought leadership; measure of success is very direct and objective and mostly based on visible results of the individual…”

and had received some interesting comments:

“..does salary play a role in why people opt for management as against continuing in IC role? If they want a better salary, is moving into management their only option?..”

“..there is no good appreciation for IC’s to stay longer in their position. Its kind of peer pressure and moment of embarrassment when someone in family or friend ask “Are you still a software engineer?”..”

“..Management shows that it as a carrier growth for the individual. Irrespective of the individual interest they force to get into management..”

“..It may be different in multi-nationals but I think in most Indian companies the situation [people being forced into thinking management is the only career growth path] is what you have described..”

My second inning as an IC seems to have given me a different perspective on this topic, a perspective that makes the picture more complete. I realize that my first post was about a specific phase in the career of an IC, and not complete. This post is an attempt to make it more complete and generate more discussions on this topic.

Two Phases of an Individual Contributor Role

Managing career proactively

In my last post Is your manager killing your career aspiration?, I raised the issue about good careers getting jeopardized when people read too much into manager’s feedback and kill their career aspirations. It triggered many comments from my friends on facebook, and it has taken me a while to internalize those comments and formulate my opinion and response. The discussions touched on the topics of ‘how much of the blame goes to manager, how much to the individual, and what role does organization’s culture play in all this?’. I also got some feedback on the lines of ‘this applies to me, I am in the same situation, what should I do, and how should I avoid it when I join another company’?

This post is an attempt to analyze why someone gets into this situation, and how they can be careful and avoid this fate.

Here are some of the things that went wrong for the person in the story:

1. Job requirements are not aligned to what this person can offer or want to offer.
2. Person is not able to put the feedback in perspective, and unable to see that the feedback is about the role and not always about him
3. He doesn’t know what he wants from his job – this lack of direction leads him to believe everything what the manager says
4. He doesn’t know what he needs to change in order to be excellent at the job, so he continues to follow what his manager tells him to do.

If you read this carefully, you will notice that everything points to a reactive approach to career in this story. A reactive approach happens something like this:

Is your manager killing your career aspiration?

I have been talking to a friend who has impeccable credentials as far as resume of an Indian engineer goes: IIT + IIM, about 15 years of work experience working in various big and small software companies in US. Such a resume attracts amazing amount of offers at incredible salary points. However, my conversations with him repeatedly bring up a point: he thinks he is no good, his experience is not useful to any company, he doesn’t do anything that deserves a grand salary, etc. etc. This is an insane view of the world, and when I prod him, I realize what is happening: his current company and his managers have been conspiring against him and using every performance review to tell and show him that he needs to improve in his current work, that he is just an average contributor who is found dime a dozen in this world.

Such an atrocious lie! Such a waste of talent! Such an underutilization of human resource!

Happiness and Career Success

It is obviously true that success will bring happiness, any kind of success will. However, is the reverse true – will happiness bring success? There is lots of research available that suggest that happiness indeed brings success. Here are a few references:

1. Happiness brings success, not the other way round‘ (the paper) – Scientists reviewed 225 studies involving 275,000 people and found that chronically happy people are in general more successful in their personal and professional lives. Happy people are more likely than their less happy peers to have fulfilling marriages and relationships, high incomes, superior work performance, community involvement, robust health and even a long life.
2. ‘Happiness leads to Career Success‘ talks about the book (The Happiness Advantage) from Shawn Achor that suggest that when we are happy our brain works better and we end up working harder which then leads to success.
3. People who are unhappy in life are unlikely to find satisfaction at work
4. Wall Street Journal (‘Is Happiness Overrated’) distinguishes between ‘hedonic well-being’ (immediate pleasure) and ‘eudemonic well-being’ (long term sense of fulfillment) and suggests that latter type of happiness brings the benefits of happiness (health and longevity).
5. ‘Happiness Lengthens life‘ suggests that ‘Happiness does not heal, but happiness protects against falling ill. As a result, happy people live longer. The size of the effect on longevity is comparable to that of smoking or not’.

If this is true, why have I found so many unhappy people at workplace?

Conducting a job search – Selection and Transition Phases

This post is final part of the series of posts I am doing on ‘Job Search – Strategies that work better‘. Last post concluded my comments on strategies to apply in order to get lots of job offers from the companies you want. In this post, I want to focus on Selection and Transition phases of the COAST framework that I presented earlier. Note that this post is written in a more prescriptive manner than others, because this topic is more vague than others in Job Search category and hence my hope is I can offer some specific suggestions and opinions.

There are 2 reasons I want to focus on these:

1. These are not considered part of a typical job search and hence don’t get enough attention from job hunters or from those who help job hunters.
2. Decisions made in these phases determine when you have to start your next job search, and wrong decisions bring you to job market much earlier than you want.

Here is the description of these 2 phases:

Conducting a Job Search – Social and Project Strategies

This post is part of the series of posts I am doing on ‘Job Search – Strategies that work better‘. In my last post, I talked about 5 phases of job search and how competitive strategies can be applied to each of these phases. Briefly, the phases are: Conception, Organization, Application, Selection and Transition.

In this post, I will talk about how other strategies can be applied. As one of the commenters on my previous post mentioned, there is no silver bullet and the best strategy is to mix-and-match strategies that work for you. I will specifically focus on social strategies and project management strategies that can be applied to a job search. These can be used separately or together with the competitive strategies, depending on your needs.

Social strategies model job search as a match-making where the goal is to have a best fit between job hunter and recruiter based on information gathering and sharing. Social and networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook are great places to hunt information as well as people (since all information is not captured on internet).

Project management strategies model job search as a project with clear goals, milestones, resources, and timelines that need to be tracked well. Information and Risk management are important aspects here, and strategies focus on how to do it better.

Here are some of the strategic principles that are applicable to most of the phases of job search:

1. Information Presentation: Information presentation refers to various ways

Conducting a Job Search – Competitive Strategies

In my previous post Job Search – Strategies that work better, I described how people tend to do job search without specific strategy in mind and then suffer, either by spending longer than they should in job search or, worse, not getting the job they want. I also talked about 3 views that can be applied to a strategic job search: Competitive, Social and Project Management.

In this post, I want to focus on how some of these strategies can be applied to a typical job search.I continue to use the strategic framework that is developed for business competition to job search, so most most of the references below go back to businesses. Also, this topic is too large to be covered in a few posts, so I have tried to be brief and not verbose. I invite comments on some of those areas and I can expand those later.

Also, please keep in mind that a strategy is only worth so much, execution is way more important; it is good to keep in mind this quote by Edison: “Strategy is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration”. My usage of word strategy includes a healthy dose of perspiration, because otherwise nothing will work.

In any job change, following phases are involved:

1. Conception: Identify the need for a change and making sure right goals exist for making change. As one of the comments on the previous post suggested,