The Myth about Growth
Growth is a Personal Journey
If you are new to Leadership Letters, this is a periodic publication where I share insights into leadership qualities and challenges that are commonly encountered but not frequently discussed. Drawing from my experiences in the industry, working with leaders at prominent companies such as Apple, Google (#faang), and beyond, I aim to explore effective engineering leadership styles. My goal is to infuse a sense of enjoyment into technology, as it rightfully should be for all.
Pledge: I am never going to enable payments on these contents as it directly goes against my goal of spreading leadership lessons widely. If you like my content and want to show your support, please share with your friends and subscribe.
In the last post we talked about key elements needed to accelerate your growth and meet your career goals. We haven't really gotten into what it truly means to grow. Is there a universal growth framework? Today we are going to shed some light on the topic of common misconceptions about growing in your career. Towards the end we will cover why a leader needs to understand this to be effective.
Growth is Personal
Growth can mean many things for individuals. Let me tell you a story about my time at Google. Google invented this really innovative approach to inspire developers to write more tests by publishing weekly posts on the toilet, famously known as “Testing on the Toilet” [1]. After noticing the effectiveness of these letters, they eventually increased the horizon to cover broader topics including mental health, niche technologies, boiler-plate codes etc. One of these days I find myself in the toilet spending more time than I anticipated reading a very enlightening topic about the race of getting to the next level and how it burns out engineers. I am not going to go into detail here (because I did not find any external links for the post) but I learnt a lot about growth that day.
A simple retrospect revealed I was a participant of the same race and realized I did not fully comprehend why. My immediate reaction was to discuss this in detail with my leader and he added very colorful thoughts to it, also recommended some books (see those recommendations at the bottom). Often we find ourselves racing against time, because everybody else is doing the same. I believe this is the source of our major misconception about growth meaning getting to the next level. As a leader this kind of thinking can be very detrimental.
While this simple article on the toilet opened my eyes, I learned to fully comprehend the reason behind burn outs. As Steve Jobs famously said in his Stanford 2005 Graduation ceremony speech, life is short, “You’ve got to find what you love” [2]. The main reason for burning out can be attributed to the fact that we are all part of a race to the top, without comprehending why. This is a very personal question, ask yourself this regularly. For me at the time, it did not change much. I realized I was motivated by two main things back then, the impact on people & the ability to do the right thing; secondly I was financially motivated. Honestly I never felt better. Keep in mind what motivates you today can be different from a year ago, so continue to ask yourself these questions.
Now let’s turn our focus into what is a leader’s responsibility in all this.
Leader’s Role
As a leader your role is to recognize this difference, educate your people to delve deeper into their own desires. Not everyone is in the race to get to the next level. Imagine if I always optimize for growth opportunities from a promotion perspective, I might force people into situations where they are not really motivated by the work they are doing. If I have a report who likes to take on challenging experimental projects, having them work on a high visibility undertaking with a lot of impact is not going to be desirable. Though, it might be a great project for someone who aspires to get to the next level.
Here are a few thing I’d encourage you to do:
Ask your report what truly motivates them
Work with them to paint a picture of the future they envision for themselves
Caution them about the herd mentality and advocate for finding a personal reason, it is extremely important for sustainable performance
Recommend reading books that I linked below (I don’t get any commissions, in case you were wondering)
Today we talked about the mythical corporate ladder climbing race and how it is not for everyone. There’s a common tendency to fall on this pattern when someone does not recognize their motivational sources. As a leader sometimes you will lead individuals who know exactly what they want and why, however more often you will lead people who don’t. Their personal growth is also your responsibility. Instigate these conversations and guide them to find what they truly desire!
If you enjoyed this content, please share it with friends and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.
References
[1] Google blog: https://testing.googleblog.com/2007/01/introducing-testing-on-toilet.html
[2] Steve Jobs Speech: https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/12/youve-got-find-love-jobs-says/
[3] Wanting by Luke Burgis: https://a.co/d/cXSfHIE
[4] Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber: https://a.co/d/3ecYMjr
[5] The Image is from Netflix series “Lucifer”