![]() He told me that my motivations were wrong, that I hadn’t built relationships with my peers and so on. One of the senior directors I worked with did me the favor of giving me the hard feedback that I needed to hear. Failing to align my team with the rest of the company was one of the worst failures in my career. ![]() I didn’t build relationships outwardly, so my engineering teams were adopting changes but the rest of the organization had no idea what we were doing. They didn’t know what I was doing, they just saw me making changes in engineering without involving the leaders of the project management team, the release management team, or the QA team.īasically, I kept doing what I was doing as a manager when I should have turned more of my focus outside the team. My peers and everyone around me outside my team said in their feedback that they had no relationship with me. I was proud of what we managed to accomplish, but when it came time for performance reviews, I received the worst review of my career. We changed our release method and other internal processes. I attended stand-ups, we were teaching Scrum and we were introducing new tooling to manage the Agile process. I spent all my time focusing internally, working with my team. We were going through a transformation to become an agile organization. My team consisted of five sub-teams, about 50 people combined, and I had six or seven managers reporting to me. I first became a director and started managing managers about 17 years ago. Most people don’t realize this, but when you take on a broader leadership role, you often end up with less control. I also wanted to gain more control to be able to fix everything around me that I thought should be better. Unfortunately, I think this is more common than people like to admit. I wanted the bigger title, I wanted to feel important, and I was chasing my ego. My focus wasn’t to enable others or to become the best leader I could be. I took on my first director role as part of a job change, so I switched companies to get there. What was your transition like to managing managers as a director?
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