Hi Maria,

There’s no clear career ladder or set of expectations for directors in my organization, only a set of documents with new ones added every year. How can I find out what the growth expectations are?

Thanks,

Kris

Hi Kris,

One of the many things that gets fuzzier as you take on broader leadership scope is what good looks like. You might have noticed many versions of this: in your day-to-day priorities, in setting goals for your org, or as you mention, career frameworks. 

This isn’t to say that structure isn’t important, but it is more of the reality of the role at that level. The job is to spot things coming, to do what needs doing, to balance tactical with strategic, and to self-direct more than be managed.

The key thing to ensure is that you approach the job with intention and pragmatism. This will allow you to see the opportunity in the situation, as opposed to a more frustrated point of view that will likely leave you feeling helpless and blocked. I’m going to suggest two practical angles to this, and some actions you can take under each.

Going after clarity in fuzziness 

It’s important to work with what you have and seek to clarify and connect the specifics to your role and location in the organization. 

I hear that a disjointed collection of documents can seem chaotic, but keep in mind that whoever put them together likely had similar intentions to you. They likely wanted to clarify and build agreement on how everyone in the company thinks about growth at more senior levels. A first step would be to distill what gems are hidden in that content.

Some actions that would help:

• Connect with someone from HR (or equivalent). Surface the problem you see, get their input on how it’s managed at the moment in different areas in the org, and what advice they might have for your specific situation.
• Reach out and book 1:1s with other Directors in the company. Ideally those that have been around for a while longer. This will help reassure you (I can almost bet you’re not alone), but their experience will also help you see what is valued in the company in practice.
• If there’s a company you know of that does this well, connect with someone there. Failing that, reflect on what specifically it is that has made their framework successful. That will point you to what exactly is missing in your company’s case.

Carving your own path

The second angle is to see how you can define the way forward yourself. The undoubted way to achieve that is to find ways that you can add value to the company. For example, it could be a new product or team, proposing and implementing improvements in the engineering process followed in your company, or building stronger connections across different departments within the organization.

An action that would help is to discuss goals in an upcoming 1:1 with your manager. Go to that conversation prepared. Read through the documents and put together some recommendations. That shows very tangibly that you can make sense of imperfect information, that you’re proactive, and that you have a good sense of what’s important. 

If you’re completely stuck on where to start, a framing that I’ve found helpful is to think of the triangle of product, people, and process. Management work is almost always a combination of those. Here are some prompts to help you brainstorm specific goals:

• Are we building the right things at the right pace?
• Is the shape of my org facilitating or adding friction to our goals? Do I have the right people in the right places? Are people in my org happy and growing?
• Are we spending most of our time on the right things? Do we have the right feedback loops in place?

Leaving things better than you found them

If at the end of all this you want to take it a step further, this sounds like a good opportunity to create a bit more clarity for everyone, and especially those that will join after you. 

By that point you’ll have gauged how much of a problem this is. If it seems important enough, you could work with your peers and HR to craft enough of a framework that is actually used, helps people in the role think of their growth areas, and does a better job in linking the values and goals of the company with what people spend their time on.

There’s a few ways you could move this forward:

• Summarize your findings in a proposal that you put forward to senior leadership and HR.
• Start a working group with peers and HR to define that framework – including how you’ll know that it’s working.

In either case, make sure that you speak to the why and the importance of feedback loops. This framing will help gather support for the initiative, but also protect you from investing time building something that is ultimately not used.

Summary

See this as an opportunity to carve a way forward by connecting personal to business goals, making sure that you get input and feedback from your manager and HR team. If you find the approach helpful, you have the option of scaling it by creating what you wish you had found when you started on this role.