Tales From Leadership

We have a good one for you today. This is the concept of going from an individual contributor ultimately to a manager to a director and up the ladder, right? So we'll give it 1 second just to see if anybody hops on here on our live stream, which is always the best when we have individuals that are here ready, willing and able to participate, ask questions, just gives us as creators so much additional inspiration to come and show up on this platform and have these unbelievable talks about things that, you know, our real lived experiences draw into.

Right? So what up, Risa? All right, so what we're going to talk about today is this transitioning from, I'm just going to use this as an example, coder. Okay? Let's say, for instance, we're starting a. An app, okay? And we're an app and we're a startup organization and we have, we're gonna use a coder as an example, okay? A coder as the individual contributor to a coder, ultimately as a manager, leader, and then a director. What are the separations? What are the gaps? An individual contributor, of course, is I have a task, I have my duties.

I have my responsibilities. I fulfill. I'm a coder. My job is to build, probably project a, project b, project C, right? I have an assignment, I fulfill the assignment. I do my tasks. It's basically a b, not a whole lot of gray area. Somebody directs me or manages me and tells me what I need to do and what I need to accomplish. Done. That's your individual contributor. Right. Let's liken it to other industries, maybe. I work in the hot hotel industry, right? In the hotel industry, I am a housekeeper, right?

So I'm working the housekeeper. My job is to probably go clean rooms, make sure that the laundry gets folded. I'm the individual contributor. My goal, my gut is they probably say you have wing a or you're responsible for so many rooms. Got my task, got my duties, responsibilities done. Individual contributor. Jump up. Next level manager, right? So now I'm an individual contributor and now I oversee the other individual contributors. This is where the world misses. Like literally the world misses, okay?

We immediately think that because somebody's good at job a, right, of individually contributing, they're naturally going to morph in and be good at job b, that they will be a good manager overseeing all those individual contributors, right? So it usually, most of the time, usually doesn't work well. Why is because they compare themselves to what they did, how they did it. I was good at this. This is what I did. This is how I did it. This is why I did it. And their experiences is good if they learn the soft skills, right?

So here's my words of wisdom. So you have this individual contributor and you know that they're excelling and you're looking at potentially escalating them into a managerial role and overseeing these other individual contributors. Here's my suggestion. Get their feet wet now. Give them leadership opportunities. Leadership, I use that term very loosely when I say this, but maybe give them a few extra incentives that actually have managerial duties and responsibilities behind them. Maybe it's managing the schedule, maybe it's leading a couple meetings, maybe it's directing an initiative, maybe it's taking a little bit of ownership for something in a different light, in a different level.

Okay, so again, take your individual contributor, move it up to your manager, right? And then now we have the biggest of biggest jumps, right? Individual contributor to manager. Managers to directors. Managers are still hands dirty, getting their feet wet into things, trying to feel out their team and how we're going to deliver initiatives. They're usually project management based. And then we move to director. And now director oversees our managers and our individual contributors. What's the most important thing for a director to be successful.

What's the most important thing for a director? Attribute, skill set. You name it, right? Relationships and emotional intelligence. Can they build relationships? Do they have emotional intelligence? And do they have the communication skills to be able to delegate, delineate and transfer knowledge from ultimately their direct superiors, their leadership. Right. Executive directors, VPs, presidents, COos, CEO's, CEO's, you name it. Right. How do they take that information and be able to share and ultimately delegate tasks and skills?

By using relationships, communication, delegation, trust, empowerment. And this is the big one. Can somebody leave their ego at the door? Right. As far as your continue to move up your leadership, can you talk about instead of ego, can you build an ecosystem? An ego system is leading from fear, leading from a variety of different things. It's this top down approach that goes like this. And then an ecosystem is basically the circle that everybody's working in conjunction and the director's kind of right in the middle.

Right. And it's just piecemealing everything away. And then you get the wheel and the wheel starts spinning in the cycle in the system. It is the hardest transition for any business. You go from one person starting a one person shop to having two people, four people, six people, eight people, 1020, 40, 60. And that transition from individual contributor ultimately to the next layer. Right to the next layer heading into the manager and then ultimately leading into the directoral level. Overseeing those layers of the business is where dreams happen, is where businesses can scale.

It's where individuals can grow. It's where businesses can grow and accelerate and move fast. But it takes every bit those layers of the ecosystem to work well. Right? We can get into goals, we can get into tasks, we can get into duties, assignments and all the things. But at the end of the day, are you able to build a system that promotes people to success, not promotes people to the, basically the point of inefficiency, the Peter principle. Right. How can you promote people to successful and not promote people to fail?

In our country, we have a big problem with promotion to fail. Right. Promote to win, promote to be successful. You know, it's just, I was watching this leadership, I was watching this leadership summit with Jocko Wilnick the other day, who has this unbelievable vantage of leadership. And I love his thought processes all around it being ultimately what he said is, here we are in the SEals teams and we have an unbelievable sniper that can shoot incredible distances from 1800 yards or 1400 yards, and we just magically think that they're going to be able to oversee other people and run another group of snipers.

It's not how it works. And yes, that's extreme and that's warfare. But the reality is, like, business over here, leadership over here, it doesn't matter if it's a school system, doesn't matter if it's a Burger KinG across the street or the hotel down the road, right? Like, you're either going to promote individuals to success or as a country. And quite frankly, the businesses around our globe are going to continue to promote individuals where they fall off the cliff. So let's see what you can do and your companies can do and your people can do by ultimately understanding this concept.

Understanding the concept. Give them the tools so they can manage and lead effectively. The other thing is, we're always here. All of us here are Cadre, you know, especially.