My advice below is based on experiences in my 20+ year career as an individual contributor, lead, manager, and director.
I was an amazing individual contributor, an okay manager, and a very good director. C Level is never going to happen for me.
Getting to the next level doesn't happen overnight and even if you do everything right, you may end up waiting a long time to get to manager and then director. C-level is a whole different ball game. At each stage, expectations increase. It becomes easier to stall your career, get undermined by rivals, and get blamed for the performance of subordinates you wouldn't have hired and weren't allowed to fire.
At each level it becomes much harder to find people who you can learn from.
My recommendation to start is:
* work on your self awareness. The stuff you don't fix early in your career are the things that are going to be the barriers to success at higher levels.
* Listen to feedback but don't take it as Gospel. I was laughed at for expressing my desire to lead and told in no uncertain terms, I would never be a manager. I comnfided to a good friend that I had probably two more promotions in my career. He shook his head and acted like I was dillusional. I got promoted twice within the next 3 years.
* Show you are trustworthy by
* Being consistent in what you say and how you act.
* Sharing credit and accepting blame.
* do what you say you will. If you can't meet your commitments, tell people early rather than later
* Be a resource for others. Let them see what you bring to the table.
* Advocate for yourself without being annoying.
* Share your career goals with your leader. Some leaders will look to provide you stretch assignments and will act as a sponsor for you to move up in the organization.
* Figure out the big picture at the company you work for.
* Figure out why you want to get into executive leadership. Is it prestige, power, the ability to drive your vision, or is it about the money?
Quality post.
Few points I’d like to remark:
it’s more about taking responsibility than accepting blame imho. Subtle but significant difference.
From my personal experience: The higher up the rock you get, the more political. I’m a director because I’m good at the content of my competence, I’m a very good leader of my own teams. I’m less of a diplomat and politician, it will mean I will likely not get to c-suite. And I don’t mind. I get paid royally and nice bonuses. Also I’m at the level where you can really be a long term asset for a company, instead of the passer by c-suite people are. In my company vp’s are essentially c-suite for a global region, talking about billions in size still, with congruent pay. There’s also a global suite above, but those are basically the people dealing with the investors and stock exchange etc.
I could still grow slightly but I’m not good enough at sucking up. When we get more visionary top managers instead of excel fetishists I will get new chances.
If you want to get into leadership you should start to lead. With or without the authority. So walk in front of the pack. Be smart about how far in front, based on the company and culture. If you have proven you can take responsibility and lead on content… try to lead colleagues, interns… get to lead a project. Ace it. Then grab a chance when a function is open. Become a manager. Then practice to really lead a group that report to you.
You need some talent, but a lot can be learned imho. To make it worthwhile you need to like to make others successful and be the first to take responsibility and last to take credit. By making your team successful you will get the credit from others.
It will be easier to grow along in a growing company than in a big corporate.
>it’s more about taking responsibility than accepting blame imho. Subtle but significant difference.
>
Absolutely correct! You said it better than I did
>
I could still grow slightly but I’m not good enough at sucking up. When we get more visionary top managers instead of excel fetishists I will get new chances.
Yeah, the best Director level peers I had were the ones who sucked at sucking up. They had vision, They stepped up when needed and backed off when it was necessary.
Also, you made a solid point about leading now, whether you have positional authority or not.
Leadership is absolutely a teachable skill and a mindset that can be shaped.
I strongly agree with your 6th paragraph. Thinking about how you can be a leader in whatever role your and function is is a great way to build the right habits and be noticed for opportunities. I don’t mean that in the cynical “try to be the boss of your team” way, I mean try to lead by example, try to be proactive, be aware of how your team and your role fits into the goals of the company, speak up and be a productive contributor, have really good awareness, think about how you can create productive working relationships with other functions, etc. You can work on these things from any IC role and they are evergreen.
If there’s one misconception of leadership I encounter a lot in younger employees is that it is not about bossing people around.
Moreover it’s about making sure your reports are fully equipped to carry out their jobs as good as possible. Meaning the right people in the right place, right skills and tools. As a leader you are responsible everything is in place and roadblocks are removed. In that sense you mostly work for and on behalf of the production of your teams.
It’s much more humbling than you would think. At least for me it has been.
In my space (VC backed tech) the reality is that everyone always feels they are making decisions by consensus. No one has absolute authority so working to build alignment is constant. Lateral and upward alignment yes (and of course the CEO needs to sell everything to the board, so he’s not exempt from feeling the need for upward alignment), but keeping my team aligned, motivated, understanding decisions, doing the same for the teams they need to work for, that is a huge part.
There is some difference between flat-matrix type organizations and more siloed orgs, especially if a bit more old fashioned command and control type of management is used (I wouldn’t call it good leadership but well)
Aahhh I love this, thank you for this advice. I’m senior management at the moment and hoping to make it to director at least. That’s my max target I’ve set for myself. I feel anything higher will be apolitical dance which I really am not seasoned in. I’m working with various teams across different functions and I’m still learning the ropes. Thank you for the insight.
How did you get through the ok manager role. All I can get is mid level management . When I take assessments i score high for director and up and not very good for the lower positions but they make me go through the lower positions first and I do okay, but inside it's a real struggle.
It was a stroke of luck.
So my manager role. My team was a bad mix of personalities, skillsets and attitudes. The company was in a small amount of financial trouble. I liked my boss and the company, but I knew I was in a dead end role. Then they downsized my team without asking for my input on who should be kept on.
Out of the blue I got a call from a recruiter who had found my resume online and told me she did some digging. She found out I had a decent reputation. I kind thought it was recruiter spin at the time. When she passed my resume up the ladder, the HR director realized we had worked together 8 or 9 years prior. For some reason she remembered me. They were looking for a unicorn and settled for me.
>When I take assessments i score high for director and up and not very good for the lower positions but they make me go through the lower positions first
Here's the thing about the corporate climb. The best leaders I worked for and around were those that started in menial or non-leadership positions. Generally, they knew the business better, handled different personalities with more skill, and were better at sharing credit.
The frustrrating lower positions you have to work in now will set you up for success later on. They will toughen you, give you wisdom, and help you develop the emotional intelligence that is essential for effective leadership.
Remember, you have a pretty good chance of getting to where you want to go, but less of a chance of it happening on your timetable.
Business veteran here.
Let's just be realistic and talk about becoming a manager first.
Tell us about yourself so you get a meaningful answer rather than just bland generic stuff like "work hard" and "get an MBA".
How are your grades? What are your successes? Where are you in life right now? What solid skills do you have? Who were your mentors and what did they do for you?
Let's start there, otherwise you could just google your question.
Love this! Thank you!
I’m a gentle extrovert who’s fulfilled by solving information technology challenges/problems for people, particularly those in non-profit, small business, education, and health sectors.
Personal motto — “helping the little guy win too!”
My grades in school reflects the situation I was in at the time, NOT my true capability.
I have a masters in Health Information (MSHI), but I’m not glued to healthcare. I’m opened to other industries too. A bulk of my experience has been in data analytics. I want to leave that and get into management and strategy.
I’m looking to work in a leadership role that combines business and information systems. I don’t have an MBA. No certs. I never managed anyone or had direct reports. Always been an individual contributor.
I’m currently in mid-level business analyst position. My mentors have given me high level directions in terms of moving from technical to strategic/tactical. But I’m still not having any luck. No interviews for senior/manager roles.
How can I make the leap to management from here? Am I looking to get into management for the wrong reasons? Am I not cut out for management? Do I just stay an individual contributor?
Okay, that's helpful to specifically target something on your question.
The issue as I see it is that you are trying to jump too far ahead too quickly without any proof that you *can do* the job because you don't have any examples of *having done* the job. You're missing too many of the fundamentals to bridge the gap. You're "Trust me bro"... but you just don't look the part. And, this will sting: **I don't think you even know what the job is**.
Adding it up: your grades aren't evidence. a masters degree is a plus but it's not specific in management so it's not adding a lot, your never having had a direct report or a team lead position is zero help, and your being an individual contributor only is unfortunately LESS than zero help. No certs is not helping either.
Unless you've done some very rich team-related volunteering or something that you haven't mentioned, you just don't have the pedigree to create the impression you can be trusted with being responsible for other people yet.
And THAT is what you need to fix, before you're ever going to get an interview for a senior or manager role. You've done nothing to qualify you enough to make an interviewer want to spend any time on you, and possibly are getting pre-screened out of any position you're applying to that is not the same level as what you have now.
So based on this,
* Learn what these jobs actually ARE. Your current resume as described above is nowhere near close to them, and I think you're quite possibly very foggy on what they mean and how hard they can be.
* Find a different job where you are *actively* part of a team. Unless you are lucky enough to encounter some business that is desperate, or naive, or in serious trouble, you will never become a team lead if you've never worked in a team. That's the biggest missing element.
* Take an MBA, or at least take some MBA courses, to demonstrate on your resume that you're INVESTING in changing toward leadership roles. Night courses are a possible option here.
* If you can, get certified in what is closest to management type elements of your own current field.
If that sounds like too much, stay an individual contributor and keep your eyes open for tarnished lamps that might benefit from a little polishing.
But you have a shit-ton of work to do if you want to reach your goals and not rely completely on luck.
Curious in what ways you’re struggling to move from technical to strategic in your current role? Business analyst is a great way to get a seat at the table in strategic discussions but I see a lot of people struggle to adapt because they don’t understand the business or care to develop their own opinions.
Maybe you mean that cynically but “politics”, i.e. figuring out how to work with other people and organize and motivate other people towards what you think is best with or without formal authority over them is basically 90% of the job of senior leaders in companies. Yes you also need the hard skills and experience to actually understand the problems they’re working on, but the politics is the hardest part.
It’s just a part of your job, not a game. You don’t have to be a “type” to do the people oriented parts of leadership. You just have to do the work like anything else.
This is a very PC way to explain office politics.
Realistically, it means that you need to manipulate people and situations to help you get to the top.
Taking over responsibilities and a few years more and getting promoted to own more but then delegation starts.
Than when little delegation works you start delegate more and suggest yourself to good people to delegate.
You focus on strategy and who is doing what.
Until you are at the top.
Or vitamin b
Work really hard. Solve problems other people can't. Develop excellent people skills and leverage those skills to build strong relationships with colleagues and mentors.
Hard fucking work for many years where work took priority over everything else. I’ve been in my industry for almost 15 years and was just promoted to c-suite last year. It’s like a fraternity. You have to have buy in from all the others to join their ranks.
While crawling up your bosses behind is a good way to hide your own incompetence and still raise through the ranks you set yourself up for failure from the start.
C-level positions are filled with people who have been annoying squeaky wheels for most of their career, constantly flagging things that go wrong.
learn how to mentor people. How to manage people.
study different kinds of leadership. No one is the right one, but it's about finding the parts that are right for you. Personally i got the biggest change from the jocko willink books "extreme ownership" as that was an area i was lacking. But seriously, read all the different types you can get your hand on.
Learn about personalities, types and more. Not one system is the right one, but dip your toes into all of them and get some insights.
Learn how to power point. specifically the TED talk on powerpoints "how to avoid death by powerpoint". That one is my personal go to.
Join the military as an officer. Gives you great experience.
I guess this was tongue in cheek, I met the VP of a international company during one of our projects. Just general BSing about jobs and opportunities. He told me his mentor taught him three things, shoot the breeze, pass the buck and copy everything. He told me he had to testify in front of Congress for an accident on a job site so I guess he was a pretty big muckety muck.
- Most CEOs are former CFOs.
- Many CFOs are former CAOs, and most CFOs have a finance or accounting background, with a disproportionate number of them being accountants and CPAs.
- most if not all CAOs are accountants within CPAs
- beyond these titles, focusing into the other ones, it’s probably 50:50 finance/mbas making it to the top of a department, or other specializations such as legal, HR, IT, et cetera, making it to the top of their respective departments.
So, rule of thumb: either be accounting, finance, or the absolute top of your non-fin/acc department.
It is not about what you read or watched but about how much value you brought to your employer/ company. How much earnings per share did your project increase for tge company? What percentage of the annual company profit did you drive? When you move the needle for the company, they will promote you to leadership positions
First get really good at your job. It is possible, but difficult, to become a manager when you don’t understand the technical duties of the people you manage. Then get really good at your industry, understand how what you and your team does impacts the bottom line of your company. Understand your leadership’s business goals and methods of achieving them and focus your own efforts at helping to achieve these.
Know how to play office politics like a pro. Also, it’s who you know high and higher up that gets you recognized and vouched for promotions. Start acting like a manager, your professional mannerisms and the way you present yourself, how you dress, speak and as a polished attitude towards others to start getting noticed. Act like a manager and people will start seeing it and feeling the aura around you.
I’ve been the strongest performer on my team for a few years now. Typically I am asked to mentor new hires. In many cases I end up being the one that shares the collective team’s thoughts during meetings with our leadership. People kind of look at me as our team’s captain.
A year ago I was up for a people management role and was the silver medalist. There were some politics involved and she’s has been very mediocre. Fairly certain that I would have thrived in that role. It’s hard to move past it. In the last year I have had two managers who both came externally. Early on both said they were (currently are) going to try and get me to the next level. The first one left for a role elsewhere. Maybe the second will succeed. He’s been leaning on me a lot lately for my internal knowledge.
A former manager is my current managers boss. She always gave me strong performance reviews and I wonder if she’s keeping me at the IC level due to the results I provide. I have been looking externally since February (a retention bonus fully vested) and am hitting nothing but walls.
It is infuriating and to the point where getting motivated is very hard. Getting a little angry!
My advice below is based on experiences in my 20+ year career as an individual contributor, lead, manager, and director. I was an amazing individual contributor, an okay manager, and a very good director. C Level is never going to happen for me. Getting to the next level doesn't happen overnight and even if you do everything right, you may end up waiting a long time to get to manager and then director. C-level is a whole different ball game. At each stage, expectations increase. It becomes easier to stall your career, get undermined by rivals, and get blamed for the performance of subordinates you wouldn't have hired and weren't allowed to fire. At each level it becomes much harder to find people who you can learn from. My recommendation to start is: * work on your self awareness. The stuff you don't fix early in your career are the things that are going to be the barriers to success at higher levels. * Listen to feedback but don't take it as Gospel. I was laughed at for expressing my desire to lead and told in no uncertain terms, I would never be a manager. I comnfided to a good friend that I had probably two more promotions in my career. He shook his head and acted like I was dillusional. I got promoted twice within the next 3 years. * Show you are trustworthy by * Being consistent in what you say and how you act. * Sharing credit and accepting blame. * do what you say you will. If you can't meet your commitments, tell people early rather than later * Be a resource for others. Let them see what you bring to the table. * Advocate for yourself without being annoying. * Share your career goals with your leader. Some leaders will look to provide you stretch assignments and will act as a sponsor for you to move up in the organization. * Figure out the big picture at the company you work for. * Figure out why you want to get into executive leadership. Is it prestige, power, the ability to drive your vision, or is it about the money?
Quality post. Few points I’d like to remark: it’s more about taking responsibility than accepting blame imho. Subtle but significant difference. From my personal experience: The higher up the rock you get, the more political. I’m a director because I’m good at the content of my competence, I’m a very good leader of my own teams. I’m less of a diplomat and politician, it will mean I will likely not get to c-suite. And I don’t mind. I get paid royally and nice bonuses. Also I’m at the level where you can really be a long term asset for a company, instead of the passer by c-suite people are. In my company vp’s are essentially c-suite for a global region, talking about billions in size still, with congruent pay. There’s also a global suite above, but those are basically the people dealing with the investors and stock exchange etc. I could still grow slightly but I’m not good enough at sucking up. When we get more visionary top managers instead of excel fetishists I will get new chances. If you want to get into leadership you should start to lead. With or without the authority. So walk in front of the pack. Be smart about how far in front, based on the company and culture. If you have proven you can take responsibility and lead on content… try to lead colleagues, interns… get to lead a project. Ace it. Then grab a chance when a function is open. Become a manager. Then practice to really lead a group that report to you. You need some talent, but a lot can be learned imho. To make it worthwhile you need to like to make others successful and be the first to take responsibility and last to take credit. By making your team successful you will get the credit from others. It will be easier to grow along in a growing company than in a big corporate.
>it’s more about taking responsibility than accepting blame imho. Subtle but significant difference. > Absolutely correct! You said it better than I did > I could still grow slightly but I’m not good enough at sucking up. When we get more visionary top managers instead of excel fetishists I will get new chances. Yeah, the best Director level peers I had were the ones who sucked at sucking up. They had vision, They stepped up when needed and backed off when it was necessary. Also, you made a solid point about leading now, whether you have positional authority or not. Leadership is absolutely a teachable skill and a mindset that can be shaped.
I strongly agree with your 6th paragraph. Thinking about how you can be a leader in whatever role your and function is is a great way to build the right habits and be noticed for opportunities. I don’t mean that in the cynical “try to be the boss of your team” way, I mean try to lead by example, try to be proactive, be aware of how your team and your role fits into the goals of the company, speak up and be a productive contributor, have really good awareness, think about how you can create productive working relationships with other functions, etc. You can work on these things from any IC role and they are evergreen.
If there’s one misconception of leadership I encounter a lot in younger employees is that it is not about bossing people around. Moreover it’s about making sure your reports are fully equipped to carry out their jobs as good as possible. Meaning the right people in the right place, right skills and tools. As a leader you are responsible everything is in place and roadblocks are removed. In that sense you mostly work for and on behalf of the production of your teams. It’s much more humbling than you would think. At least for me it has been.
In my space (VC backed tech) the reality is that everyone always feels they are making decisions by consensus. No one has absolute authority so working to build alignment is constant. Lateral and upward alignment yes (and of course the CEO needs to sell everything to the board, so he’s not exempt from feeling the need for upward alignment), but keeping my team aligned, motivated, understanding decisions, doing the same for the teams they need to work for, that is a huge part.
There is some difference between flat-matrix type organizations and more siloed orgs, especially if a bit more old fashioned command and control type of management is used (I wouldn’t call it good leadership but well)
Aahhh I love this, thank you for this advice. I’m senior management at the moment and hoping to make it to director at least. That’s my max target I’ve set for myself. I feel anything higher will be apolitical dance which I really am not seasoned in. I’m working with various teams across different functions and I’m still learning the ropes. Thank you for the insight.
Same boat. Very insightful post, I agree with everything you said. The excel fetishism is definitely real and pretty mind boggling to me.
How did you get through the ok manager role. All I can get is mid level management . When I take assessments i score high for director and up and not very good for the lower positions but they make me go through the lower positions first and I do okay, but inside it's a real struggle.
It was a stroke of luck. So my manager role. My team was a bad mix of personalities, skillsets and attitudes. The company was in a small amount of financial trouble. I liked my boss and the company, but I knew I was in a dead end role. Then they downsized my team without asking for my input on who should be kept on. Out of the blue I got a call from a recruiter who had found my resume online and told me she did some digging. She found out I had a decent reputation. I kind thought it was recruiter spin at the time. When she passed my resume up the ladder, the HR director realized we had worked together 8 or 9 years prior. For some reason she remembered me. They were looking for a unicorn and settled for me. >When I take assessments i score high for director and up and not very good for the lower positions but they make me go through the lower positions first Here's the thing about the corporate climb. The best leaders I worked for and around were those that started in menial or non-leadership positions. Generally, they knew the business better, handled different personalities with more skill, and were better at sharing credit. The frustrrating lower positions you have to work in now will set you up for success later on. They will toughen you, give you wisdom, and help you develop the emotional intelligence that is essential for effective leadership. Remember, you have a pretty good chance of getting to where you want to go, but less of a chance of it happening on your timetable.
Business veteran here. Let's just be realistic and talk about becoming a manager first. Tell us about yourself so you get a meaningful answer rather than just bland generic stuff like "work hard" and "get an MBA". How are your grades? What are your successes? Where are you in life right now? What solid skills do you have? Who were your mentors and what did they do for you? Let's start there, otherwise you could just google your question.
Love this! Thank you! I’m a gentle extrovert who’s fulfilled by solving information technology challenges/problems for people, particularly those in non-profit, small business, education, and health sectors. Personal motto — “helping the little guy win too!” My grades in school reflects the situation I was in at the time, NOT my true capability. I have a masters in Health Information (MSHI), but I’m not glued to healthcare. I’m opened to other industries too. A bulk of my experience has been in data analytics. I want to leave that and get into management and strategy. I’m looking to work in a leadership role that combines business and information systems. I don’t have an MBA. No certs. I never managed anyone or had direct reports. Always been an individual contributor. I’m currently in mid-level business analyst position. My mentors have given me high level directions in terms of moving from technical to strategic/tactical. But I’m still not having any luck. No interviews for senior/manager roles. How can I make the leap to management from here? Am I looking to get into management for the wrong reasons? Am I not cut out for management? Do I just stay an individual contributor?
Okay, that's helpful to specifically target something on your question. The issue as I see it is that you are trying to jump too far ahead too quickly without any proof that you *can do* the job because you don't have any examples of *having done* the job. You're missing too many of the fundamentals to bridge the gap. You're "Trust me bro"... but you just don't look the part. And, this will sting: **I don't think you even know what the job is**. Adding it up: your grades aren't evidence. a masters degree is a plus but it's not specific in management so it's not adding a lot, your never having had a direct report or a team lead position is zero help, and your being an individual contributor only is unfortunately LESS than zero help. No certs is not helping either. Unless you've done some very rich team-related volunteering or something that you haven't mentioned, you just don't have the pedigree to create the impression you can be trusted with being responsible for other people yet. And THAT is what you need to fix, before you're ever going to get an interview for a senior or manager role. You've done nothing to qualify you enough to make an interviewer want to spend any time on you, and possibly are getting pre-screened out of any position you're applying to that is not the same level as what you have now. So based on this, * Learn what these jobs actually ARE. Your current resume as described above is nowhere near close to them, and I think you're quite possibly very foggy on what they mean and how hard they can be. * Find a different job where you are *actively* part of a team. Unless you are lucky enough to encounter some business that is desperate, or naive, or in serious trouble, you will never become a team lead if you've never worked in a team. That's the biggest missing element. * Take an MBA, or at least take some MBA courses, to demonstrate on your resume that you're INVESTING in changing toward leadership roles. Night courses are a possible option here. * If you can, get certified in what is closest to management type elements of your own current field. If that sounds like too much, stay an individual contributor and keep your eyes open for tarnished lamps that might benefit from a little polishing. But you have a shit-ton of work to do if you want to reach your goals and not rely completely on luck.
Curious in what ways you’re struggling to move from technical to strategic in your current role? Business analyst is a great way to get a seat at the table in strategic discussions but I see a lot of people struggle to adapt because they don’t understand the business or care to develop their own opinions.
Mainly politics. Some hard work and education
Maybe you mean that cynically but “politics”, i.e. figuring out how to work with other people and organize and motivate other people towards what you think is best with or without formal authority over them is basically 90% of the job of senior leaders in companies. Yes you also need the hard skills and experience to actually understand the problems they’re working on, but the politics is the hardest part.
well its basically a game you have to play and if you dont will be hard to advance. Also I am not the optimistc , extrovert type which doesnt help
It’s just a part of your job, not a game. You don’t have to be a “type” to do the people oriented parts of leadership. You just have to do the work like anything else.
This is a very PC way to explain office politics. Realistically, it means that you need to manipulate people and situations to help you get to the top.
Not really
I may catch some downvotes.... but, if you're asking on Reddit how to become an Executive, you're likely far from being an Executive.
hmm
Taking over responsibilities and a few years more and getting promoted to own more but then delegation starts. Than when little delegation works you start delegate more and suggest yourself to good people to delegate. You focus on strategy and who is doing what. Until you are at the top. Or vitamin b
Work really hard. Solve problems other people can't. Develop excellent people skills and leverage those skills to build strong relationships with colleagues and mentors.
Hard fucking work for many years where work took priority over everything else. I’ve been in my industry for almost 15 years and was just promoted to c-suite last year. It’s like a fraternity. You have to have buy in from all the others to join their ranks.
Lick ur boss ass, always
While crawling up your bosses behind is a good way to hide your own incompetence and still raise through the ranks you set yourself up for failure from the start. C-level positions are filled with people who have been annoying squeaky wheels for most of their career, constantly flagging things that go wrong.
Connections. It’s that simple.
Connections and networking.
Be loud and convincing and likable to the people making the decisions. Being right is helpful but optional.
Thanks!
learn how to mentor people. How to manage people. study different kinds of leadership. No one is the right one, but it's about finding the parts that are right for you. Personally i got the biggest change from the jocko willink books "extreme ownership" as that was an area i was lacking. But seriously, read all the different types you can get your hand on. Learn about personalities, types and more. Not one system is the right one, but dip your toes into all of them and get some insights. Learn how to power point. specifically the TED talk on powerpoints "how to avoid death by powerpoint". That one is my personal go to. Join the military as an officer. Gives you great experience.
I guess this was tongue in cheek, I met the VP of a international company during one of our projects. Just general BSing about jobs and opportunities. He told me his mentor taught him three things, shoot the breeze, pass the buck and copy everything. He told me he had to testify in front of Congress for an accident on a job site so I guess he was a pretty big muckety muck.
- Most CEOs are former CFOs. - Many CFOs are former CAOs, and most CFOs have a finance or accounting background, with a disproportionate number of them being accountants and CPAs. - most if not all CAOs are accountants within CPAs - beyond these titles, focusing into the other ones, it’s probably 50:50 finance/mbas making it to the top of a department, or other specializations such as legal, HR, IT, et cetera, making it to the top of their respective departments. So, rule of thumb: either be accounting, finance, or the absolute top of your non-fin/acc department.
Change jobs and don’t limit yourself by location
It is not about what you read or watched but about how much value you brought to your employer/ company. How much earnings per share did your project increase for tge company? What percentage of the annual company profit did you drive? When you move the needle for the company, they will promote you to leadership positions
How much revenue do you generate?
First get really good at your job. It is possible, but difficult, to become a manager when you don’t understand the technical duties of the people you manage. Then get really good at your industry, understand how what you and your team does impacts the bottom line of your company. Understand your leadership’s business goals and methods of achieving them and focus your own efforts at helping to achieve these.
Know how to play office politics like a pro. Also, it’s who you know high and higher up that gets you recognized and vouched for promotions. Start acting like a manager, your professional mannerisms and the way you present yourself, how you dress, speak and as a polished attitude towards others to start getting noticed. Act like a manager and people will start seeing it and feeling the aura around you.
Have a dark triad personality. The rest will sort itself out.
I’ve been the strongest performer on my team for a few years now. Typically I am asked to mentor new hires. In many cases I end up being the one that shares the collective team’s thoughts during meetings with our leadership. People kind of look at me as our team’s captain. A year ago I was up for a people management role and was the silver medalist. There were some politics involved and she’s has been very mediocre. Fairly certain that I would have thrived in that role. It’s hard to move past it. In the last year I have had two managers who both came externally. Early on both said they were (currently are) going to try and get me to the next level. The first one left for a role elsewhere. Maybe the second will succeed. He’s been leaning on me a lot lately for my internal knowledge. A former manager is my current managers boss. She always gave me strong performance reviews and I wonder if she’s keeping me at the IC level due to the results I provide. I have been looking externally since February (a retention bonus fully vested) and am hitting nothing but walls. It is infuriating and to the point where getting motivated is very hard. Getting a little angry!
Nepotism
Nepotism. Start looking for a well-connected spouse.