Published on: 2024-08-02
How Women Rise summarises 12 mistakes women make when they climb up the career ladder.
A friend lent me the book How Women Rise, written by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith. The friend is an inspiration for me, but I won’t talk about her in this article, not yet :)
The small book encompasses 12 things that women should stop doing as they grow in their careers. It is full of examples of women with diverse professions from different sectors, ranging from lawyers, to software engineers, to healthcare practitioners.
What I learnt:
As an individual contributor, I kept a work log. I wrote down all the things I did on a daily basis. This was useful before 1:1 with my manager, and before performance review. The brain has the tendency to only remember things that are fresh. Keeping a work log reminds me what achievement I should let people know.
As a manager I don’t have a work log, because at least 60% of my time is used for regular things such as 1:1 and admin work. Maybe you can call my to-do list my work log.
So the format how I record my achievements changed. This blog is one way of documentation. I want to share here the workshops that I did with my team in order to achieve alignment and to share knowledge. I want to share here the difficult scenarios that I experienced, what I did, and what I learnt from it.
As an individual contributor, technical expertise was essential for me. As I joined my current employer three years ago, I didn’t have any practical experience with frontend technology. In order to pass the interview, I did some hello world projects with React. The first one and half year marks a steep learning curve for me, as I became an expert on React and frontend development.
Now that I chose the path of becoming a manager, the expert role is not as important as before. I don’t have to know all the solutions to a particular problem, I don’t have to have the best answer to the next scaling problem, I don’t have to set up the necessary metrics for the perfect dashboard. I just have to encourage and enable my team to do it.
The book encourages everyone to prepare a short elevator speech: what I do, what I want to achieve in my career, why am I the correct person for this achievement. By knowing who we are, where we want to be, and put this information into concrete words, we are more confident.
My current version of the elevator speech is: I am an engineering manager with a strong technical background, I want to empower a whole organization on the technical level to provide the most value to the world, and my enthusiasm of technology and product makes me the correct person to achieve this goal.
It is amazing how much I can learn about myself at work. I am able to do all kinds of things for the first time. The more things you do, the more chances that you could make a mistake, or not do it in the best optimal ways.
You could on one day give too much disclosure of an information. Instead of ruminating on it, just say “oh well, it might be better that I have kept that information to myself.” and move on. That’s it, you learnt it for the next time.