When you are asked as a manager “What do I need to get to the next level?” I suggest the quality and completeness of your answer is directly correlated to your effectiveness as a leader. Let’s start with the worst answer, “We’re a meritocracy where the best idea wins.”

This is a bullshit cop-out answer. First off, being a meritocracy is a philosophy, it’s not a strategy. Using this as an answer to the growth question is akin to saying, “We give out gold medals when you win, so when you start getting gold medals, we’ll all know you’re winning.”

A meritocracy, if achievable, would be a trailing indicator. It would be a sign that long ago, your leadership team successfully created a culture where the humans were recognized because of their ability. It reads like a noble dream worth striving for, but it is poor career growth advice.

Here’s a better answer.

Two Paths

There are two career paths¹ in your organization. One which describes the growth of the individuals and one that illustrates the growth of the managers. These paths are readily visible public artifacts written by those who do the work. This means engineers write the paths for engineers, marketing writes marketing’s, and so on.

The contents of these artifacts need to reflect your values, culture, and language, but I humbly suggest they contain the following information:

• A series of levels and titles. A level is a generic number to differentiate each level like Engineer 1, Engineer 2, etc. A title is a more descriptive version of the level such as Associate Engineer, Engineer, Senior Engineer, and so forth².
• A brief description of the overall expectation of the level. For a senior engineer title, this could be: “Owns well-defined projects from beginning to end.”
• A list of competences that are required attributes for all versions of this role. These are the measures for success for each level. An example competency might be “Technical Ability” and might the following definition: “Technical: Designing, scoping and building features and systems. Helping others to make technical decisions.”
• Finally, you need to define the per level expectation of the competencies that demonstrates the competency. An Associates job relative to the technical facet (“Implements and maintains the product or system features to solve scoped problems. Asks for guidance when necessary.”) is much different than a Senior engineer (“Independently scopes flexible technical solutions. Anticipates technical uncertainties. Trusted to design and implement team-level technical solutions. Guides team to improve code structure and maintainability. Garners resources required to complete their work.”)

This suggested list is not definitive. You could easily add sphere of influence, ideal years of experience, or comparable levels outside of your company to this artifact. And then do the whole thing over again for your manager career path.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of this task, you are in good company. There are existing career paths on the internet that can serve as good starting points, but I strongly encourage your team to write their own because your culture is unique. The competencies you need are a function of the values of your particular collection of builders.

Two Equal Paths

As a human who has screwed up the design and landing of career paths in every possible way, I have hard-earned advice on common pitfalls of landing these artifacts. My first piece of advice is making it clear with your actions that these two paths – management and individual – are equal. I’ll explain this concept by describing how to not land your career paths.

The need for a career path begins when there are enough engineers to require a rubric for career growth. A well-intentioned group of individuals defines this path. Great! You have a career path. Who decides who goes where on this newly defined path? Who is Senior? Who is Senior staff? Usually some form of a manager. It is at this moment when individual contributors not familiar with the ways of managers realize that these folks have a heretofore unknown influence on their careers. They probably already suspected something was up because these people were sitting in meetings… all the time.

When it becomes apparent these managers have special powers, a subset of individual contributors quickly become interested in management. The problem is this is often a career path that doesn’t often exist yet usually because everyone one was too busy working to define the individual contributor career path.

Here’s the screw-up. You just finished defining the individual contributor career path, and suddenly everyone is interested in a career path that has yet to be written. What’s up? The answer is: your individual career path has not made it clear that individuals have equal opportunities to lead.

There are many good reasons for an engineer to want to move into management, but if their only reason is the perception that management is the best place to grow as a leader, then you’ve started down a path where the perception is leadership is not the job of individuals. This is disaster.

The Growth Tax

Artifacts like a career path show up to document the culture, to define rubrics, and to help inform a process to allow informed decisions to be made to help the team scale. They exist to provide accessible definition, but how they are applied is what the team is truly watching. In the example above where managers are choosing levels for a newly defined career path, the team cares equally about their level and who is choosing it.

During a period of rapid growth with only organic role definition, everyone is wondering where they stand because everything is changing all the time. Suddenly, these managers appear who have the power to determine role and individuals ask themselves, “What other powers are they going to grant themselves? And how do I get in on that situation?”

Yes, you already wrote a career path for individuals. You defined a clear set of competencies of what makes a successful growing individual, but you forgot to make it clear that leadership comes from everywhere. If an individual doesn’t believe that they have an equal chance to lead as a manager, then those who desire to lead will attempt to get on the manager path.

This isn’t a horrible outcome because you do need to build and hire capable managers, but it’s a disaster because you are signaling to your team that it’s the managers who are calling the shots.

The growth tax is a perceived productivity penalty that you incur as a function of the size of your team. How long does it take to make a hard decision? How does a person find out a critical piece of information? Who owns what? The cost to answer each of these (and far more) questions slightly increases as each new human arrives.

These small communication taxes pale in comparison to the taxes levied by defining cultural norms. In a company where it is believed that the managers are the only leaders, you create hierarchy. We must go a higher power to ask for permission. Hierarchy creates silos. We own this, and they own that. Silos often create politics. Our mission is the only mission. Their mission is lesser.

Again, a disaster.

Leadership Comes From Everywhere

A meritocracy is a philosophy that states that power should be vested in individuals almost exclusively based on ability and talent. Advancing in this system is based on performance measured through examination and/or demonstrated achievement. As a leader and as an engineer, the concept of a meritocracy is appealing³. I want my teams as flat as possible and full of empowered individuals and any action that re-enforces the perspective that “managers have all the power” is sub-optimal.

Are managers required to scale a large group of humans? My vote is yes. You might disagree, but I think a set of humans responsible for the people, process, and the product are an essential scaling function. One reason you might disagree is that you’ve seen managers who’ve done the job poorly. That sucks. There are good managers out there, and they are the ones that understand their job is their team because without their team they have exactly no job.

The definition of individual contributor leadership starts with defining a leadership competency in your career path, but you need to spend an equal amount of time defining clear places for individuals to lead. Here are two places you can invest:

Technical Lead What does technical lead mean for your company? Is it a throwaway title that managers use to placate cranky engineers? That’s a missed opportunity to define credible contributor leadership. Here’s a starting definition: “You are the owner of this code/project/technology and this means you are the final decision maker when it comes to this area.”

With this definition in hand, you make a list of the all the technical areas that need technical leadership and make it publicly available. These are the areas we are responsible for and these are the technical leads. Ask them first.

Details about defining this role are both numerous and potentially politically hazardous. For example, how long can someone be a technical lead? What happens when they leave? And, finally, the contentious, “Who chooses technical leads?” Good luck.

Technical Lead Manager Another leadership variant. This role is a hybrid designed to give aspiring managers a transparent and fair view of people management.

The details: Technical Lead Managers continue to code a minimum of 50% of their time, but they also have direct reports. What’s the catch? Cap their direct reports at three. This constraint is intended to give new managers exposure to all the aspects of people leadership (Reviews, promotions, 1:1s, there’s a book) while giving them reasonable time to be hands-on engineers. Why three directs? Why 50%? Your ratios may vary, but what we’re optimizing for is a higher probability that they can do both jobs well instead of both poorly.

Like Technical Leads, the devil is in the operational details, but one cultural aspect I like to reenforce is the removal of any stigma when a Technical Leader Managers chooses to leave the role. After four months in the role when they approach me and suggest, “I don’t think I am built for the people thing.” I ask clarifying questions, we discuss, and once we’re both satisfied with the answers, we celebrate because it is likely we just avoided inflicting another crap manager on the world.

A Trailing Indicator

My final piece of advice is the most complex and incomplete. As I wrote above, the manner that you define leadership is as important as how it is perceived you are applying it. A thoughtfully constructed promotion process provides a means of consistently and fairly demonstrating to the entire team how you value leadership.

The topic of building a promotion process deserves an entire article. I’ll write it. I’m sorry to leave you hanging, but if you intend to follow the advice in this piece, you’re on the right track. You have career growth paths for both individuals contributors and managers. You’ve also perhaps defined additional non-managerial roles that give individuals opportunities to lead.

Your future promotion process benefits from work above because it gives both managers and individuals a standard frame of reference to have career and promotion discussions not just at promotion time, but all the time. Your future promotion process also needs to answer the question, “Are you consistently and fairly promoting both individual contributors and managers who are demonstrating leadership?”

There is more work you need to do. You need to train your managers to have career conversations all year long, you need to build an employee-friendly internal transfer policy that allows individuals to freely move about your company, you need to invest in teaching the entire company to give feedback, and there’s much much more because building a growth-mind company isn’t defined by a word, it’s defined by hard work.