This is the final post of my blog series on advancement. As a technology leader, I am frequently asked how I advanced through the ranks and climbed the corporate ladder. Last week, I covered what it takes to go from Tech Lead to Manager. In this article, I will discuss the next step to Director.

1. From Newbie to Tech Lead (two weeks ago)
2. From Tech Lead to Manager (last week)
3. From Manager to Director (this week)

I left off last week nine years into my career when I had landed my second Manager role in the opportunity-rich environment of RCIS, a national crop insurance provider, and at the time, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo. At last count, I had 13 Rules for Advancement. I will reference some of those same rules in this article and add a few more.

The first thing a new manager needs to do is follow Rule #1: Master your current job, in the context of Rule #12: New management means old problems. I’ve always started new management roles with the feeling like I’m already behind even though I just got there. It’s more than a little overwhelming.

A colleague of mine, Nick Hernandez, talks about the “mean-time between horrifying discoveries.” The concept is that once the horrifying discoveries start happening at a less-frequent rate, you can start to gain confidence that you are aware of most of the big issues and can realistically start prioritizing. While you are a new manager in the midst of a tight “mean-time between horrifying discoveries” you have to rely on Rule #11: Muster confidence to put on a brave and smiling face as you trudge through it.

Baked into Rule #12, is the notion that you were hired because you need to fix something. Before any advancement to Director is an option, you need to do two things: Rule #14: Lead a transformation and Rule #15: Sustain a new normal. When I started at RCIS, we had three significant challenges: First, we had just gone through a security audit resulting in a tall list of remediation projects and pressure from the parent company to act swiftly. Second, we had significant technology debt which resulted in an unstable infrastructure and a reactive culture.

Third, our flagship software product was being re-platformed from a Client-Server app to a cloud SaaS app to remain relevant in the marketplace. Any one of those challenges would have been difficult to face, but it seemed impossible to tackle them simultaneously. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. In addition to me, several other high-caliber managers, directors, and engineers were hired into the organization around the same time.

Rule #14: Lead a transformation is key. I specifically chose the word “transformation” because your team should feel very different inside and out afterward. Leading a change is not enough. It may just be a series of changes, but transformation is a higher result. This takes servant leadership, the cultivation of good followership, among other transformational leadership skills, that I’ll be sure to fully explain in a future blog post.

Over the course of about 2-3 years, we remediated all of our audit issues, eliminated most of technology debt, and successfully launched our cloud SaaS app. The team went from reactive to proactive, elevated their thinking, and became well-respected across IT and the business.

Rule #14 is about leadership, but Rule #15: Sustain a new normal, is about good management. Transformation isn’t enough, and it is worthless if it cannot be sustained over time. Some managers forget this. They think to themselves (pridefully) “I’m a builder, not a maintainer, let someone else run it.” That attitude doesn’t serve the team or the company very well.

A good manager needs to build systems of service management and performance measurement to ensure the new normal is sustained, and foster a healthy team culture to guarantee that it won’t degrade over time. These two rules work together and are both necessary to demonstrate to upper management that you can be trusted with more authority.

However, this isn’t enough to advance to Director. What happens next is Rule #16: Expand your span of control. When I had achieved and sustained some success, my boss gave me additional functions to manage. And then as soon as I got that under control, he gave me another function, and then another. I started with a team of three and over-time, ended up with a team of 20. So, the funny thing about these expansions, is they sort of feel like a promotion, but not really. They don’t come with a better title, office, or significant jump in compensation. It’s just a ton more work.

This leads to Rule #17: Delegate, develop, and empower. I had no interest in becoming a work-a-holic, so I needed to empower my engineers and develop them to become tech leads and team leads. I needed to learn how to delegate tasks, and more importantly, delegate authority. I didn’t realize this at the time, but I desperately needed to master Rule #17, not only for my own advancement, but for the advancement of my boss. He couldn’t unload things to me and do higher-level work, if I didn’t clear my plate and create capacity for him to delegate responsibility to me. Rule #17 is how you achieve Rule #2 (Start doing the job you want, in addition to your current job) without becoming a work-a-holic.

Rules 1-17 got me prepared to be a Director, but then it came back to Rule #3: No one will just promote you. You have to compete for opportunities and win. My boss applied Rule #13: Sometimes you have to leave to advance, and created an opportunity for me. However, there was another equally qualified candidate for the position, who was my peer. There was a stalemate for about six months where the vacancy wasn’t filled, and we just maintained our positions. It wasn’t until my peer left the company, that I got the job. I can humbly admit to all of my readers that it took not one, but two departures for me to get promoted. I achieved this level about 13 years into my career. I was given a VP title, not a Director title. Don’t let that impress you too much. That was sort of a banking thing. It was a Director-equivalent position compared to most IT organizations.

I took over as VP of Infrastructure & Operations. I had seven managers reporting to me and about 75 total team members under my span of control. The first rule I’ll cover for this phase of my career is Rule #18: Leadership is lonely. Make some friends. When you are a Director (or VP), people start treating you differently, even though you don’t feel different. All of a sudden you are on this other plane of existence, and you’re no longer just one of the team. Your words carry more weight, and people are a lot more careful around you because you are the big boss.

This is surreal. Some may go on a power trip because of this, but I just sort of felt lonely. I needed to combat this new found isolation and make a concerted effort to socialize and integrate with the team. What used to be natural now took work. I used to be in-the-know on things, but now I was an outsider. The solution to this problem is to not take it personally, not let it feed my ego, and do something intentional about it.

Now that I was in my new position, Rule #12: New management means old problems, kicked-in once again. There was a very real imminent threat facing my department. Our parent company, Wells Fargo, launched an initiative to integrate the autonomous RCIS IT Infrastructure & Operations function into corporate. I took the job with the full knowledge that it was quite unstable. I quickly started to realize that being a VP/Director/Middle-Manager was a lot different than being a Manager. There were a couple of new rules for this phase of my career.

First, Rule #19: Middle-management is expendable. Accept it. Fortunately, I didn’t experience getting fired or laid-off, but I always felt the reality of that possibility, mostly because I realized that I wasn’t actually needed to run the IT operations of my company. My very capable managers had that well in-hand. While I once was the linchpin of the operation, now I was just overhead. Seriously, if this rule puts your stomach in knots then keep your manager role. Job security doesn’t come from your employer, it comes from within. I know that I am highly employable. Should the worst-case scenario happen, my family won’t starve.

When this realization was sinking in, I read a fantastic book, Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within, by Robert E. Quinn. One of the themes of this book was the notion that if you aren’t risking your job, you aren’t doing your job. I found this concept pretty freeing in the context of my current circumstance. Not only was I an expendable middle-manger, but I was in the cross-hairs of a corporate take-over from the parent company. There was nothing left to do, but embrace that situation and put everything on the line. Self-preservation wasn’t a job-skill that was going to serve me well in this phase, so I discarded it.

The circumstance and the implementation of Rule #19 gave me a new focus: Rule #20: Protect the team. I instantly felt and embraced a paternalistic instinct for my group. We had built something remarkable over the past four years, and it wasn’t going down on my watch. The people, the technology, the processes, the culture, all of it was worth protecting. The business we served needed it, our customers counted on it, and the 75 team members in my department deserved to have someone watching their backs.

I don’t fault Wells Fargo for seeking centralization. That’s naturally what corporations do, but in this case I knew it would be a poor fit. Since I didn’t need to spend my time running the department (it ran itself), I spent my time protecting it and defending it. I’m proud to say that we succeeded. After a year-long due diligence, Wells Fargo and RCIS came to the mutual agreement that these functions are best run separately. RCIS Infrastructure & Operations avoided consolidation into Wells Fargo IT. In fact, a few years later, Wells Fargo sold RCIS to Zurich. It stands as an autonomous IT department to this day.

Protecting the team also means running interference. There were so many distractions that came at my team. All legitimate normal work flowed through normal processes, and didn’t funnel through me. But all of the special projects, one-offs, audits, and political games, I took those on personally to shield my team from having to deal with those distractions. I wanted them focused on serving the customers and I served them by keeping the distracting stuff for myself.

My tenure in this position lasted three full years and ended on my own terms. We accomplished some pretty cool and innovative things in those years, but I was ready for a new challenge. I had the opportunity to move to a Director position at CHS. Rule #13: Sometimes you have to leave to advance. There was more scale and complexity there and I was excited by the notion of working for a company that wasn’t a subsidiary of another company. I had 16 years of working for subsidiaries and it was getting old.

That’s all for this series. See you next week. Please comment below and share with your colleagues!

Here are the Rules for Advancement:

1. Master your current job.
2. Start doing the job you want, in addition to your current job.
3. No one will just promote you. You have to compete for opportunities and win.
4. Certifications & education augment lack of experience.
5. Volunteer for everything.
6. Specialize in something.
7. Network.
8. Own it.
9. Get mentored.
10. Politics create and destroy opportunities.
11. Muster confidence.
12. New management means old problems.
13. Sometimes you have to leave to advance.
14. Lead a transformation.
15. Sustain a new normal.
16. Expand your span of control.
17. Delegate, develop, and empower.
18. Leadership is lonely. Make some friends.
19. Middle-management is expendable. Accept it.
20. Protect the team.

Get the PDF Here! Rules for Advancement: