Why is it that hard-working and high-performing women are so often passed up for promotions?
Researchers from the University of Minnesota, Yale and MIT analyzed data on more than 30,000 employees from a North American retail chain and found that women were 7.3 percent more likely to be given a “high” rating for their performance compared to men but 5.8 percent more likely to be rated lower than their male colleagues on their potential for growth and development.
While performance was measured in real-world metrics, potential was defined by subjective traits like assertiveness, charisma and execution skills. This difference in measurement led to women being 14 percent less likely to be promoted per year, slowing down their ascent through the leadership ranks and leaving senior management positions dominated by men.
If you have aspirations of leading a team, department or company, it can feel incredibly important to move from an individual contributor (IC) to a management role as soon as possible — the higher you go, the harder it is to break through glass ceilings.
Here’s how to make that all-important first part of the climb up the ladder according to eight New York women in tech who have all made the ascent themselves.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
There is a good amount of overlap in the skill set needed for senior engineering IC and management roles. Both need to understand the business context and goals of their team and be able to break down business problems into executable work. You’re expected to mentor and grow these engineers while simultaneously caring for the long-term technical stability and resilience of your systems. You can’t go wrong by pushing for more exposure to the business and working on your ability to break down problems into well-executed solutions.
When I was an engineer, human resource processes were one of the more invisible parts of management to me: how we get headcount, what processes kick off when someone is hired and performance review cycles and the role managers play in them. The good news is you have a great resource to learn these things, your manager. Use your one-on-one time to be curious about what they are working on, share your interest in the management path and ask what tasks they can delegate to you.
Identifying high-priority initiatives and determining how your team will tackle them is a core part of engineering leadership.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
Identifying high-priority initiatives and determining how your team will tackle them is a core part of engineering leadership. One example of this involves a time when my team had grown quite a bit. We had three product managers, myself and two other engineering managers, and a bunch of engineers loosely organized into work streams. We were planning for upcoming quarters and it was clear the current alignment of work-to-work streams wasn’t going to serve us any longer.
I got the PMs and EMs together and drew out our goals for the upcoming quarters, guiding the PMs to stack-rank the initiatives amongst each other and the EMs to map the engineering skills and capacity to the highest-priority work — all while ignoring the current work stream boundaries. Doing this collectively created buy-in from the start across engineering and product leadership.
Later that year I was formally promoted to senior engineering manager. As I continued to grow in my career, I took a version of that process with me, getting leadership groups together, laying out the bigger picture and having them work as a group toward a solution.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
Communication. Tailoring your message and medium to your audience is crucial. You see this in one-on-ones where you need to listen and truly hear your team members to effectively support and coach them and also in technical writing in specs, requests for comments or technical strategy docs.
Even something as simple as communicating the status of a project takes on so many forms. You get into the weeds with your team talking through implementation details but have to translate that to business impact and progress toward the goals you and your PM are accountable for. You may need to represent this work to non-technical stakeholders who won’t need to know how an API is being built but will need to know how the feature will impact their team or when staffing up will be needed to support it in the market.
Maybe the project hit a critical milestone and you will be presenting it at a company all hands. Or maybe its value is in question and you need to explain to your manager or the exec team why it should continue to receive investment. All that requires communication.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
A general misconception is that strong individual performance is the most important aspect of preparing for a management role. While performance is likely the first measure to unlock promotion eligibility, the best organizations also care that the candidate contributes positively to the overall team. This does not mean you need to be the loudest person in the room. Instead, it should be clear and obvious — in your own way — that you are invested in the team’s success in addition to your own.
Share ideas, feedback and experiences in team meetings. Meet with new team members to help with onboarding and coaching. Offer your time to assist with enablement. Try to identify gaps on your team that your experience can help to fill. While it is important to be an expert in your job, you can also start to develop skills for helping others to become experts, too.
Additionally, let your current manager know you are interested in moving to management. Ask that person for advice, mentorship and reading materials. See if there are any projects you can assist with. Great managers are invested in your career and will gladly provide guidance.
Coaching is the number one skill a person should cultivate to move into management, and coaching requires curiosity.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
About a year and a half into my tenure at a previous company, the leadership team asked me to move to a new city to open a new office for the sales team. I had been a manager for about six months, and the idea of hiring and leading a new business unit was terrifying. My VP told me to think about the offer, but I said yes immediately. My company saw enough potential in me to take a chance, and I knew it was a rare opportunity.
I embraced my inexperience and experimented, studied external materials, hired a great team and raised my hand when I needed help. I had a lot of success and was promoted to a director role six months later. If I had been too afraid to take the risk and jump into the opportunity when it was presented, I would be years behind in my career today. Nobody ever “feels ready” for the next role. Sometimes you just have to take the first step and be willing to learn along the way.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
One of the most difficult things for new managers to learn is how to coach someone on a task instead of doing the task for them. Managers are often experts in their field and know a lot of the answers. However, we don’t learn if we can always rely on someone else to complete our work or tell us exactly what to do. Coaching is the number one skill a person should cultivate to move into management, and coaching requires curiosity. If someone comes to you with a problem, try asking them a question before providing a solution.
The mere act of reasoning through solutions, even if they come to the wrong conclusion, means they have acquired more skills to work through the answer themselves the next time. And if they come to the wrong conclusion, there is a teachable moment that requires an explanation of the why’s and why not’s.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Prioritization is one of the most underdeveloped skills in first-time managers. As an individual contributor, you can muscle through tight bandwidth, which means you aren’t forced to prioritize and manage time and effort against outcomes. Often, first-time managers struggle to deliver through their team because they haven’t learned how to prioritize and define the baseline outcome.
To prepare, I recommend t-shirt sizing your own big projects — small, medium and large — and prioritizing work against a defined goal. Developing and delivering against your own time will help you develop your own system for time management and eventually coach and hold others accountable to do the same.
Almost every career-defining moment for me has come as a result of taking on a project, function or goal that had failed several times before.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
Almost every career-defining moment for me has come as a result of taking on a project, function or goal that had failed several times before. Often it is operationally complex, ambiguous and fast-moving work with poorly defined problem statements or a bad product-market fit. The first project at Bluecore was launching a performance-based pricing model.
We were at a point of providing tremendous value to customers that were showing up as month-over-month gains in e-commerce revenue but that was tied to an a la carte pricing menu that forced customers to sign new contracts every few months. By developing and defining a new business model with companion packaging, we were able to give customers access to all our platform capabilities and future innovations while aligning with their key objective of revenue growth.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
Master communication as a vehicle for context setting. I see a lot of managers over- or under-sharing information. They view information as something to be controlled, gifted or shoved over the fence. The most common view is that communication is about transparency, and I fundamentally disagree with that premise.
I can share everything I hear or what is on my mind and communicate very little. Great communication provides clarity around actions and enough information for the recipient to make good decisions. A manager who masters communication will have a team in lockstep with shared goals — and more importantly, shared learnings.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Empathy is perhaps the most important skill to develop. Individual contributors just have to think about their own projects, to-do lists and careers. You have to think about those things for yourself and everyone on your team as a manager, and your primary role is to help your team thrive and grow. Who are they, what motivates them and what circumstances drive them to perform their best? Think about training and onboarding — are you giving them the tools to succeed and grow? Similarly, managers should deliver ongoing feedback that celebrates strengths and builds upon shortcomings. Performance reviews shouldn’t have any surprises.
The ability to work efficiently with other teams is another important skill. By understanding each team and their contributions, you have a clearer view of the organization and the support and collaboration needed to drive it forward. This puts you in a much better position to lead others as you work toward a common goal.
Aspiring managers should focus on empathy and understanding how to work with cross-functional teams, which both derive from communication.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
I spent the majority of my career working with pharma brands on the agency side. In a previous role, I created a new service offering by connecting multiple data sources in a single integrated platform, enabling clients to better understand physician personas and behaviors. Because that data was all offline, it was never able to translate to a digital buying platform.
When I joined DeepIntent in 2018, the first thing I did was write the business plan for our “HCP Planner” solution, which solves that very problem. DeepIntent was a much smaller company then, and everything it took to launch a new product was my responsibility. Bringing the HCP Planner tool to market was one of my proudest career accomplishments because it helped put DeepIntent on the map. It was named one of PM360’s “Most Innovative Products of 2019” and I was promoted from VP of data and product to chief strategy officer.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
Aspiring managers should focus on empathy and understanding how to work with cross-functional teams, which both derive from communication. Communication skills are two-pronged: You must be able to communicate just as effectively with internal teams as those outside of your organization.
This means developing presentation skills beyond regurgitating a slide and becoming more persuasive and influential. It also means being able to effectively ask for and deliver feedback. Those conversations can be uncomfortable but are ultimately necessary to grow. Most importantly, a good communicator is always a good listener. Your colleagues have different perspectives and it’s important to listen and learn from them.
One way to improve communication skills is to observe leaders you admire. Ask them for feedback, which can help inspire the way you deliver feedback. Giving good feedback creates strong bonds with the people on your team because you’re helping them develop their skills. Another way to hone communication skills is simply to make a point to converse with people at every level.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Learn to listen more than you speak. Read and learn as much as you can on the topic of management and women in leadership. Advocate for the women around you and take on mentorship opportunities. Take any opportunity you might have to attend trainings on people and team management. Reflect on the attributes of managers you have flourished under. Develop awareness of any implicit biases you might have and actively work to eradicate them. Step outside your comfort zone often and get used to feeling uncomfortable. Find your own voice and develop the courage to use it.
Read and learn as much as you can on the topic of management and women in leadership.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
Earlier in my career, I worked hard on being a great generalist. As I progressed, I made a concerted effort to identify my unique “superpower” so that I could harness it throughout my career. Once I figured out what that was, everything clicked: I was able to take on more responsibilities that utilized it, which made me develop credibility and become the subject matter expert on the topic. Furthermore, I was able to hone it over the years so I could coach and mentor others on the subject. Ask yourself things like, “What am I uniquely good at? What is my one superpower?”
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
Active listening. Managers should always listen more than they speak, and it’s an underrated skill to master in the world we live in today where everyone feels an urgency to be heard. You cannot be truly empathetic without listening to others and you cannot lead effectively without hearing what your team needs and resonates with the most.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
First, ask yourself why you want to move into a management role. If one of those reasons isn’t “to help others develop in their careers” then you might want to rethink it. Plenty of successful people thrive in individual roles and don’t need to move into management. The higher you go in management, the less control you have over your day.
For those who do have “helping develop others” on their list, I’ll share this. Moving into a management role quickly highlighted areas where I needed to be skilled in understanding people and what motivates them, selling ideas to teammates, backing up ideas and decisions with data rather than personal thinking or bias, and understanding the operations behind the business. Pick one of those topics or systematically check them off in a list, but invest in training, a business mentor or books in the areas outlined above to prepare for a management role.
Don’t downplay the tasks you’re working on today however trivial they may seem because that role is your personal launchpad.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
A key accelerator for me was when I worked in a startup and was asked to take on a line of the sales business which really wasn’t humming yet. We didn’t yet know the magic of what we had and needed someone to find out. I think I was tapped for it because I showed up consistently for the little things in my role, so leaders thought they’d see that same methodical tenacity and drive in bigger things.
I also was vocal in my curiosity. Don’t downplay the tasks you’re working on today however trivial they may seem because that role is your personal launchpad. Show up for the little things, be curious and before long big things will knock at your door.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
Google “Dale Carnegie sales training,” register for “The Dale Carnegie Course” in-person sessions and pay for it yourself if your company doesn’t have the budget. A roughly $2,000 one-time investment will change your trajectory and cultivate every skill you need to move into management.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
I encourage honest introspection to see if management is really what you want. I’ve seen many strong ICs who would’ve been happier on an advanced individual contributor path. If management is what you truly want, there are two major areas to develop in.
First, hard skills like strategic thinking, specifically the ability to develop an executable roadmap from conceptual business goals. This will help you to build an effective team that delivers meaningful impact. Since the business environment is fluid, the ability to stay connected, adapt and pivot is also critical.
Then there are soft skills. Cultivating the ability to learn and care for your team is foundational. When you understand your team’s motives, strengths and weaknesses, you can give them proper assignments and incentives. And when you care, you will go the extra mile to set the team up for success and build trust more easily. Leading people with not only your mind but also your heart goes a long way.
Leading people with not only your mind but also your heart goes a long way.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
For me, it was an accumulation of many different efforts that can be put into two major buckets: set the goal with clarity and alignment and take care of people. A clear goal sets the North Star for the team, but without clarity and cross-functional alignment people will be all over the place. When energy is diverted, the outcome will be diluted. I’ve always strived to bring more transparency across teams and create communication forums for people. When you put a group of smart people together, provide a clear objective and ensure information flows properly through all directions, magic happens easier.
As leaders, we should always remember that we lead people, not headcounts. Finding a sense of purpose for your team, ensuring that their opinions and contributions matter and their work is recognized allows you to achieve something meaningful!
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
The willingness to serve. As you move from IC to a manager, you no longer focus on your own specific assignments. You need to take care of your direct reports, upper management, other internal stakeholders and target customers. This brings a different meaning to day-to-day work. Managers try to understand the true needs and underlying motives of the people they serve. We start to think about the changes we can introduce to improve people’s lives.
If people feel they are trusted, respected and taken care of, they will go the extra mile. And if we genuinely care about our target customers’ real needs, the product strategy we develop will be at a different level. A manager willing to serve their fellow team members can help create a motivating, healthy environment that can deliver meaningful results and bring success all around.
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What should individual contributors be doing during their career to prepare for a management role?
Learn to do all the work that you will be expecting from the people you manage. It creates a much deeper feeling of respect and lets you lead by example. Learn the processes in and out and think about what you would do differently and why. It’s great to question things, but it’s also important to understand how difficult it may be to make a change. You stand out by saying, “I identified the problem and thought of a solution,” not by saying, “It would be better if…”
Finally, embrace failure. What is important is trying something new and learning from the experience. Understand the risk of trying something new and take accountability for the result.
Learn to do all the work that you will be expecting from the people you manage. It creates a much deeper feeling of respect and lets you lead by example.”
Was there a moment in which you did something that helped you stand out as a leader at your company?
I initiated and headed a huge project. It was a change I felt was necessary and though I got a lot of pushback, once my neck was on the line I felt that I had to get it right. It took a lot, but I got it done. The “how” is what matters, though; I asked for help when I needed it and gave credit where it was due. It’s important that when you rise you bring everyone who helped you up, too.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they’d like to move into management?
Communication. When you manage, you manage people. It’s so important that your message comes off the right way and you lead people toward growth rather than kill their morale.
