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Using leadership skills to grow your technology career

Have you noticed that every technology resume seems to begin with a long list of jargon? “ASP, .NET, C++, Java, …”

It sounds counter-intuitive, but learning new technical skills will not significantly increase your chances of moving up the corporate ladder.

Here’s the analogy: you can be the best janitor in the world and still be worth only a little bit more than an average janitor in terms of salary. Unless the major bottleneck to revenue growth in your organization is cleanliness, a janitor can do little to affect the bottom line and thus little to grow his career. And even if cleanliness were the bottleneck, an average janitor would provide roughly the same benefit as a fantastic janitor.

Of course writing software takes a lot more smarts than mopping floors. But unless the engineering problems your organization is solving are so difficult that only a limited number of people have the chops to tackle them - and you’re one of those people - then more technical skills won’t give you a lot of growth potential.

Besides, if you’re serious about your career you’ll be doing technical learning all the time just to keep up.

So what skills should you develop to grow your career?

Leadership Skill #1: Strong and clear communication

Executive radar is specially designed to pick up only a few kinds of behaviors. The first is clear communication. If your jargon and acronyms make executives want to pop an Advil, then you’re not on the top of the list for a promotion.

Adopt a straightforward style of communication. Use everyday words whenever you can and explain why what you have to say matters to the company; steer clear of the details of your implementation unless asked.

Leadership Skill #2: Persuasion and leadership

Leadership skills are an obvious way to improve your chances of promotion. You want senior management to notice that you’re skilled in one or more of the following:

leading others
persuading others of the merits of an idea
getting others to rally around an idea, building momentum
giving recognition to others for their work

If you demonstrate traits that suggest you can lead a team, you might find yourself doing just that. But be careful not to associate leadership with bossiness. Good leaders listen more than they talk and throw in a little bit of self-deprecating humor to show that they don’t take themselves too seriously.

Leadership Skill #3: Product, Business, and Financial Acumen

If you show your managers that you understand context, you’ll go far. Put things in the context of the market your product is targeting, or make an argument for something based on what you know of the business strategy.

Here are a few different angles to get you thinking:

What is your organization really good at doing? What is your distinctive competency?
Is your product a new technology, looking to disrupt established players, or an increment on a proven technology?
Does your strategy focus on high volume, or high margin?
Do you have an immediate need to make a quick profit, or are you targeting long-term growth and dominance?
Do you have several big customers that are particular important?
Who are your strongest competitors, and do they have any weaknesses?

Conclusions

Remember that when you’re considering investing in yourself and your career, the return on learning the intricacies of the latest .NET version is minuscule compared to the return you’ll get for improving the things that executives will notice.

Related Categories

Career Growth, Career Path, Communicating, Leadership

One Response to “Using leadership skills to grow your technology career”

Janice
June 1st, 2009 at 12:43 pm

I really want to work on my leadership skills and this might really help. Thank you for posting this.