Wizard of Oz manager moments

One of my favorite parts of being a manager is helping someone tap into more of their potential.  I believe that we all have infinite ability to grow. So even when someone seems to be at the top of their game, there’s another layer of what they can achieve.

Sometimes growth is fixing gaps, but the more interesting growth is when you take what you’re good at and make it great or great to amazing.

The real leaps in impact come from honing what you’re really damn good at. To help illustrate this point, I often draw this diagram.

For any job there are a range of necessary skills.  For an engineer, those may be language proficiency, systems design, testing, working with others etc.  A PM might include communication, technical depth, data analysis, user research etc.  What ever your job is, list out the skills that are required in place of the skills place holders. At each level there are different expectations.  Often in more junior levels there’s a need to grow in each of them.  You need to develop a solid foundation and be able to reach a level of usefulness across the board.  But at higher levels, the base expectation of each skill doesn’t jump as much.  Instead, there’s an expectation that you start to specialize a bit in where you can add massive impact in specific areas. Some skills follow a slightly different pattern.  For example, it’s common that leadership is an added category that may not be required at junior levels and later is a base expectation.

The great news is that as long as you bring all areas up to the baseline for your level (or the next level to reach it) you can then focus more of your energy on the areas that you are gifted in or love.

For this reason, I encourage the people that work with me to spend 80% of their efforts in areas that are in their strengths area.

As a manager, one of the greatest things you can do, is to help people identify their strengths and find new ways to align them with business needs.