A lot of people have recently asked me a variant of the following questions…
What does it take to grow from a junior to a senior position?
How do I become more valuable?
While every type of position (development, marketing, sales, etc) has it’s own set of hurdles you’ll have to overcome I think there is one universal truth:
You become indispensible by making everyone else awesome.
You will not find a step by step guide to doing this. If someone tells you there is one you’ve been lied to. It’s subjective and everyone’s path will be different. But if you’d like some practical examples I’ll go on to prove the point:
Getting to Level 2
If you are a new recruit, out of college, you probably depend on other people for assistance. From that POV you are actually making people less successful because other people are spending time assisting you complete your tasks.
Moving out of the junior (or whatever title your company puts on it) should be based on how well you are able to complete your own work without depending on others to be successful. At this point you are contributing to the greater good and growing your skills on your own. This should be the quickest transition for people.
Getting to Level 3
Once you’ve demonstrated your successful independence and growth over time you’ll ask what it takes to be a viewed as a “Senior” member of the team. This is where you need to drop your focus on individual success and move onto team success.
The first indication that you are on the right path is when people start coming to you for advice. That means you’ve found a niche in something that’s made you individually successful. The hard part is not learning to turn your secrets into team success.
It doesn’t mean you need to be a manager or team lead. A good example of this in the development world is having created your 1st framework that other team members can use to be more successful. It could simply be that you become the go-to person when people want their work reviewed.
Beyond Level 3
There are two equal paths here that any good company should recognize:
Path #1 is for people that want to dedicate 100% of their time to other peoples success.
These are people that will be directly leading people. At this point your success is demonstrated by your ability to attract, motivate, and retain fantastically successful teams and do so on a continually larger scale.
Path #2 is for people that want to become an expert in their field.
It’s the most often forgotten path for a lot of companies, so I’ll provide some more details here. The universal success factor remains true and good companies would never succeed without these people. Your title/paycheck/worth here is still valued by how successful you are at making other people shine. Except in this case you are doing so through what, on the surface, may appear to be individually focused accomplishments:
- You continually solve problems that other people give up on for those people… but along the way you teach them to fish for themselves.
- You take every opportunity to share what you’ve learned with other individuals on the team because you know you’ve failed if you have to be the goto “hero” for everything.
- Your niche has become bigger and more important now that you’ve found a new way to look at something.
- You discover new patterns and implement scalable frameworks that other people can use over and over again to solve multiple problems.
- You kick start efforts or projects by taking those first painful steps or proving that the impossible is possible… and it doesn’t cost as much as other people thought.
Bonus – Taking the Macro View for World Domination
As I was thinking about this topic I came to the ?obvious? conclusion that the most successful ventures and companies are the ones that are dedicated to extending this philosophy to their customers and derive meaning for their employees in doing so. On the surface there are individual accomplishments, but when you dig there is always a larger platform/framework play that drove unprecedented success by making other people money.
On the surface… Microsoft commoditized a simpler computer experience, Google helped you find information faster, twitter helps you communicate more quickly, and Apple re-invented smartphones.
Dig deeper and you find… Microsoft built the best PC development platform, Google developed a business model for web sites through ads, twitter built the simplest communication API, and Apple one upped Microsoft by making the best* mobile platform for developers to make money with.
The challenge is to become the best at scaling what you believe in for other people. As an employer… once you find people that are good at this… don’t lose them since they are the hardest to replace… as they’ve become the most indispensible.