Defensive Driving For Your Career

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To have a positive career you need to be appropriately recognized and rewarded for your work.

But there are a lot of ways that credit and/or rewards can get missed. Often it’s something unintentional, like your boss or some other executive simply didn’t realize what you accomplished, or didn’t understand the right way to compensate you for the value you’re adding. Sometimes it’s more nefarious, and someone is trying to take credit for your work or otherwise keep you down. Either way you need to drive defensively - taking actions that allow you to make forward progress even if people around you are negligent or malicious.

All of the techniques below can be approached in a benign way, but I realize that they may come across as cynical. There is a less cynical set of takes at the end as well.

Take Public Credit

Many organizations basically only know how to value you from what you announce publicly. If your role doesn’t own an explicit topline number for the business, it’s shockingly easy for people (including your boss!) to judge your work performance almost entirely on what you share with them.

This truth often gets lost in tech because many of the most important roles have visible and quantitative outputs (particularly engineering and sales, but also product management, design, and marketing roles that drive pipeline). For the rest, however, you’re basically relying on the last email you sent that your boss saw.

As a result, you need to be visible in a way that isn’t obnoxious or wasteful. To do this, you should pick 1-3 important, public announcements that you always make. Some examples:

• If you’re a product leader, you should own at least one major announcement cadence for your product. Example: Announce a new feature at every all-hands meeting or send a summary of all recent releases to the company.

• If you’re an engineering leader, you should own at least one major quality, stability, or performance number. Example: Announce your uptime number and whether it’s satisfactory or needs work to the entire EPD org. Report on defect rates and bugfix counts. For infra-heavy companies, report on infrastructure costs.

• If you’re a sales leader, you should own the company’s sales metrics. Share every 7-figure+ contract publicly in Slack, congratulate the Account Exec on the deal, thank the marketing, product, or sales engineering team. Every quarter, announce your bookings vs. plan and give some reflections (note that basically all sales leaders already do this, because they’re typically great at showcasing their own value).

• If you’re an Individual Contributor engineer, announce major upgrades to the product that you own, or interesting upgrades to the underlying technology (and why they matter).

Also, in many cases you have to send or speak the note, not your team. “They’ll know it was me” – they likely won’t. Nobody else is paying attention to you, and nobody else cares about you. Own the message, push it gently down people’s throats, and let your team own a different sub-message if they want to.

Other rules: Whatever you’re sharing has to actually be important, or else you’re like those free newspapers full of ads at the coffee shop. And if you send out the update, you are on the hook to really own it and answer questions. Which is kind of the whole point.

Don’t Let Anyone Lie About You

If you’re going to have a high-visibility job, like most execs, you can never let yourself get punked: having someone challenge you in front of a public audience and letting it slide.

The number one way that people punk you at work is by lying about you and what you did. Common examples include:

• Claiming that they did work that you actually did (note – it’s potentially ok if your boss does this, since you’re a part of their team, as long as they separately figure out a way to get you the credit you deserve. This is fairly common even with good managers)

• Claiming you said something that you didn’t, or DIDN’T say something that you did

• Claiming that you’re aligned with them when you’re not

• Agreeing to something on your behalf without consulting you first

The problem with getting punked is that it makes people think they can mess with you anytime they please. As a result, every time that someone lies about you, you need to politely (or if necessary, not so politely) push back and correct the record. The ultimate goal: You want to be a corporate rattlesnake – spend your whole day chilling in your cave (never lie about others), and if anyone comes after you, rattle once for a warning and then bite them in the face in front of their friends and loved ones.

Companies operate on an ultra-mild version of prison rules. Life operates on an ultra-mild version of prison rules. Unfortunately, that means that sometimes you need to lean way into conflict when someone challenges you in public. This works unreasonably well 99% of the execs who will lie about you are bullies who fear actual confrontation.

Beware People Who Think You Got Lucky

There’s a certain personality type that acts very unprofessionally if they think that you got to your position through luck. If someone is undeservedly doing “better” than them, they’ll behave strangely at minimum and in some cases actively sabotage them in order to settle some sort of score.

Doing “better” is personal and can be whatever metric they’ve chosen, but it’s typically some combination of title and lifetime earnings / current compensation, moderated by age. As in, I was a VP with $500k at your age, and you’re a COO making $2.5m.

A few situations that I’ve seen increase this risk dramatically:

• Your startup getting acquired for a lot of money, making you much richer than the acquirers. This one is a classic

• Being visibly young for your seniority

• Being young and having a lot of tenure / internal organizational leverage

• Being more successful than someone who has a very high prestige background, despite having a much lower prestige background (e.g. you went to community college, they went to a top Ivy, but you’re senior to them)

• Any of the above + a somewhat naive or aw-shucks demeanor that makes you feel bullyable

The best solution is to simply never let someone who thinks that you got lucky manage you, or control your title / compensation. That’s a pretty hard variable to control, so some of the better secondary ways to avoid this issue are to:

• Be highly paranoid about your title / compensation if you suspect jealousy is coming into the picture, including demanding to understand compensation philosophy and bands, or at least confirming how the bands that determine your compensation are being set

• Work with very ambitious people wherever possible, particularly ones with a strong internal locus of control. These sorts of people have a strong tendency to be competitive but not really care if you were “lucky,” and their desire for you to be happy (so that you continue to support the overall journey) will override any competitive urges that they feel towards you

• Be very aggressive and dominant in the workplace, simply because psychologically it’s harder to feel jealous of people who seem inordinately dominant in their demeanor

Maintain Leverage

Lastly, you need to maintain leverage at all times. Leverage mainly comes from one place: your ability to walk a valuable asset (your labor) out the door. As a result, for better or worse, it’s usually best to both be very good at your job (obviously) and then make it clear that you could walk, and that you even consider it from time to time.

There’s a balance here. You don’t want to be the dude who’s constantly throwing a tantrum and threatening to quit. So here are a few concrete steps you can take to keep em a little bit nervous. All of these ideas assume that you’re a good-to-top performer in good standing:

• Ask what it would take to get more compensation or a higher title periodically (if you feel that you deserve it and can justify it). Don’t assume that people are thinking about advancing you preemptively, you’re almost certainly thinking about it before they are

• Cultivate your network so that you have more career options. If there’s an easy way to do it in casual conversation, reference the fact that you have a deep network to your manager

• If something disappoints you at work, don’t fully bottle it up. You’re allowed to express discontent when it arises. You don’t want to be a constant complainer, but acting like someone who never has any issues is not ideal, either. The squeaky wheel gets the grease

I also recommend that you regularly take an interview or two to build your own confidence. You want that “I’m wanted” glow on you at all times.

How To Handle This As a Leader

Of course, if you’re a leader at a company (or the CEO), there are different takeaways. You don’t want your team to feel that they need to follow this advice and drive defensively all the time – you want them driving normally, on the same highway, ideally in unison, as fast as they possibly can. And there are ways to facilitate that:

• Have a very clear picture of what winning or losing looks like for different people on your team, and work with them to get reporting on those metrics upfront. You don’t want people to need to showcase their wins to get promotions, raises, or respect. You should work with them (or dictate) the definitions of victory, and monitor them yourself. You need a consistent evaluation function for every job on your team. It doesn’t even need to be objective, subjective evaluation functions (this product looks like shit) can actually be ok. It’s much more important that it’s consistent, so that people aren’t forced to perform for your attention in order to have a real career.

• If someone regularly lies about others, that needs to be a major performance issue that can result in termination.

• The best way to prevent capricious compensation is to not be capricious yourself, or tolerate jealous leaders on your team. There are red flags. If someone says “he hasn’t done his time” or “she’s only getting paid that much because we acquired her company,” they’re showcasing their real thoughts. Don’t tolerate this among your managers, and if you’re like this fix yourself.

• The best way to manage your employees’ leverage is to have very frank conversations with them about where they see their careers going and how satisfied they are on the job.

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