Growing along a technical non-management track can sometimes feel almost as disorienting as becoming a manager. Sure, you may not take on the entirely new career tasks of hiring, firing, and performance reviews of employees, but there’s still a pretty significant shift of identity that happens as you reach staff, architect, and principal levels of technical leadership.
One of the big adjustments you’ll need to make is in understanding that your value to the organization becomes much harder to prove through measurement. As you become more valuable, you’ll actually directly create fewer things. You will find yourself more removed from direct impact on any specific project or customer success.
You will provide insight, feedback, guidance, and warnings. Other people will actually do more of the hands-on work.
And sometimes the most important and valuable work you can do is to give insight that prevents ineffective or counterproductive work from being started.
Organizations tend to celebrate the members of project and customer teams who perform tasks and complete milestones. And just like managers give more recognition than they receive, you can also avoid promotion remorse by finding your fulfillment not in the accolades of others but in the quality and effectiveness of the invisible work that you do.
If you’d like to explore more about avoiding promotion remorse in non-management technical leadership, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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