Helpfulness: A Key To Unlocking Leadership Responsibility
“Helpfulness: A Key To Unlocking Leadership Responsibility” by Karen Catlin The best piece of advice I received when I started managing people? That my …
“Helpfulness: A Key To Unlocking Leadership Responsibility” by Karen Catlin
The best piece of advice I received when I started managing people? That my job was to make my team successful. Over time, I built on this advice, realizing that I also had to make the teams around me successful. This approach was key to unlocking more leadership responsibility. Let me explain…
At one point in my career, I was the only program manager at my software company, responsible for scheduling and organizing the work needed to create a successful product. Given that I hate reinventing the wheel, I was careful to keep track of what I did, improving how I got the job done with each project we released. When other teams started hiring program managers, I put together a kit of my best practices to help them learn the ropes and be successful. I wasn’t expecting anything in return, but, in hindsight, creating this kit was critical to my career. My personal brand became linked with strong program management, driving consistency across business units, and “dotted line” leadership of people outside my direct team. As a result of helping others, my leadership reputation and responsibilities grew.
While I like to think of myself as a generally helpful person, I’m a novice when compared to Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton. I heard about him from my friend Lise, who pointed me to a NY Times article “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?” The reporter followed Grant during a typical day, where students sought his advice as he walked across campus, stood in lines outside of his office hours waiting to get a chance to talk to him, and sent him hundreds of emails asking for help or thanking him for something he had done for them.
Adam Grant practices “extreme helpfulness,” giving his time and advice to everyone who asks for it, regardless of how busy he is. He’s truly generous with his time, without expecting anything in return. Does helpfulness pay off for Grant? According to the article, yes.
“For Grant, helping is not the enemy of productivity, a time-sapping diversion from the actual work at hand; it is the mother lode, the motivator that spurs increased productivity and creativity.”
Creating the kit for program managers was my mother lode. After that experience, I wanted to help my co-workers even more. I started mentoring individuals to share my experience and advice. I continously updated the kit and encouraged others to contribute to it. I built shared engineering services teams to help other groups across the company create their software products. Like Grant, helping others increased my productivity and creativity, along the way making me a better leader.
How did I transition from simply being helpful to being recognized as a leader? There is an important distinction to make. Making people around me successful does not mean that I did their work. By contrast, I shared my experience while helping them identify their own strategies for success. If you want to turn helpfulness into leadership, consider the following:
- Teach others to fish. If co-workers ask you to track down all the difficult bugs (because you’re so good at it), turn it into a leadership opportunity. Identify the 3-5 steps you take to reproduce any difficult bug, share it in an email or internal blog, and offer to give a casual talk about it at your next team meeting. Bonus points for giving a lightening talk about it at a local tech Meetup.
- Embrace lessons learned. Offer to run a post-mortem or review of a customer meeting, a sprint, or a system outage. Identify things that went well and things that need to improve. Create best practices.
- Tell stories. Every challenge that you or your team faces is fodder for a story that can guide future behavior and become part of your company’s lore. Look for opportunities to be the keeper of this knowledge and to share it via storytelling.
- Share credit. Be generous with thanking others for what you learned from them or what they contributed to the projects you weave into your stories, your lightening talks, or your best practices.
The next time you help people around you be successful, consider using one of these approaches to build your reputation as a leader. They’ve worked for me, and I hope they help you as well. If you want to explore this topic further, please consider joining Femgineer Friends, our bi-monthly group mentoring program. We meet online to discuss strategies for developing leadership skills and advancing your technical career.
Do you have other ideas for transitioning from simply being helpful to being recognized as a leader? Please leave a comment; I’d like to hear from you!
Karen Catlin, a former software industry executive, is now a leadership coach and the latest member of the Femgineer team. She is passionate about helping women have successful careers in tech. She’s also the author of “Use Your Inside Voice“, a blog about the intersection of leadership and parenting; a version of this post was originally published there. Find her on Twitter at @kecatlin.
