More responsibility is not growth

The average age of a VP of Engineering and a Senior Manager of Engineering is the same: 47. So, your career growth is not about time served in a role. The people who make it to director and beyond didn't wait around for it. They positioned themselves, they asked, and when the company couldn't give it to them, they moved out. Ask being the keyword here.

Praise and promises

A Senior Manager we’re working with kept getting told by her management, “Hey, you're too good in your current role and we can't afford to replace you” And she bought it. She even felt flattered.

They kept adding more and more responsibilities to her charter and she kept thinking this would count towards a great promotion or at least increase her chances for a lucrative job-switch. Problem was, it was impossible for her to run a job search on her own with how much work she was doing, and an internal promotion was always coming “next quarter” or “during the next appraisal cycle.”

In the meantime, all she got was praise and promises.

Praise doesn’t pay bills, and more responsibility is not growth.

What growth actually looks like

Here's what most people get confused by: They think because they keep getting more responsibilities, they're growing. They're not. More responsibilities at the same level is not growth. That's just exploitation.

Your job as a leader is to build a system, scale it, stabilize it, and then replace yourself with somebody who can run it. And then you move on to the next level where you have more leaders underneath you or you're leading something at a bigger scale. Unless that's happening, you're just stacking work on yourself. And look, you can have a “promotion” internally, but you can't go outside and leverage that because you haven't actually grown.

If your management benefits from it, they will keep you where you are. They do not care about your growth. They're selling internal growth to you with this euphemistic corporate language and it keeps you trapped. And you have to wake up out of that narrative as soon as possible.

At Wolf Mentoring, we've placed 100+ tech leaders in Director, VP and C-level roles. And the number one conversation I have with managers who come to us is some version of "I've been a senior manager for five, six, seven years and I can't seem to break past that. What am I doing wrong?"

If you’re having the same questions, we can answer those AND, when your market qualifies, guarantee the results. Book a call with us to get started.