At some point in your career the job description becomes 100% “whatever it takes for your team and the company to be successful”. The people that get ahead are the ones that realize this fact early.
Steve Jobs is always a controversial character when evaluating management styles, but I have always loved this story regarding his expectations for VPs:
Steve Jobs told employees a short story when they were promoted to vice president at Apple. Jobs would tell the VP that if the garbage in his office was not being emptied, Jobs would naturally demand an explanation from the janitor. “Well, the lock on the door was changed,’ the janitor could reasonably respond. “And I couldn’t get a key.”
The janitor’s response is reasonable. It’s an understandable excuse. The janitor can’t do his job without a key. As a janitor, he’s allowed to have excuses.
“When you’re the janitor, reasons matter,” Jobs told his newly-minted VPs. “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”
“In other words,’ (Jobs continued,) “when the employee becomes a vice president, he or she must vacate all excuses for failure. A vice president is responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it doesn’t matter what you say.”
John Rossman, Think like Amazon
There is a lot of power in the Jobs story. As a senior leader you own it all – both successes and failures. The reasons for each stop mattering. My addition to that perspective is that ownership shouldn’t start at the VP level. You should be going above and beyond to deliver results, and owning all outcomes, wherever you are in your career journey. This trait is rare and puts you far above your peers in any industry.
I have had numerous direct and indirect reports that requested a kind of checklist for promotion. “Just tell me what to do and I will do it” is a common refrain. This is relatively easy to provide to recent grads up through Senior engineers. The expectations at these levels are more straightforward, almost mechanical. At the Staff+ levels it becomes much more difficult to create that kind of to-do list. This is because managers are indexing less on your technical knowledge and project completion rate. Instead, we are focusing more on your soft skills, including communication, collaboration, and ownership. Establishing strong ownership early shows a senior level of execution, accelerating your career growth.
This same ownership effect occurs within the management ladder. While software management is already a bit like four different jobs masquerading as one, at the Director+ levels is starts boiling down to “whatever it takes”. This explains why so many Director+ job postings are oddly vague, with terms like “create a healthy team culture”, “collaborate with product management”, or “ensure technical excellence”. As a job posting there has to be a job description, but how do you capture the reality of “responsible for everything”?
One of my personal Top 50 management books is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Lief Babin. You can distill the entire book down to a single view: you always have some control over a situation, so stop giving excuses and pretending that there was nothing you could do. The individuals who get ahead quickly are the ones that internalize this fact early.
Photo: The Cessna 152 that I did most of my flight training in. I have a lot of fond memories in that plane, including my first solo flight. On any plane the pilot-in-command (PIC) is the individual directly responsible for and the final authority regarding operation of that aircraft. No excuses.