What are the best ways to advance your IT career through team management?

While receiving constructive feedback can be challenging, often touching on personal sensitivities and impacting self-esteem, it remains an invaluable tool for growth. Here are some strategies I've found particularly effective in embracing and using constructive feedback: 1. Recognize that the perception of others is their reality; all feedback, regardless of its objective accuracy, is relevant. 2. Recognize that feedback is a key to uncovering blind spots, accelerating your personal and professional development. 3. Appreciate that when someone offers constructive feedback, it reflects their deep investment in your success and their genuine care for your progress. In a nutshell - Feedback is a gift.

Humility can be a superpower if you let it. The age spectrum is wider in IT than many adjacent fields, and it is important to ask for unfiltered feedback from those older and younger than you to get a realistic perspective on your performance.

No one wants to read a list of strengths/weaknesses. Are you able to clearly communicate the value you delivered and the outcomes you achieved and specifically tie that to being a force multiplier? If your list of accomplishments is what you personally did rather than how it got done because you supported the people who had to do the job, then you are not a Manager, you're an individual contributor who prides themselves in their manager title. Your skills are the value you've achieved, not what you say you can do.

Through experience, I found that it's critical to understand the business priorities at any given moment and align your work and impact with them. Showing impact is equally important and needs to use objective and quantifiable metrics to the extent possible. Here are a few concrete tips that may be helpful: 1. Proactively seek opportunities to expand your scope by identifying relevant problems and proposing solutions. 2. Figure out what the goals of your manager and your manager's manager are. Find ways to apply your skills to support those goals and show impact. 3. Build relationships with your peers and stakeholders by seeking to understand their spaces and proactively offer support. Make sure to ask for feedback as well.

Who are your mentors? If you were asked this question in an interview, don't list random people who inspire you that you just passively consume their content. Can you itemize who is someone you specifically seek out? Do you know why you talk to them and consider them a mentor? The list needs to be larger than whoever your current boss is. Bonus points if it's someone who is either a current direct report or a former one. Demonstrate that you know how to follow, not just lead.

If you can't tie everything you've done back to outcomes and and what level of the organization you've had impact, then you need to start doing so. Everything you do as a leader/manager in software or IT has some kind of outcome. It's not about the projects you've complete, it's about the change you've enabled. Actions speak louder than words, show that via what you did.

Your list of accomplishments and results achieved should not just include a list of positive outcomes for your boss, or company. If you want to say you're a great leader/manager of people you should be maintaining a list of great (and no so great) outcomes for the people you've supported. How many people do you think would say that as their manager you positively impacted their career and created opportunities for them to grow, achieve and move on to better things? Better yet, do you insist in your quarterly/annual goals with your manager what your positive outcomes will be for your people, not just your delivered projects? Promotions, raises, opportunities found or provided. Are you growing your people, or just making them do work?

We all like to claim that we are adaptable. It's probably the most common random word I see on a leaders resume profile. If you're claiming it, can you prove it? This isn't about times you've disagreed and committed. How many times has major change occurred in your professional career? Were you leading that change or just adapting to it? Adapting to change as a leader means supporting that change, finding opportunities to drive it and be a part of its outcomes. This isn't about shielding your team from the big bad corporation, this is about positioning your people to be thought leaders and the drivers of change. This is how you demonstrate your usefulness to those who need to affect change to realize outcomes.