How can I become a Director?

How can I become a Director?

Invariably, this is a question that I get asked many times every year. There is something about the title “Director” that suggests a non-trivial magnitude of change in expectation, responsibility, status. In any software product company (which are unfortunately the only ones I am familiar with, since my entire career has been spent only in such companies), the title of Director is one that is coveted by many and should always be a protected title that conveys a sense of capability, mindset, and influence in those who have the title – not just the achievements and results that got them there.?

My thoughts below have nothing to do with my current employer or any specific company. This is MY idea of what it takes to deserve the title regardless of the company you work for. The actual bar used in different companies may be quite different (higher or lower).

When I assess people for “Director-worthiness”, regardless of the specific function they belong to (Engineering, Product Management, HR, Talent Acquisition, etc.), I look for the following qualities to determine if they are ready or not:

Mastery

• To become a director in any area, I expect that the person has played at least one (or several) roles in that organization at an individual contributor level, for a sufficient period that gives them deep insight into the nitty-gritty details of what the work involves. For e.g. If I am looking to promote someone to be a Director of Engineering, I expect that the person has played the role of Engineer (and if relevant, that of an Architect) for well over a decade before becoming an Engineering Manager.?
• IMHO, this length of time is needed for someone to see enough challenges and situations where they get a 360-degree view of all that is involved to succeed in that role. Being a Director means knowing the job of the folks who do the core body of work in the team so well (through personal experience), that they can lead with authority and credibility that comes only from having been in those shoes at a ground level.
• However, just Mastery of the details is not enough. To be a Director, the experience not only has to be deep – but the lessons the person has learnt from this experience has to enable them to draw significant and simplifying abstractions that allow them to draw the big picture for others without being lost in the details alone. For e.g. Engineers are particularly good at articulating WHAT they are building and HOW they are going about building it, the tools they are using, the programming languages and frameworks they are leveraging, etc. But often, it is only with experience and deliberate thought that they will be able to articulate the WHY behind what they are doing and how this WHY guides both the WHAT and the HOW.?
• Being a Director means one has leveraged the experience and blended it with thoughtfulness to hone one's ability to derive the WHY behind everything that the team does and learnt how to communicate the WHY in a way that motivates teams and clarifies the picture for the team.
• Mastery of both the details as well as meaningful abstractions where relevant, are important for someone to attain, to become a Director.
• As you prepare to demand the role of a Director, assess yourself carefully on how well you can draw abstractions and explain the WHY convincingly to people. Put yourself in other’s shoes and see if you would be convinced by the WHY. Start to mindfully practice articulating the WHY when you assign responsibilities to people. With practice, you should get better and better at formulating the WHY when ambiguity around the purpose exists. All your team members automatically can be good avenues of target practice. When you articulate the WHY to the team and they “get it”, you know you’re getting better at this.

Clarity and Simplicity in thought and expression:

• When one has to “Direct” another person, the primary element for effective “direction” is communication. And for any communication to succeed, it is not language skills that matter the most. It is clarity of thought that matters the most.?
• For someone to earn the title of “Director”, their internal thought engine must evolve to a level where they are able to articulate their thoughts very succinctly and clearly in a way that forges clarity and simplicity to any situation. When clarity and simplicity are inserted into any situation, “directing” people on what to do and why, becomes very straightforward.?
• As you prepare to earn the Director title, start working on writing a lot. Write down your reasoning and rationale. Put effort into learning how to organize your thought process into bullet points. Read, re-read, compress, repeat – get good at succinctly articulating a position in as simple a manner as possible. Enlist the help of a trusted colleague to review what you write and see if they come back with questions. If there are questions that should have been answered in the written material in the first place, that is input to you that you need to get better at communicating clearly in a way where no easy questions come up.?
• I am suggesting writing things down a lot, to build muscle for clear communication. The more you write, the more your brain gets accustomed to structured thinking – and this helps you even when you speak. The clearest speakers are often ones who have spent time honing their written communication skills. This is also one reason many great companies insist on a culture that mandates heavy use of writing. Writing forces people to think and articulate with clarity.

Intent to inspire:

• This is a leadership quality that is needed for leaders at any level – not only Directors. However, I consider this to be non-negotiable for someone who wants to be a director.
• Leadership is rarely about great ideas or great execution by an individual – it is often about teams of people coming together to accomplish unreasonably great things together. Anything “unreasonably great” happens only when people are inspired – not merely commanded. For any Director, the recognition that the ability to inspire is an important trait for collective success – and building intentionality around becoming better at inspiring others, is particularly important IMHO.
• I don’t expect every Director to be inspirational – but I expect every Director to recognize the importance of this element and intentionally work on getting better at inspiring people.
• How does one get better at inspiring people? It is a complex combination of not just being able to think and speak clearly about the WHY, but crafting a message that caters to individuals as well as groups, keeping in mind their current context, what they might be going through in their own personal lives, reading their individual personalities and gauging what drives them, etc.?
• A popular hypothesis is that all human motivation stems from either fear or greed – and that inspiration often builds on a deep-seated greed in all of us for greatness. I feel such a binary explanation for the underpinnings of motivation ignores another key driver in most humans - Purpose. While motivation may be founded in fear and greed, a vast majority of the most motivated individuals draw from a deep sense of purpose to power their motivation. Every human being often aspires to personal and collective greatness and a chance to participate in any effort that achieves greatness. Reading individual motivations (founded in purpose/fear/greed) and crafting a message to inspire people is something that one can practice and get better at over time.
• Often, people believe that the job of “inspiring” is left to senior management, management “Gurus”, etc. This is a fallacy. Every leader who aims to get to the Director level and beyond should intentionally build skills in inspiring others.

Bias for action/Decisiveness:

• We all want leaders who consider alternatives, assess options, weigh merits – nobody says they want a leader to blindly rush in a direction without weighing pros and cons. However, the speed at which this analysis happens, the confidence with which the leader picks one direction to go in and the willingness with which a leader accepts responsibility when things go wrong and course-corrects, determines the quality of the leadership in action.
• When I assess Directors, I like to see a strong bias to act versus a bias to endlessly be paralyzed in a state of analysis. I like decisive leaders who keep the ball moving because when teams are stuck in analysis, energy levels go down, negativity creeps in and sluggishness takes over – a?vicious?cycle takes root. Even when it is risky, I prefer leaders who jump in one direction (after a sufficiently deep analysis, of course) because movement causes the generation of positive energy, and a?virtuous?cycle gets created.
• As one prepares to claim readiness for a Director role, I would urge them to examine their decisions – how decisive have they been, how quickly have they acted – and very importantly, how many times have they been wrong and how have those times affected the quality of their future decisions. This last point is important because it is easy for anybody to just randomly jump in one direction and claim they are being decisive. If they fail more times than they succeed, then clearly this decisiveness is not helping anybody. The quality of decision-making must constantly go up, along with the speed+intensity of analysis and decisiveness.

Bias for transparency, kindness, and compassion:

• This bit may come across as soft and fluffy – but true, sustainable, ever-lasting greatness can only be attained if everybody involved in the exercise of creating something great equally get to share in not just the glory of the achievement but feel deeply cared for during the entire journey.
• Most outcomes are fleeting – but the journey to the outcome is the lived experience that is not fleeting. All of us are conditioned to disproportionately weigh outcomes when it comes to measuring success – but we rarely look at how glorious the journey was.
• A leader at a Director level should make the journey great. This is done through exhibiting a culture of transparency, kindness, and compassion in the way where every decision anchors itself not just in the WHY of the team’s mission – but also garnishes it with compassion and kindness that accounts for everybody on the team and what they are going through – and the entire process is transparent to let people know why the leader is behaving the way she/he is.

Leadership is, at its core, an exercise in rapid and radical trust generation. At a Director level, the expectation for me is that the individual not only recognizes the importance of trust – but is able to intentionally build their muscle in generating massive amounts of trust quickly left/right/up/down in the organization. The ability to generate trust needs to be even higher at more senior levels in the organization.