Superstar Employees

This is the fifth article in a series about Lessons Learned.

As mentioned previously, the art of management is about figuring out how to elevate your people to be their best selves, including when they are already excellent, or even better than you in one (or several) aspects. Often this can be challenging when the under-performers attempt to grab more of your attention, and top people can clearly run on their own quite well without much guidance. However, it’s important to resist the urge to spend all your time greasing the squeaky wheels, and ensure that you’re properly focusing on continuing to tune the parts of the machine that are already highly efficient. The metaphor breaks down a bit here, as the best parts of machines can’t build more machines (at least not yet), but that’s where we’re going with this analogy.

First, let’s talk about L, who was a superstar artist who became a superstar UX designer. L and I had worked together previously as friendly peers at a local video game company, and when I joined the Amazon Fire Phone team to build up a gaming group, I knew they were the artist I wanted to hire. During the interview, I specifically asked them if it would be weird working for me, as there was sometimes tension between former peers who followed different career trajectories. L didn’t foresee a problem, and I was happy that we were able to keep our working relationship friendly and professional.

Once onboard, L was extremely impressive with their ability to take the lead in the visual design for our sample games, working alongside our Game Designer, and even assist other teams with some look and feel work. L received praise across the org, even frequently from other managers and leaders who vocally questioned the value of gaming on device at all (despite the fact that at the time it was a $100B+ annual revenue earned across the industry).?

Even through the quality work and the positive feedback, L was more timid and uncertain than they should have been. I met frequently with L to pass on the feedback and encourage them to speak up more in meetings, have more backbone, and be forceful in driving their vision forward, even when facing resistance. I reminded them that they were the subject matter expert in this area across the entire org, as no other person on the team had any background in the arts on anything entertainment related. With time, L became more confident and vocal, and the feedback on them as a strong member of the team only improved.

This change didn’t happen overnight. There were months of conversations, actionable advice about how to communicate effectively, who to lean on for support in meetings, pairing them up with more senior leaders who could mentor them, and books to read that would offer different perspectives on the work environment. The outcome was that L turned from a very good hire to an outstanding employee and contributor.

About a year into their career, due to a schedule slip for the Fire Phone, the Gaming Team wrapped up it’s tasks and shifted over to join the Maps Team. This afforded L two amazing rewards. First, as they were enthusiastic to grow their expertise to continue on Maps User Experience, we changed their title to one in the UX Design category, which afforded them a hefty compensation increase. Then, two months after that, L received a Top Tier rating on their review. Because of the compensation increase with the title change, their review rating increase percentage was applied to their new total comp, adding another very significant financial bump. L was delighted, and I was happy that I was able to use the clear and visible data of their incredible work, contributions, and response to career coaching to argue for L to be appropriately awarded for their value to the team.

Another fine example was M, who worked as an engineer at a gaming company that I joined as a new leader for software engineering. This was M’s first role out of college, and while junior, they came across as confident without arrogance, and wrote solid code on some major feature areas. I quickly identified M as one of the strongest players on the (admittedly small) team, and started including them in more meetings and planning sessions as we hired up to grow the team.

In one-on-ones, M expressed a reticence about their ability to grow quickly, but I assured them that I would only push them until they were near their limits, then back off so they had time to adjust to their new normal. Meanwhile, I coached them on maintaining high standards and communicating professionally across the different teams within our organization.

Through all this, M was dealing with some difficult personal issues, so I made sure to balance out their workload expectations with plenty of personal time so that they could take the necessary steps to focus on their own needs outside of the company. M appreciated this, rarely missing a deadline, but feeling confident that they could say no when there was too much on their plate.

As the team grew, I frequently assigned M to help onboard new engineers, and as a result, not only did the engineering team spin up more quickly, but M gained a high level of trust across the entire company. Part of my coaching around this area was reminding M that spinning up engineers did not mean answering the same questions multiple times, but rather finding mechanisms to encourage new engineers to document their learnings and spread that around the team via entries in our Confluence instance and further democratization of knowledge; no one person should be perceived or allowed to become a bottleneck, either for knowledge nor capability.

By the time the team expanded past my ability to effectively manage all the Individual Contributors myself, I pitched to the studio lead that we could either hire an external manager, or promote an existing software developer to the manager role. The choice was obvious to promote M to this role, as it leveraged their existing knowledge, and they had already earned the trust and respect of the team, easing the transition. While it took about a month to convince M that this was the right move for them, mostly due to concerns about being a manager while still so early in their career, they eventually agreed and took on about half of my direct reports while still reporting to me. Continued coaching focused around how to handle to transition from IC to Leadership, how to communicate directly with both under-performers and their own rising stars, and how to advise without having the wisdom of years of experience.

M was a success because of both their drive and their ability to ask the difficult questions without fear around their own knowledge gaps. A combination of tenacity and humility led to a manager-employee relationship that allowed them to grow quickly and dramatically increase their impact across the company and project in a relatively short period of time.

There have been multiple other excellent employees that I’ve managed to help grow both their career and impact, and the consistent keys to this growth are: to give them the proper amount of focus; remember that everyone has areas in which they can grow and to identify and coach around these areas; and reinforce their strengths while amplifying their visibility across the organization. Identifying growth areas is easy if, as described in an earlier Lessons Learned, you have extensive and crisp role descriptions, and this is another critical piece of the puzzle in turning your great employees into excellent team members and leaders.

Next up, a discussion about Core Values.

Lessons Learned:

• Put your focus and time into your best performers, not your worst.
• Identify the gaps that remain to be closed to bring your top players up to the next level, and then coach and provide opportunities to close these gaps.
• Don’t be afraid to find external mentors and pair them up with subject matter experts when your employees have growth opportunities that are outside your area of expertise.?
• Ensure your rising stars are visible across the team so that it is easy to build org-level consensus for their continued growth and broader impact.