Career Bloom

Your source for authentic and practical career advice

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Over last 25 years, I have experienced multiple R&D roles in small startups and large multinationals, across multiple geographies (China, US, India) and domains (payments, e-learning, edtech). I consider myself a mix of leader & strategist, entrepreneur & org builder, product creator & problem solver, and now, researcher & systems thinker.

  • Why do we work – when organizations care about careers

    In the last post on Career Stages, I described a few key attributes for evaluating career progression that organizations and/or individuals need to take care of if they want to effectively manage the career, esp. of their senior employees. Low engagement level, ‘through others’ contribution mode, and # of real working hours are key points an organization need to care about if they want their senior employees to contribute significantly.

    The definition of ‘senior’ is vague, and will vary from company to company. However, most companies know their ‘senior’ employees, and most ‘senior’ employees know they are ‘senior’, and so we don’t need a precise definition for now! J

    So what can an organization do?

    1. Upgrade recognition and project assignment systems: Most senior people (by above vague definition of ‘senior’!) are asset to the company. They have contributed a lot to the organization in the past and have gained immense domain knowledge that they are always eager to share and give back to the organization. As they meet their basic needs from the job (personal security, financial stability, health and well-being, etc.), (more…)

  • Why do we work – career stages and attributes

    In my previous post on ‘Why do we work‘, I talked about 4 levels of employees from the perspective of career and motivational stages: Entry Level Employees, Senior employees/frontline managers, Middle Managers, and executives. They differ in terms of how they manage their career and what motivates them to give their best to the organization. I also talked about the fact that motivations flow from basic human needs (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). In this and next 2 posts, I will focus on first 3 and discuss their career perspectives and what can be done to improve the situation.

    Here is a look at some key career attributes for early and late stages of career. Please note that this description applies to cases when individuals let the organizations drive their career plans. Also, there will be many more attributes than just these when you analyze your own career journey, these are the ones I found repeating across the people I talked to and have worked with in the past. (more…)

  • Why do we work – Career vs. Needs Hierarchy

    I have been talking to many working professionals over past few weeks about their need to work and what they seek from work. This post (and the next one) summarizes my observations and theory around what I hear.

    From a career and motivation perspective, there are 4 levels of employees in an organization:

    • Entry Level employees (Level 1): These are employees who are still figuring out how their career will proceed. Typically these are employees with 0-5 yrs of experience. They need a secure job that can fulfill their basic needs and they are willing to be very flexible around what roles they take up to achieve this. They are mostly unclear of their career goals and rely on their manager for all career guidance. (more…)

  • Career Management – A personal story

    I have always wanted to be my own boss. In Oct 2000, 4 years after my graduation and 1 year after joining Microsoft in US, I left to start my own company in India. It all seemed perfect: I was a ‘smart’ developer working in a ‘cutting-edge technology’ area, I had a ‘network’, and most importantly, I had the ‘energy and enthusiasm’ of a 27 year old who thinks the world is his playground!

    Six months later, the boom turned into bust, and so did our hopes of starting a new company. I found a job as a consultant in my old company and life continued, but it left a scar. I have been reflecting on that little experience over the years and I realize something important: it was a good failure. I didn’t know anything about creating and running a company – building teams, execute on a vague idea to build products, sell an idea or product or service, or handling big successes and failures. This failure provided me a strong motivation to embark on a journey through the corporate world to gain diverse experiences and learn. In my next attempt at entrepreneurship, I wanted to be able to succeed even when riding against the wave. I wanted to make that scar count. (more…)

  • Adjusting to a new manager

    When you get a new manager in your existing role, it is important to spend time in making some adjustments; otherwise your career may get adversely impacted. This is because relationship with your manager impact career the most. This relationship will be built only when you and your manager know enough about each other and act on them. Since it is your career that is at stake, it is important that you make sure that your manager knows you well, in addition to you knowing her well.

    Here are a few articles on this topic that focus on tactical activities that may help in this: same job, new boss, surviving new boss, adjust to a new boss, new boss? 5 ways to adjust

    In this post, I want to focus on a few strategic aspects of building relationships with a new manager so that you can apply these (or other) tactics more effectively.

    Here are the really important things to know about the manager:

    1. Goals and motivations – Everyone in a new role comes with a set of career goals and organizational goals. They also have specific likes/dislikes which motivate them to work everyday. Knowing these will help you make sense of their day to day actions.
    2. Leadership style (hands-on, hands-off, trusting, non-trusting, etc.) – Leadership Styles, Management Styles (more…)
  • Personal Excellence

    Personal Excellence

    Why do some individuals always try to do their best in a situation, while others don’t? At work, why do some people bemoan their work, and still do an outstanding job, while others seem happy with their work, and still produce mediocre results? In my experience, this can be traced to one of the important traits of an individual: desire to seek excellence in whatever they do.

    Everyone wants to be best at what they do, but it is not always easy to do so. Those with a healthy dose of this trait will continue to pursue excellence even when given a boring assignment or challenging environment, while others will give up and settle for mediocrity. So why do some people pursue excellence? Vince Lombardi (great football coach) suggests, “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”. For Indian movie fans, Amir Khan character in 3 Idiots says, “seek excellence, success will follow” (more on 3 Idiots). (more…)

  • New Managers: moving from 1 report to 5 reports effectively

    You were a management understudy and had a report (or 2) to test your management abilities. Now your manager thinks you are now ready to be a manager and you now have 5 reports. Congratulations!

    Once celebrations are over, you start thinking: is this going to be any different than before? Do my strategies for managing my 1 report extend to managing these 4? And you start getting some doubts. Are there some reasons to worry?

    In a previous post about industry newbie as manager, I pointed to perils of getting promoted to management position too early in the career. This is a very real problem and newbie managers should guard against this by spending enough time to master these skills and getting good at dealing with ambiguities and achieving results through others. Having 1 or 2 reports to start a management career is a good way to start practicing these.

    In another post about management challenges, I discussed major aspects of management that become critical when you have too many reports (my example had 9 reports). All those are very valid for managers having any number of reports, and if you are a new manager, you will do good to review them.

    However, when you move from 1 report to 4-5 reports, there is a big pitfall that you will do well to avoid. This is the art of time management. (more…)

  • Career Paths for engineers – Being a Phase 2 IC

    When I received my first performance review in as an individual contributor last month, after having been a manager for 7 years before that, it was revealing, to say the least. This prompted me to talk to a few other individual contributors I knew in the company, these discussions were very insightful.

    I also reviewed my post last year on Management Track vs. Individual Contributor Track where I had written the following:

    “… skills needed to succeed and measures of success for each track are very different and sometimes unclear. To succeed in management track, one needs to be good at dealing with ambiguities, taking decisions based on partial data, and be able to deal to managing regular management challenges; measure of success most of the time is very indirect (mostly through the success of the team members) and hence can be very subjective and debatable. To succeed in IC track, one needs to have deep technical and domain expertise, should be good at solving complex technical problems, and be able to provide technical and thought leadership; measure of success is very direct and objective and mostly based on visible results of the individual…”

    and had received some interesting comments:

    “..does salary play a role in why people opt for management as against continuing in IC role? If they want a better salary, is moving into management their only option?..”

    “..there is no good appreciation for IC’s to stay longer in their position. Its kind of peer pressure and moment of embarrassment when someone in family or friend ask “Are you still a software engineer?”..”

    “..Management shows that it as a carrier growth for the individual. Irrespective of the individual interest they force to get into management..”

    “..It may be different in multi-nationals but I think in most Indian companies the situation [people being forced into thinking management is the only career growth path] is what you have described..”

    My second inning as an IC seems to have given me a different perspective on this topic, a perspective that makes the picture more complete. I realize that my first post was about a specific phase in the career of an IC, and not complete. This post is an attempt to make it more complete and generate more discussions on this topic.

    Two Phases of an Individual Contributor Role
    (more…)

  • Managing career proactively

    In my last post Is your manager killing your career aspiration?, I raised the issue about good careers getting jeopardized when people read too much into manager’s feedback and kill their career aspirations. It triggered many comments from my friends on facebook, and it has taken me a while to internalize those comments and formulate my opinion and response. The discussions touched on the topics of ‘how much of the blame goes to manager, how much to the individual, and what role does organization’s culture play in all this?’. I also got some feedback on the lines of ‘this applies to me, I am in the same situation, what should I do, and how should I avoid it when I join another company’?

    This post is an attempt to analyze why someone gets into this situation, and how they can be careful and avoid this fate.

    Here are some of the things that went wrong for the person in the story:

    1. Job requirements are not aligned to what this person can offer or want to offer.
    2. Person is not able to put the feedback in perspective, and unable to see that the feedback is about the role and not always about him
    3. He doesn’t know what he wants from his job – this lack of direction leads him to believe everything what the manager says
    4. He doesn’t know what he needs to change in order to be excellent at the job, so he continues to follow what his manager tells him to do.

    If you read this carefully, you will notice that everything points to a reactive approach to career in this story. A reactive approach happens something like this: (more…)

  • Is your manager killing your career aspiration?

    I have been talking to a friend who has impeccable credentials as far as resume of an Indian engineer goes: IIT + IIM, about 15 years of work experience working in various big and small software companies in US. Such a resume attracts amazing amount of offers at incredible salary points. However, my conversations with him repeatedly bring up a point: he thinks he is no good, his experience is not useful to any company, he doesn’t do anything that deserves a grand salary, etc. etc. This is an insane view of the world, and when I prod him, I realize what is happening: his current company and his managers have been conspiring against him and using every performance review to tell and show him that he needs to improve in his current work, that he is just an average contributor who is found dime a dozen in this world.

    Such an atrocious lie! Such a waste of talent! Such an underutilization of human resource! (more…)