Recently, I was invited to have a fireside chat type of conversation at an America on Tech panel. The audience was early career young folks either still in school or just at the precipice of starting their careers in technology. Most of them were from underrepresented minority populations — in short, kids who reminded me a lot of me.
When I was in their shoes, I tried to educate myself on what it would be like out in the real world. As a child of immigrants, the first message I heard was that I had to work harder — being just as good as folks from more privileged backgrounds would not be enough to succeed. As an honor student in school, I heard the message that you will have to work hard and it will all pay off when you get into a good college.
I got into the good college but then when I started to work, I realized a couple of things: my parents were right about the lack of meritocracy (more on that another time!) but all my hard work didn’t really fully prepare me for what the next twenty years of my career would bring. So, when I had the opportunity to speak to folks who were about to make that leap into this world, I shared my number one piece of advice.
1. Life is a group project. Work is a group project.
If, like me, you are somewhat of a perfectionist and maybe loathed group projects in college, then I regret to inform you that life is a group project. And what I mean by that is everything that really matters, you do with others. At work, when there’s a big problem to be solved and a new project that gets spun up, there are usually numerous people who are tapped on the shoulder to participate — and they all have to figure out how to get the job done, together.
It’s important for folks early in their career to recognize that you don’t actually have to like everyone that you work with — but you should learn something from everyone you work with. In some teams, the folks you work with teach you how to manage conflict and disagreement but still get the work done. With some folks, you learn how not to behave and not to treat others. That is incredibly important because as Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
2. Write the Right Things.
Writing is incredibly important but writing only what is right is more important. I’ll share two anecdotes to help unpack what I mean.
During my last couple of years in college, I worked as part of a team that did tech support for students and faculty, alongside maintaining the department’s website (which is where course materials like a syllabus were housed). We had a couple of supervisors who were great but their boss was not my favorite leader (and hindsight hasn’t changed my perspective). Occasionally I needed to interact with the boss in writing and quickly realized that if I sent a long email, it would not get read. I had to adjust; get more concise and get to the point quickly in order for them to prioritize a response. I didn’t take this personally but I did learn from that experience that we should assume most folks are busy and the best way to get a response is to put the right things into your writing. In my current day-to-day, I find myself re-writing emails to get them to be more concise before finally hitting send.
Later in my career, I learned an excellent lesson through my colleague who did not write the right thing. We were both working with difficult stakeholders and, in a message to one of our cross-functional leaders who was on our project, he mentioned a specific stakeholder by name and put down their idea. That message was obviously only intended for that leader’s eyes only but you can guess what happened next, the message accidentally landed in the hands of the person whose idea was being put down. That caused some unpleasantness and difficult conversations which are all completely avoidable by not putting it in writing at all. When I find myself re-writing my emails, I always try to think: if this message was forwarded to someone else (or plastered on a billboard), would I have a problem with that? If the answer is anything other than “no,” I know I have to keep working on my message.
3. You Need to Manage Your Boss.
Early in my career, I was just lucky to have a job. I graduated into a not great economy and a recession soon followed which made it important to hold on to whatever way I was earning a living at the time. And so I didn’t really think about what I needed from my boss: I wasn’t asking about whether they were investing in me and my growth. I didn’t come with targeted agendas on what I wanted to cover in our 1-1 meetings. I didn’t request feedback.
In hindsight, I was very passive early on in my career. I fell into a lot of great opportunities for growth which might’ve had to do with my work ethic but also, if I’m being honest, was highly about being lucky and working with some phenomenal humans. I wouldn’t go back and change any job hopping decisions I made but, if I’m being honest, there were probably opportunities that I didn’t know were options because I simply never asked.
The other piece of managing your boss is where this becomes reciprocal. If you want a manager who looks out for you and your growth, then you need to make them look good. And what I mean by that is doing your job really well. When you do a good job, it validates their decision in bringing you into their team (their choice now looks incredibly smart to their leaders or peers). It’s also important for folks to realize that part of managing your boss is trying to make their life easier. You obviously should not be picking up someone’s dry cleaning but something as simple as sending a weekly digest of what’s going on and context on where you might need their help so they can digest before your 1-1 meeting goes a long way.
Ultimately, you have to “learn” your boss to truly gain an ally in your career journey. You’ll have to quickly figure this out (e.g. how they like to get information from you, what are key decisions they’ve made and won’t be open to revisiting, what values might be motivating their movements) and adapt or else you’ll likely face far more friction. It is true that there are many bad managers out there but surviving them is possible if you learn their triggers (which can buy you time until you find a better situation).
4. Anything can be a data point.
There are undoubtedly going to be times in your career when you feel under appreciated, overworked, maybe a combination of the two! In those moments, it’s important to start to quantify. If I feel overworked, what’s contributing to that?
Even in my current role as a leader of a team, I’m not above using a stop-watch and timing how long it takes me to do a task I don’t want to spend time on for the purpose of then being able to say “I’m spending X hours of my week on Y low value task, is this where you want my time spent?” OR to say, “I’m drowning in X hours of this work that I know can be delegated so I can focus on where you need me in Project Z.”
Don’t shy away from asking for help — but having numbers to support the ask makes it hard to overlook. It also helps you avoid seeming like a complainer and instead positions you as proactive.
5. Boundaries Exist. Use Them.
Work is not family.
It is totally OK to not make someone else’s emergency your emergency. You will not earn a medal for caving for someone else’s urgency and you’ll be rewarding bad behavior — it’s a lose lose.
At an office job where you don’t earn overtime, it’s completely fine to leave at 5pm. Again, there is no prize awarded to the person who leaves last and turns the lights out on their way home.
Sometimes, I find it hard to turn off my brain when there’s a lot going on at work but that’s more of a personal challenge and I’ve found tactics to help with this that avoid me logging hours at odd hours because I’m feeling compelled to do something.
For example, if a great idea occurs to me in the shower or as I’m laying in bed I remember something I wanted to do yesterday but didn’t get around to, I set a reminder on my phone to have that thing I wanted to remember pop up the next morning. That is how I set the boundary that this is my time and I want to make sure the work thing that popped up during my time is compartmentalized right back into work time.
There are many different ways to set boundaries but, for folks early in their career, it’s important to not let trying to be perfect get in the way of good enough (and sustained mental health). Take your vacation. Prioritize what matters in life. This is a good practice to adopt when you are early in your career so you can continue to build this competency as you advance.