As I continue on my management career, I strive to be the best empathetic and compassionate leader I can be. This is not every manager’s goal and some individuals get into management because they want to climb the corporate ladder and move into bigger leadership roles. I think this is a typical stigma most people are led to believe in. I just want to be responsible for helping individuals get stuff done at work and be happy doing their work and ultimately guide individuals towards success in the goals they want to achieve in their career path. I believe in Servant leadership, a leadership philosophy that prioritizes the needs of others over one’s own. Servant leaders are motivated by selflessness and believe that their success is measured by the success of their employees. They are more likely to lead by example and invest in their team’s growth.
Here is an interesting and fun scenario: What happens when your goal is to find a company that strongly believes in having a great corporate working culture, values every employee as individuals, and has strong values and then it gets acquired by a company that is the complete opposite?
This does happen and can happen easily in the world of tech. A new parent company can literally displace all of those values and remove the majority of the perks to cut costs, change a workplace from being mostly 100% remote to mandating 5 days a week in the office and may even require anyone not close to an office to relocate or take severance. What can make the situation better or worse is that the company could be doing well financially and prides itself on focusing on paying the employees well and provide generous RSUs to keep you motivated in lieu of the cutbacks and perks.
The tech industry continues to progress and change and a lot of companies continue to constantly cut costs and headcount where it makes sense. Daycare, massages, free food, and all the fancy perks are a thing of the past. Financially, it may not make sense anymore if a publicly traded company can cut all of these perks, do layoffs, and manage to to keep driving the stock up.
The answer I have come to when placed in a situation like this is to stay positive and be true to yourself and what you believe in. I will not change my values and what I believe a manager’s role should be. The focus should continue to be the success of the team and the individuals.
What can I do to stay positive and motivated and promote the same? Stay engaged, make sure my team is not distracted, focus on the work, and then at the end of the day maintain a good work life balance.
What can your team members do to grow themselves?
- stay positive and be a better person and role model by providing guidance and mentorship to others
- seek out mentorship and guidance from people you look up to
- be proactive — dont just sit back and relax and be comfortable. the best thing you can do to grow is to make yourself uncomfortable. You should always look for more to learn and to always try new things.
- Sell yourself — if you can continue to provide value, your contributions will sell itself. One can always jump around to different companies in order to get paid more and to get better titles and promotions. I have definitely done a lot of that in the past, but ultimately i think the best reward is to earn it and actually be deserving of it as that feeling will be more satisfying.
“It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon made a good point when he said its all about having a positive attitude. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/19/amazon-ceo-an-embarrassing-amount-of-your-success-depends-on-this-skill.html
This applies to everything in life. The power of positivity and the law of attaction. The “New Thought spiritual belief that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into a person’s life”.
You can only change what you have control over so there is no reason to focus on the negative or stress over things that not within your own control. Que Será, Será. Which in both Spanish and Portuguese means whatever will be will be.
At the end of my tenure with a company, if I can hear from an engineer that I was one of the best managers that they have ever had, it means the world to me to know that I am doing something right.