This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jerry Lee, 29, a former manager at Google and cofounder of Wonsulting, a career consulting company. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his education and employment history.
I started my career at Google in 2017 after graduating from college.
During my time at the company, I had the opportunity to work for two teams.
My first team dealt with trust and safety issues at Google. As part of our work, we tried to understand how people might abuse Google’s products.
For instance, we would consider hypothetical problems like how a scammer might try to send out a million emails on Gmail and what we could do to prevent it.
My first team felt very “Google-y” in that things were very casual and collaborative.
Later, I switched roles and joined a strategy and operations team.
Working in that team felt like working at a consulting firm, where the pace was much faster. The work was heavily centered on making slides and delivering polished presentations to senior leaders.
I learned different things working on both teams. My first team taught me how to problem-solve and analyze business problems efficiently.
In comparison, the second team taught me about business principles and execution. I got to tackle problems like handling product launches and managing stakeholder relationships.
I wanted to get promoted as fast as possible
The most important goal I had at Google was to get promoted as fast as humanly possible. I think it is very important for individual contributors to define their north star.
In my case, climbing up the ranks quickly was what I cared about the most.
One of the work hacks I came up with to achieve this goal was to become very friendly with as many managers and leaders as possible.
It took a while, but I eventually got close to one manager who told me everything about how the performance review worked.
As I listened to him, I realized I needed to work on projects involving as many managers as possible. This would ensure that more people would know who I was and could vouch for me during performance reviews.
If getting promoted is important to you, I recommend trying to understand how the process works from a manager’s perspective and how they make decisions.
Once you get a sense of what they’re looking for, you’re going to want to design your workload around those focus areas to maximize your chances of getting promoted.
Managers should be proactive in developing their staff’s careers, too
Working at Google also influenced how I lead my employees as well.
When I worked at Google, some employees gave feedback that their managers were more reactive than proactive about developing their staff’s careers.
One of the things I’m trying to do at my career consulting company, Wonsulting, is force career conversations to happen at every level.
For instance, when I manage my managers, I tell them to have a career conversation with each of their employees. I have a career conversation with every employee at least once a year.
It’s all about implementing a system to ensure that no one at my company feels like they can’t grow their career.
Besides having conversations, we also try to document what’s important to everybody.
For instance, some people want promotions, while others want work-life balance. Logging these things allows us to structure our workload and performance reviews around their preferences.
Succeeding at work is less about what you know but how you do things
When it comes to doing well in your career, it’s not about what you do but how you do things.
As you advance in your career, people pay less attention to your hard, technical skills and instead focus more on your soft skills.
It doesn’t matter how strong a performer someone is if they’re not well-liked. If they behave arrogantly and are overly dominating, people won’t buy their ideas, no matter how good these concepts are.
Your ideas are only going to gain traction if you can communicate well and bring people on board.
That’s why I focus so much more on soft skills today. To me, hard skills like improving your spreadsheet skills or writing articles faster are secondary.
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