Practice makes perfect may be especially true in leadership. But how can you exercise leadership if you aren’t a manager?
“You don’t need a title to lead,” said Donielle Palladino, director of technology operations at Chicago-based Mastery Logistics.
Since women make up nearly 48 percent of entry-level hires in tech but only 38 percent of first-level managers, according to a McKinsey report, Built In Chicago asked Palladino and 12 other women in leadership at Chicago-based companies for the lessons they learned on their journey to leadership.
The majority echoed Palladino’s sentiment: individual contributors can actually flex leadership muscles outside of formal frameworks. Potential practice scenarios could range from joining cross-functional task forces, leading meetings, joining interest groups or organizing extracurriculars, to name a few.
Read on to discover more tried and true tips from these women in leadership.
Clearcover is a car insurance company.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
In my 15 years as an individual contributor, I learned that building strong relationships and making influential decisions were key elements in my leadership development. I also learned that a good manager is not one who knows everything, but someone who can communicate a clear vision that energizes the team to accomplish its goals and grow. Effective leaders can get team members to challenge themselves while working toward a common goal.
As an individual contributor, you should seek out additional responsibilities that strengthen your leadership muscles. I suggest looking for cross-team opportunities that allow you to branch out of your comfort zone and interact with different people. Expanding your network and broadening your perspective while honing your core skills is immensely useful when preparing for a management position.
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Clearcover.
I did not experience a singular moment that boosted my career to the next level. Rather, my collective years of experience as a software engineer provided me with the depth and perspective to become an effective and passionate leader. I continuously increased my span of influence while working my way up from an individual contributor to a team lead.
The most pivotal step I took in my journey was voicing my desire to manage a team. That opened the door to my management journey. Providing my team the support and freedom to do meaningful work has helped me to grow and do well as a manager.
The most pivotal step I took in my journey was voicing my desire to manage a team.”
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Communication. Effective communication is essential. It helps build a vital connection with your employees, establishing a mutual currency of trust and respect. Learning effective communication is important before you become a manager — expressing my aspiration to lead a team was ultimately how I segued my career. You need to establish a strong line of communication with your team, set a clear vision for them to be successful, and be transparent and concise in the way you share your opinions. Cultivating these skills will help individuals do well in their management journeys.
Mastery Logistics is a transportation management system.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Practice being a leader. Opportunities to grow your leadership abilities occur in many areas, and seeking them out is a great way to get comfortable in management. Leadership is a supportive role. Great leaders set up plays to execute and help the team win. They look for opportunities to push the team into the spotlight. They know how to listen, show empathy and communicate clearly. Practice these skills in your everyday life. You can prepare by finding areas to play a supporting role as an individual contributor.
To become a more effective leader, understand how influence — not authority — works and cultivate that skill. Influence is the talent and ability to shape the opinions of others. Influence in the workplace takes trust and emotional connection. Practice gaining influence by leading a volunteer effort, setting up a fun competition or asking people to join an extracurricular endeavor. This is a great way to cultivate your leadership skills.
To become a more effective leader, understand how influence — not authority — works and cultivate that skill.”
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Mastery Logistics.
I am passionate, sometimes obsessive, about biking and fundraising. When I joined Mastery, I started a cycling team to ride in the Minnesota MS150, a 150-mile bike ride over two days to raise money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Mastery owners Jeff and Marianne Silver graciously supported our newly formed cycling teams’ efforts. They provided us each with a stellar cycling kit when we raised a certain amount of money, made a significant donation to our team and gave me the space to bring this effort forward; I could not be more grateful for the opportunity and support.
The forming of the team allowed me to delegate work to others who had volunteered, lead multiple projects, present the new team during an all-company call and connect to others within the organization with whom I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance. This effort allowed me to lead without a title, influence others and build trust within our organization.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Trustworthiness. Trust is the foundation of any healthy functioning team. Becoming a trusted person within an organization requires going outside of your comfort zone. Vulnerability can feel like a scary word; however, learning to be vulnerable shows courage. When people see you showing up authentically, they will feel safe, knowing that it’s okay to be themselves too.
My teams and I benefit from these trusting relationships; we are honest and supportive, easily ask each other for help, admit when we’re wrong or don’t know something, are transparent, and communicate effectively. After seeing how great we work together, the teams work to build these same trusted relationships outside of our area. With this, we enjoy a culture of diversity and inclusion, honesty, psychological safety, mutual respect — and, most importantly, laughter!
A great way to help support these relationships is to involve an icebreaker question in a meeting, which can lead to chatting about someone’s weekend or upcoming plans, helping to create a more personal connection.
Level Ex is a medical video game studio.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Find ways to learn from, and mentor, other individual contributors in your field. Management involves so much interaction, it’s important to discover if you are the type of person that likes working with other people. Not everyone does — and that’s OK! Use this opportunity to develop your soft skills and build trust with other people on your team. Observe their strengths and weaknesses and think about ways to leverage strengths while fortifying weaknesses.
Find ways to learn from, and mentor, other individual contributors in your field.”
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Level Ex.
I had been tasked with ensuring that we had all the equipment purchased and available for a very important, and costly, infrastructure setup. About two days before the big event, I realized that there was a critical piece of equipment missing. After additional investigation, I realized that not only was it missing — the item was backordered for weeks.
My gut reaction was to go to my manager to explain the situation and figure out a solution together. While I was en route to his office, I stopped and realized that I already had a solid plan formed in my head. Instead of using an hour of my manager’s time, I simply stopped by to say, “Hey, this happened. But don’t worry, I’m already on it.”
Since then, my problem-solving skills have gone from, “find people to help you figure out a solution” to “figure out a solution and propose it.” This way of thinking has helped me shift into a leadership mindset.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
People skills — after all, you are managing people! The ability to empathize and gauge the health of your team is so important. As a manager, you need to understand the balance between defending your team from additional work and pushing them to deliver better results. The only way you can do that is if your team can be honest with you and trust you to lead them to success.
Inspira Financial offers services for financial wellness.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Curiosity is key. Leaders need to continuously grow and learn every aspect of their industry and job function. As a marketing leader in financial services, I need to be knowledgeable in technology, finance, customer service, product development, security and sales. This knowledge comes from working on new projects, talking to internal subject matter experts and asking lots of questions.
Leaders think holistically about the business. They can see the big picture and then take the best course of action for the company as a whole. You need to know what makes your company tick, so dig in and get invested in all areas of the business. Then, learn about businesses in other fields — such as those in e-commerce, healthcare, banking, cloud technology and data security — and find a way to apply that knowledge to add value to your role.
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Inspira Financial.
Being proactive has been the key to my success. No great leader waits to be told what to do. Your job is to always be creating more value by solving business problems, improving customer experience, decreasing costs, improving efficiencies, building brands or creating more great leaders. There is no shortage of opportunities for ways to make a difference and creatively solve problems. And if you see something that needs additional resources, create that business case with data and return on investment and sell your vision. Once you do add value, it is important to do some shameless self-promotion. This isn’t easy for most people, but when you craft the story around teamwork, data and results, you show credibility and a bias for action.
No great leader waits to be told what to do.”
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
The number one skill a person should cultivate is how to build a great team. Don’t shy away from people who have different experiences and areas of expertise, more creativity or more data know-how than you. Empower people to think big, speak up and share different points of view. Build a great team by building diversity of thought and diversity of backgrounds. Hire people you can learn from and who make the team better. Most of all, support your people. Give them the chance to learn and grow, stretch your star performers, get them out of their comfort zone and have some fun. Your goal as a leader is to groom the next set of leaders. If you do your job well, your superstars may become your boss, may take bigger positions at other companies, and will make the world a better place.
Vail Systems is a communications technology company.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Individual contributors should prepare for management roles by exercising leadership whenever possible. Leadership opportunities exist for all employees long before taking on management roles. Becoming a project lead is an excellent way for individual contributors to expand their knowledge base and work cross-functionally outside their team. By doing this, individuals can expand a range of crucial management skills including communication, management of time and expectations, and identifying strengths in others to promote effective collaboration.
Leadership opportunities exist for all employees long before taking on management roles.”
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Vail Systems.
At every opportunity, I share my expertise through company-wide presentations. We have a group, Pizza and AI, where folks across the company with an interest in artificial intelligence gather to share ideas and projects. It is an excellent venue to not only learn about the field but also to practice communicating highly complex ideas to a wide audience of both domain experts and laypeople. This afforded me the opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge and expertise in a room full of people I would not otherwise have had the opportunity to engage with.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Honing communication skills is the key to success in nearly every position, but proves particularly important when preparing for a management role. Effective communication is critical to improving job performance while promoting trust and satisfaction among employees. Increasing your exposure to individuals across fields with a variety of skill sets will enable you to effectively communicate at all levels of your organization. Keep in mind that the ability to be empathetic, listen actively and ask the right questions are crucial for good communication.
Integral Ad Science is a digital ad verification platform.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
I am a believer in doing the job that you want, not the job that you have. As an individual contributor, think about the projects that you can offer to take on. Understand the goals and expectations — and then do what you can to exceed them.
Another important skill that an individual contributor can develop is the ability to collaborate cross-functionally. It’s not just about the team you manage but also the teams that you partner with. Start building relationships with cross-functional leaders in other departments, understand their goals and identify opportunities that will allow you to partner closer. Many of the decisions about your career are made when you aren’t in the room. Make sure you are garnering support while delivering on your company initiatives.
I am a believer in doing the job that you want, not the job that you have.”
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Integral Ad Science.
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment. Each time I’ve joined a new company, I make it a point to do a listening tour. I take the time to best understand the challenges and successes of the teams that I’ll be working with closely. From there, I work collaboratively to build a strategy that not only helps me achieve my individual team goals but my counterpart’s goals as well. Having focus and rigor behind collaboration has helped me become a trusted leader while helping my companies achieve their successes.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Effective listening and communication skills. These skills are the foundation of how a manager motivates, develops, and coaches a team to greatness. It’s important to note that I call out listening and communication skills. We often learn about how to effectively communicate expectations early on. Developing the skills so you can listen, learn and understand is arguably what distinguishes a good manager from a great one.
GoHealth is a health insurance marketplace.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Be a problem-solver that executes and drives results. In my career, these are the key skills that have helped me thrive in both individual contributor and leadership roles. The level at which you can achieve has a huge impact on your ability to be successful. The best part is that developing these skills is easy to do whether you’re a leader or not. Start with an investigative mindset and view problems as opportunities. These opportunities will help you grow as a leader and learn how to find solutions.
Finding the best solution is not enough — you must also make sure to execute that solution and see it to implementation. As a leader, you will be evaluated based on how well your team solves and executes deliverables. The only way a team can do this successfully is with a leader who has demonstrated these skills.
Finding the best solution is not enough — you must also make sure to execute that solution and see it to implementation.”
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at GoHealth.
Influence people that do not report to you by building strong relationships. Building relationships with different teams and influencing their decision-making had a huge impact on my trajectory. Leading different teams through their issues allowed me to highlight my leadership skills. It gave my leadership team confidence that I could be a strong leader for my own team. Find opportunities in your daily tasks to lead teams that do not report to you. Working with other teams allows you to practice and showcase that you can lead a group of people to achieve a common goal.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Knowing how to delegate tasks, projects or initiatives. When you are an individual contributor, your success is measured based on what you deliver to the business. However, in a manager role, your success will be measured based on how your team performs. You need to be delegating initiatives to your team to achieve business goals.
In my experience, when promoting new talent to management roles, this has consistently been one of the more difficult parts of that transition — myself included when I moved into management. Cultivating this skill is so important because as a manager you can’t complete all the tasks on your own. You need to trust your team to get the job done. Some skills you can focus on developing as an individual contributor to have an impact on your ability to delegate before moving into management are communication, training and patience.
Oak9 is a cloud-native security automation SaaS company.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Continue developing the skills you need by staying curious and staying vocal. Ask questions, ask for feedback and find a mentor. Does leadership know your career aspirations? Is there an opportunity to take on more responsibility? Naturally, we all want to help one another. When we’re vocal about things, it’s easier for us to give and receive support from one another. Plus, staying curious and using your voice are excellent skills to bring to any leadership position.
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at oak9.
I think what made me stand out as a leader at oak9 is the confidence and initiative to tackle things quickly and head-on. As a high-growth tech startup, there is a lot to do. I took the initiative and quickly identified opportunities for us, prioritized a plan together, generated team buy-in and assembled the team to execute. I was drawn to oak9 because their emphasis on action matched mine. I knew I could take my skills and experience to a company with these shared values and shine.
Being a servant leader means that you give more than you take.”
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Servant leadership is a skill everyone looking to move into management should cultivate. My number one job is to serve my people — those I lead, work for and work with. To me, there are two key elements to being a good servant leader: competence and emotional intelligence.
I’ve spent my entire career developing a well-rounded set of skills in my field so my teams can trust my competence. Simultaneously, I care about the people I work with and find ways to ensure they know it. Being a servant leader means that you give more than you take. I strongly believe the best leaders are constantly finding ways to make their teammates stronger and more successful, so throughout my career, I’ve always looked for big and small ways to do that.
NowSecure is a mobile app security and privacy company.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
One of the most valuable things an individual contributor can do is work on cross-functional teams. I was fortunate that, early in my career, I had the opportunity to rotate through different business units in a large enterprise. This allowed me to see how my area of expertise, cybersecurity, was perceived by people outside of the information technology space, and how my department’s policies and practices directly impacted the business. As a manager, cross-team and cross-functional work is the norm, and it is critical to understand and communicate the value your team provides to the business.
Working in different business units with a variety of stakeholders also forced me to practice communicating with audiences whose primary focus and expertise were outside of technology. I often found that what seemed intuitive to me made little sense to them; learning to translate and re-frame concerns around risk and prioritization was difficult but is a skill that I have leaned on heavily as a manager.
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at NowSecure.
Early in my career, I worked on a large operations team that was distributed across the globe. The team often struggled with consistency, particularly around communicating information and escalating issues in an appropriate timeframe. I took the lead on developing a global written standard that provided a framework for making those decisions and obtained buy-in from management and stakeholders on those expectations. This was by no means a perfect solution, but it aligned everyone to the same rubric as a starting point for future improvements. The fact that I took the concerns around consistency seriously and was able to turn those into something actionable positioned me as a leader with the ability to execute.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Empathy is hands-down the number one skill needed in management. As a manager, you need to understand and empathize with not just your direct reports, but other internal and external stakeholders.
You can do that by:
- Seeking out assignments that expose you to areas of your organization or business that are less familiar and that require you to work through challenges that you typically don't face directly. Shadowing colleagues is also an excellent way to get this kind of insight.
- Practicing active listening, particularly in situations where someone is challenging your perspective or providing critical feedback. If you rarely encounter those situations, explore whether there are opportunities to engage stakeholders in open feedback sessions.
- Seeking out others in your industry or role who have very different approaches, styles and solutions from your own. What can you learn from their perspectives? How can you incorporate different perspectives into your work?
MoLo Solutions is a logistics company.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Be a sponge. Always be hungry for knowledge and never stop finding new ways to challenge yourself in cultivating a new skill set that aligns with the position you’re aiming for. If you’re already meeting and applying the required skills from the job description in some shape or form within your current role, that next step in your career will come naturally.
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at MoLo Solutions.
Creating a department from a blank canvas by developing plans, executing those blueprints and designing and redesigning processes along the way helped me stand out as a leader at MoLo.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Embrace a service-first mentality. Effective leaders should put service at the front of their minds. If you’re focused on giving the best service to your customers, people and yourself, you’ll have the perfect recipe to hone in on this skill. There’s always room for improvement when it comes to service.
These are the three questions a leader should always ask:
- How can we improve our service to our customers? Your innovative and outside-the-box ideas will come to life, contributing to the company’s goal of being a top service provider.
- How can I better serve my team? You’ll find new and creative ways to be a servant leader and will get the very best out of your people.
- How can I service myself to provide a better experience for my customers and team? You’ll discover areas of opportunity for your continuous self-development as a leader, which, in return, will put you in a better position to lead a team as someone embodying a service-first mentality.
Aprimo is a marketing and digital asset management SaaS company.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Organizational and strategic thinking, conflict and problem resolution, and motivational ability are all necessary. Those looking to be in a management role should begin by taking leadership roles on their existing teams. One great way to show these skills is by volunteering to lead meetings, tactical teams and committees. A historically reliable way to identify an employee on a management path is one who will bring proposed solutions to the table rather than just presenting a problem. It takes a strategic thinker who wants to be involved in decision-making, not just being told what they should do to be able to lead and manage.
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at your company.
In a broad sense, I took the pressure off my direct manager to need to spend a lot of time managing me. I know that sounds simple, but it is true. A leader is a resourceful self-starter, can demonstrate that they can solve problems on their own, doesn’t need a lot of hand-holding, and is trusted by their management to make sound decisions. I make it a point to exhaust my options and take things as far as I can before I ask my manager for assistance. Doing so has given me the ability to conduct my critical thinking and also to get valuable feedback from my mentors along the way. All of this helps to create personal growth both from the discovery and the feedback.
I make it a point to exhaust my options and take things as far as I can before I ask my manager for assistance.”
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
You must want to be a mentor. Your goal as a manager isn’t to sell the most widgets. Rather, your goal is to elevate your team and provide them with the tools they need to be successful. You will know that you have done a good job not when your widget sales are up, but when your team members learn, grow and move on to higher roles.
Rewards Network offers a dining rewards program.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
The difference between individual contributors and management is being concerned with implementation details rather than project impact. Not to say management doesn’t ever get into the weeds, however, they are always considering higher-level questions. How does this impact the business? How will this affect end-users? How will implementation choices affect the team later?
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Rewards Network.
I spent several years seizing every opportunity to take ownership and lead projects. If there was ever a vacuum, I would step into it. If a pain point was brought up repeatedly, I would look for a way to address it. I wrote lots of documentation that did not previously exist. I worked to get complete solutions out the door more quickly, while still allowing for technical clean-up afterward. I suppose when someone hears, “I can take care of that” a hundred times, they start relying on the person who said it.
When someone hears, ‘I can take care of that’ a hundred times, they start relying on the person who said it.”
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
This is probably a cliche, but communication. Whether anyone likes it or not, taking on a management role means more meetings with more people. Being able to get your message across quickly and accurately, as well as understand what others are saying, is of the utmost importance. In particular, being able to adapt your communication style to suit the person with which you are conversing is incredibly useful.
Checkout is a strategic payment fintech company.
What should individual contributors be doing during their careers to prepare for a management role?
Leave your role, team and company in a better place than you found it. You don’t need to be in a management role to lead. Exercise curiosity, identify areas for improvement and drive innovation. Find a path forward through ambiguity, resource constraints and data or process challenges when others can’t. Strive for excellence and exceed expectations in your current role; you’ll be able to point back to your experience when it’s time to move to the next level.
Take initiative. You are the owner of your career; no one will ever be as invested in it as you. Share your ideas, even when it’s intimidating. Volunteer yourself for a challenging project that builds upon your skillset and stretches you professionally. Grab coffee with a leader you admire. You’re in the driver’s seat of your future.
Put it out in the universe. Let people know — friends, colleagues, mentors and especially your manager — that you want to move into management one day. Opportunities present themselves when you’re open about where you want to go.
Opportunities present themselves when you’re open about where you want to go.”
Share a moment in which you did something that accelerated your career and helped you stand out as a leader at Checkout.
I was living in New York, leading the first field marketing team at LinkedIn. At that time, we were growing our presence in EMEA and Latin America — both regions were very new. I was eager to help where I could and assist in onboarding new regional marketers and participated in off-sites to share how we were managing things in the U.S.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but building those relationships with marketers across the globe would accelerate my career and open doors I hadn’t dreamed of. The head of marketing in EMEA reached out and asked me to lead marketing for the United Kingdom, Ireland and Nordics. Although outside my past realm of work, the professional challenge and a move to London made it a worthy pursuit. It taught me other facets of marketing and how to thrive in a region outside of headquarters, something I’m doing again at Checkout.com. The experience I gained in that role helped me move into global roles and carved the path to where I am today.
What is the number one skill a person should cultivate if they want to move into management?
Setting clear goals with measurable results to drive focus and accountability is imperative. But, what often separates the good from the great requires more than a documented plan. It’s the ability to recognize an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, understand what motivates them and inspire them to do their best work. It’s understanding their ability to perform and where they are in their career, then supporting them along their journey. It’s knowing that you’ve still got a lot to learn, no matter how many years you have under your belt and welcoming feedback, even when it’s hard to hear. It’s caring about people.
