The Manager Track

When a senior leader handles a hard question at an all-hands and makes it look easy, it's natural to assume they were born comfortable in front of a room and you weren't. Kathryn Janicek has spent her career watching...

The perception of how senior you are gets built in rooms you are not in, using text you wrote in about forty seconds. A skip level reads three of your Slack messages. A peer forwards your email two levels up and never...

You give a good answer. Clear, accurate, done in one sentence. Then you keep going. You add the context, the caveat, the option you considered and did not pick. All of it is true but together it tells the room something...

You have done it a hundred times. Someone senior asks where things stand, and you give them the full picture: every work stream accounted for, clear timelines, nothing missed. Sure, you must have sounded competent and...

Most resistance to growth never announces itself. It shows up as a calendar that will not cooperate, a quarter that is too full, a leadership program that would be a better fit next year. Maren Perry, founder and CEO of...

Someone on your team does something you do not like. It is small, so you let it go. It happens again a few weeks later, and you let that one go too. By the third time, you are irritated, and now you are carrying six...

Sometime in the next few months, a decision will land on your desk that makes half the room unhappy. It will show up on an ordinary Tuesday, in a week that was already full, and you will have about a day to decide. Most...

Six months ago you sat next to these people. You complained about leadership together, covered for each other when something slipped, and knew exactly what got said in the hallway versus in the meeting. Now you run the...

Somewhere along the way, you picked up the idea that thoughtful ICs wait until they’re ready before going for the manager role. So you keep asking the question. Am I ready? And every time you ask it, it feels...

You walk into a meeting with senior people, and within seconds the internal questions start: Should I speak early or wait until I’m asked? Am I reading the mood right, or am I about to present data to a room that wants...

There is a thought a lot of managers carry around and almost never say out loud: “Honestly, my direct report is a stronger performer than I am.” If you have had some version of that thought, it usually shows up with a...

There is a small flinch that happens when someone hands a high performer a compliment. A pause. A quiet thought of “I wonder if they really mean it,” followed by a fast handoff of the credit to the team, to luck, to...

It usually shows up disguised as one of your strengths. You are the manager who notices the gap before anyone else does and quietly fills it. The deck gets polished, the deadline gets saved, the client never sees the...

You used to manage six people. Then a reorg, a hiring freeze, or a quiet round of cuts took out the layer above you, and now you are managing twelve. Same hours in the day, but double the team. Maybe a few dotted-line...

You walk in on day one and the team is already a fully formed thing. They have inside jokes you don't get, a process you didn't design, and a read on you that started forming before you said a word. You didn't choose...