Unlearning Behavior for Career Growth
One of the most valuable lessons you will need to learn throughout your career is how to unlearn behaviors. You heard correctly! The behaviors that serve you well at the beginning of your career won't necessarily help you succeed in later roles. However, they do play a crucial role in getting you there and in understanding how things are done, which ultimately helps you make good decisions throughout your career.
Small story:
Early in my career, I quickly landed a lead engineering position. To be honest, I had no idea what it entailed. I thought it was mostly about making decisions and giving instructions. I had a fantastic mentor at the time. During one of our calls, I proudly boasted that I had produced more features and code in the last sprint than eight people on my team combined. I was incredibly proud.
His immediate reaction was: "How did your leadership make you a lead engineer of the team?"
I replied: "What?"
It felt like he was intentionally trying to offend me. Who else could claim to write as much code as eight people? I was practically an 8x engineer! I was furious and went home questioning if this person should even be my mentor. Eventually, I reconsidered and asked him why it was a problem.
He explained that my job in a leadership role was primarily to empower others to become better. He pointed out how I was becoming a bottleneck for the team, and if I left, it would create a tremendous risk for the business. Furthermore, he explained, I wouldn't be able to scale my impact if I was solely focused on individual output.
I initially resisted. Why should I help someone on the team improve if I could do the work in a tenth of the time? But I understood his concerns and decided to give it a try. To scale the team's output, I needed to unlearn my habit of fixing issues and coding everything myself. Instead, I had to use that time to mentor others, enabling them to collectively produce a greater business impact than I ever could as a single engineer.
The Journey of Unlearning
This is likely a familiar journey: You learn how to get good grades in university by studying theory at a top institution. This lands you a job at a leading tech company. But here, no one will pay you for simply studying frameworks. Your first job isn't an exam; you need to unlearn the habit of researching an entire topic upfront and learn to get things done.
Once you excel at execution, you might be promoted to a mid-level engineering role. Now, you need to unlearn the focus too much on individual execution and producing as much code as possible. Instead, you must learn how to design systems, plan work, think about the team and identify project risks.
As you improve in this area, you'll need to unlearn more old habits. Instead of doing everything yourself, you'll start delegating designs, project components, and execution to others. Initially, you might delegate the easier tasks while keeping the difficult ones for yourself to ensure project success. However, you'll need to unlearn this behavior and invest in the engineers under your leadership, so they can grow, take on more critical work, and ultimately drive greater impact. This is how you progress to a lead engineering position or even a management role.
Throughout your career, you'll need to recognize that some behaviors will promote you to the next level, while others will hold you back. You must be willing to unlearn these limiting behaviors and invest time in developing the skills and habits required for your new responsibilities.