(A) and (I) games in career

Introduction

There are many ways to classify career development strategies at a high abstraction level. I find the most helpful classification is to split strategies to individual contributor(IC) route and management route. This is how most companies distinguish their career ladders. However, I find the term IC and management are misleading because

• The terms failed to capture the essence of the two strategies, but are more about the difference between the roles
• Many people in management roles actually adopted IC’s mindset
• Manager is a very unpopular word. Also traditional view on management doesn’t fit in 21st century’s company anymore

In this post I will introduce a more concise definition of the two classes of strategy and show the extreme difference between them. After careful thought and reading many books, I find career growth strategy can be classified as (A) Achievement-based and (I) Influence-based. While it’s possible and an advantage to have the ability to play both roles, one must decide what is her core game. At the end of the day, (A) and (I) are mutual exclusive.

Notice that (A) and (I) are strategies, not IC or management routes. ICs could be a strong leader while managers could focus on achieving rather than influencing.

High achiever(A)

Achievement based strategy is typical for IC routes and is the choice of most people in the early stage of their careers.

The basic idea is to be the operational critical player in impactful projects, then justify their impact by the projects they participated in. The keywords are critical and impactful. The more critical are their roles, the more impactful the project, the better.

I know some folks get really far with this strategy. However, most people begin feeling headwind after 5–7 years. The reasons are:

(i) The position in a company is highly correlated to one’s impact rank(like top x% employee)

(ii) Achiever’s impact is dominated by very few skillset, mainly technical capacity and domain knowledge

(iii) To advance one position in any single skillset in a company’s rank, you need to advance by a constant time of absolute capacity. Mathematically, the relation between your skill rank and your absolute skill merits is power law. So after a while, it gets exponentially harder to advance your rank in any given skill.

The net result is many achievers, after reaching senior level, have very similar skill sets and capacity. For them, who can advance in their career largely depends on pure chance. That’s why many ICs who struggled with promotion complain that there’s no good projects for them.

Influencer(I)

Influencer is the correct strategy for the management route.

The basic idea is to enable as many co-workers, as deeply as possible so that team productivity is unlocked and enhanced. Influencers justify their impact by the incremental productivity others achieved under their influence or leadership. The keywords are ‘many’ and ‘deeply’. That’s why most managers are very eager to hire and ‘grow’ their teams. Many use team size growth as their performance indicator and proof of leadership capacity. Sadly, far less cares as much about the ‘deeply’ part.

It’s worth noting that many managers don’t realize that they are playing the influencer game and hold the achiever’s mindset. In their view, the subordinates are their helpers for their bigger achievement. Having a manager like that is common in a fast growing industry and it’s the dominant reason for stalled careers.

The (vast) difference

It’s interesting to see how different the two strategies are.

Many of us will have to make a conscious decision to switch from (A) to (I). This will be a revolution in our mindsets as it changes almost all of our prioritization and decision at work. To mention a few:

Approaching a project

Because (A)’s path to excellence is by being an expert on impactful projects, people under this strategy are motivated to evaluate a project by:

• What’s the perceived potential impact in long term and short term?
• How much ownership I can have?
• How can I solve the problem?
• How will it help building my image as a domain expert?

They are incentivized to not care about:

• Will this project be helpful for the team and company?
• Who is the right owner?

(I)’s motivation is by definition closer bound with the company so under this strategy, people will think about:

• What’s the long term benefit of this project to our roadmap?
• What’s the reward and cost?
• What other projects and teams can benefit from it?
• Who is the best person to drive it and who should we collaborate with?
• Who are the stake owners and their expectations?
• How will this project benefit the people working on it?

Core competence

If you can choose a single area of capacity to reach excellency, for example, communication skill, domain knowledge, general intellectual level, what’s your choice?

While neither strategy can be successful with one skill, I think domain knowledge is most important for (A) and empathy is the most important for (I). So as a software engineer playing the (I) game, you are much more likely benefited from reading How to win friends and influence people than reading Designing Data-intensive Applications. (For these two, you should read both since you don’t really have to choose only one.)

Growth path

In whichever industry, (A) games require a significant amount of raw talents to even enter the game. Most bodybuilders, you may think their physiques are insane, are seriously constrained by their genes. While coaching others to prepare interviews for junior engineering jobs, I constantly found people struggled at Leetcode problems that were very straightforward for me ever since I finished algorithm classes in college. They too are constrained by their raw talents.

The good news is that those folks can choose to play the (I) game which virtually requires no talents. Yes, everyone can be a good leader as long as they are willing to accept their flaws and work hard to fix them.

Unlike high achievers who perfect one or two skills, high influencers need to be good or great at dozens of skills. No one out of school reaches the bars for everything. Leadership development is a process of recognizing the bottleneck flaw and finding ways to fix it, at every stage of the career. In this sense, I think 95% of people have the potential to be a great leader or influencer with proper mentorship and self-development mindset. In reality, far less percentage actually became one. The reason is a combination of a big ego and the lack of guidance/education.

The ego and infinite game

With (A), it’s perfectly OK to have mediocre human skills. But with (I), one’s influence is constrained by his human skills. While there are tons of books teaching this topic, it all boils down to ego. How much are you able to promote others’ ego? How much can you comfortably reduce your own ego? Strategy (I) can hardly be in good shape if the player is self-centered.

This is what Dale Carnegie means by the dominant desire of everyone: the desire to be great. This is also what Buddha means by anattā.

Another harmful mindset for (I) is playing a finite game. Typical finite games are getting promoted to the next level, having a pay raise of 30% in this year, or doubling the size of my team. If (I) players commit to such finite goals, they will find various difficulties down the path including:

(a) People won’t respect them because they largely work for themselves

(b) They are easy to get defeated and frustrated because those goals are very specific thus prone to failure

Strategy (I) requires an infinite goals like:

• Bring peace to the world
• Feed everyone with enough nutrition
• Unite the society
• Cure cancer

By playing an infinite game, the power of (I) will be fully unlocked. Both (a) and (b) won’t be an issue anymore. You will continuously win support from people under your influence. More importantly, you can never be defeated with an infinite goal. Instead, you will be humbly making small and steady progress everyday, which is the stereotype for long term success.