Emergencies create opportunities

Stand out by owning a company crisis

and

Jul 23, 2024

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Does your company have enough real emergencies?

Big companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. have many "crises" and pressure, but few real existential emergencies.

In my first job, we partnered with a company that was failing. Their product, which we needed, had many bugs and all our largest customers were angry about it. The guy working with them was diligent but very understanding and nice.

With a company crisis, they asked me to step in to manage the relationship.

Why me?

Honestly, two unflattering reasons:

I was available.
I was too blunt.

Early in my career, I had not learned diplomacy or filters, so I told the other company in plain terms where they stood and what we needed from them.

I got an effective promotion because I was the best available alternative, not because I was really qualified for the role. Our small startup needed this problem fixed and there was no one better than me, a new college graduate who had been with the company only 4 months.

The problem with big companies is that they have thousands of experienced employees and tons of money. Can you imagine the scale of problems a Google or Apple must face for the statement "all of our largest customers were angry about it" to be true?

Because of their size, there is always someone (or a whole team) of specialists they can pull into a crisis.

Obviously, I'm not recommending "have a lot of emergencies" as a business strategy.

Instead, I am pointing out that if your group never has a crisis that causes people to turn to you in desperation and say "Can you save us?" then it may be personally bad for you.

As Littlefinger (from Game of Thrones) said: “Chaos is a ladder.”

This is where what is best for a company and what is best for your career growth may not align.

When I was put in that high-risk situation, had I failed no one would have really blamed me ("We gave it to a kid, what did we expect?"), but it gave me the chance to succeed.

It was low downside (low expectations) but high upside (big value if I succeeded).

Without the crisis, neither I nor my company would have known what I could do.

If you want the chance at radical, transformative leaps forward, be somewhere where problems happen and "better" (more experienced) people are not available.

Work somewhere that takes enough risks that sometimes the risks go wrong.

It gives you space to step up.

Big Company Managers: Figure out places where you can let "unqualified" (on paper) employees take a shot at something before calling in the "best" person. The "best" person won't learn anything or show you anything unexpected. The "unqualified" person may jump on the opportunity and shoot forward as a result.

In Slack, what members are talking about and how they are helping one another:

Hiring / open roles:
- VP, Information Technolgy at Red Hat
- VP/SVP Engineering at Weave Communications
- Senior Director of New Business Development/Partnerships (Games) at AFK
- Engineering Manager, AI Products at Affinity.co
- Product Manager—Observability & Governance at Capital One
- Federal Senior Sales Specialist - Efficient Compute, US FED Specialist Org at AWS (Amazon)
New members from PlayStation, AFK, Meta, Affinity.co, Amazon, AppDirect, Lyft, and ex-MotorTrend/T-Mobile/Amazon/Motorola.
"Find Your Why" by Simon Sinek
Good in-person team-building exercises for senior-level managers who are distributed and do not often meet face-to-face.
Transitioning from TPM to Engineering Management.
Pilot Tableau to do unstructured data analytics (e.g. upload call transcripts, call recordings, user surveys, or raw spreadsheets and get out-of-the-box insights and the ability to visualize and ask more questions of it).
Persistent vs Obstinate.
Insights from the fireside chat with Wes Kao on the Art of Managing Up.
Using the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) Frugality in feedback.

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Level Up is your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.