From an 800-person team to IC
In 2015, I went from leading a global team of 800 to an individual contributor (IC) role.
I want to share why and what I learned (spoiler: how to influence instead of giving orders).
Over a 10-year span at Amazon, I had grown from leading a team of 6 as a Senior Manager to leading a team of 800 as a Vice President. I had teams in Seattle, Orange County, Bangalore, and Beijing.
By the end of this period, I was burnt out from the scale, stress, and challenges.
First, I made a decision that pursuing a promotion to the next level at Amazon, Senior Vice President, was not a goal. I knew that pursuing this level would take many years of hard work even if it was attainable. While it would pay me more money, I was increasingly looking for a sense of purpose. So far at Amazon, I had built movie, game, and phone products, all of which were good, but none of which were really helping humanity in a fundamental way. I wanted to do more directly for people.
In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million. Whenever Amazon buys a company, they assign a senior executive to help them integrate with Amazon. I pushed to take on this role at Twitch. The executives in these roles are advisors to the CEO and management team of the acquisition, but they have no direct authority.
I was a fairly “directive” boss; I gave more orders and asked fewer questions than a good leader should. I was at least aware of this, and I thought that a role where I would have no capacity to give orders would force me to learn influence skills.
Moving to this role did not immediately solve my desire to help humanity, but it was an intentional choice to grow as a leader.
I joined the Twitch leadership team.
Some people were suspicious that I was a spy, sent to report back to Amazon and perhaps to displace the founder and CEO. None of this was true, but these kinds of us-and-them suspicions are common in acquisitions. It gave me a second leadership challenge — overcoming the suspicions of some colleagues.
As you can imagine, it was a huge change going from being able to direct hundreds of people to needing to persuade peers of even small changes. As I had hoped, it taught me a lot, and I feel I grew as a leader and a person.
I learned to use a key phrase:
“Could I share how I have seen this done elsewhere?”
By asking permission to share my experiences, I imposed them on no one. Few people will tell you, “No, we don’t want to hear anything you have to say.” I then had to count on my peers to find value in what I shared. Luckily, they often did, and as they did I slowly gained their trust.
The narrow lesson is that influence is a tremendously valuable skill and that trying to lead by giving orders is a limited technique.
The broader lesson is that it is worth putting yourself in learning situations that address weaknesses and stretch you to grow.
In a future post, I will share my journey back to leading teams.
4 follow-up reader questions.
Q1: When helping to integrate Twitch into Amazon, what were two things done well?
Really sticking to trying to influence rather than tell, particularly in the early days.
Trying to learn the new company culture and business (which was very foreign to me - "People watching other people play video games? What?")
Q2: When helping to integrate Twitch into Amazon, what was one thing you wished you did earlier?
Start using the product myself. I knew I was not going to play games for others, but it took me 3+ years to figure out how I could use the product myself. Once I started streaming on Twitch (leadership advice), I learned a ton about the product and culture. Three years were lost getting there. I'm not sure how I could have specifically done better, but I know there must have been a way. I think today in a similar situation I would set myself a goal to find a way to use the product myself within 90 days. With enough creativity, I can find some use (even an unintended one, as I did with Twitch) for most things within a short period.
Q3: When helping to integrate Twitch into Amazon, what was one thing you could have done better?
I mentioned I was burnt out. I came to Twitch to help and to "recover." Shortly after starting the role, I took a 3-month leave of absence as a part of recovery. This broke up my first year. In short, I was in no way starting this job as my best self but rather using the job as a kind of hospital room also. So I guess the thing I wish I could have done better was to recognize and manage my burnout sooner, so as to have stayed mentally healthier and brought more of that to Twitch from day one. We often underestimate how much of leadership is a mental game.
Q4: What was your role/job title, moving from a VP to an IC role? Was it a "technical advisor?"
My title varied. The CEO, Emmett Shear, and I settled on the term "Spirit Guide." My actual title I think remained VP of Technology (the same as it had been). I believe I was "VP of Twitch Integration" in Amazon's phone tool.
Audience Insights
I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience, including:
Dallas Tester shared “We didn’t interact a ton when you were my skip-level at Twitch, but I often tell a story about you when I’m mentoring others. I was a PM, for the first time, on the Twitch API. I was grousing to you about an issue with an engineering lead. You said, “Dallas, Dallas, I get it. It sucks. What are YOU doing about it?” That simple question has driven a lot of my behaviors since 2017, and I use this question a lot with my mentees and direct reports. My takeaway from your words boiled down to having agency in any situation. Using the Amazon leadership principles, I viewed it as a combination of Ownership and Bias for Action. Whenever I find myself in a situation that isn't moving forward, I think of what I can do to get it moving forward. I've used this distillation to create behaviors in career ladders, mentor stuck folks, and help organizations work together. Ultimately, my message is that everybody has agency, but you have to own it and put in effort to make it work. Thank you for the small lesson!”
Asking for permission lowers people's defense mechanisms. Often times people throw opinions at others without first understanding their story and if they are looking for support or advice.
When influencing partner teams, a key skill is closely listening to their needs and learning why it is important to them / their business. If you want to be heard, try these 6 simple steps.
Become A Trusted Decision Maker
Being known as a trusted decision maker is a prerequisite to getting promoted to executive.
My on-demand course, Level Up: Breaking Through to Executive, covers the performance standards that make an executive and how to optimize your promotion process. Part of the performance standards includes what it means to be a trusted decision maker and a science-based process on how to make good decisions.
Below is a video clip on this topic.
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Level Up is a free newsletter from retired Amazon Vice President Ethan Evans that breaks down how he succeeded and how you can get to the next level.