How Your Manager's Growth Potential and Willingness to Share Power Affects Your Career Trajectory

Are you fighting for scope with your manager? Is he keeping all the credit? Learn what types of managers are best for career growth and what to do if you're stuck.

Hi! I'm Yue. Chief Product Officer turned Career Coach. My personal mission is to support more women and minorities in ascending to the C-suite.

Welcome to this month’s free edition of The Uncommon Executive. Each week I tackle questions about building power and influence, navigating challenging work environments, and accelerating your career. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:

1. How to Answer Questions Strategically with Senior Leadership

2. Landing Execution and Strategy Without Burning Out

3. How to Escalate Well (free)

4. What To Do When Conversations are Derailed

5. How I Transitioned from Individual Contributor to Manager — Twice

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(When Managed By The Little One, Teddy the Corgi, Barcelona, Spain)

As a common wisdom goes, people leave managers, not companies. A manager has an outsize impact on your day-to-day, and their support for your career growth, or lack thereof, contributes greatly to whether you’ll be landing that next promotion.

Whether and how supportive a manager is of the career growth of their team depends on their growth trajectory and how much they believe in holding on to their power. Consider a 2x2 with Willingness to Share Power on one axis, and the manager’s growth potential on the other. You end up with four types of managers, each with a different outlook on your career growth.

The Selfless Rising Star

Your manager is a rising star in the organization. She has a mentality of “working herself out of a job” and is getting promotions regularly every 2-3 years. These kinds of managers will also naturally create space for their team because they are constantly on the lookout for how to delegate more. There are frequent growth projects pushed to the team because as the manager takes on stretch projects themselves, they MUST continue to delegate to avoid burning out. For someone looking to grow their career and enjoys learning by doing, this is the ideal type of manager (shameless brag: this was me on my journey to Chief Product Officer!)

The Legacy Creator

In contrast to The Rising Star, some managers are not growing in their careers. It may be due to the company not growing or their preferences and priorities. On the other hand, they view passing along their power and skillset to others as a part of their role and legacy. These managers will not block your growth intentionally, but due to the nature of their situation, you may simply hit a growth ceiling after a few years. You become limited by the power, scope, and influence of your manager.

When you are reaching that ceiling, invest in building relationships with your skip level, your skip’s manager, and their peers. If your manager is supportive, they can help make some initial introductions and give you some additional context. It is then up to you to seek a mentor or sponsor who is more of a Rising Star or has a larger scope and room for you to grow.

The Competitive Manager

This type of manager believes that gaining power is a fixed pie, and they want to hold on to it as much as possible for themselves. They rarely share credit and often take credit from their team. They pass on the blame to their team. They are only concerned with their own career opportunities and make every attempt to block the growth of others, including those on their team.

Working for these managers is a tricky balance. If you are too successful, they will view you as a competitor and actively work against you. With the power imbalance, it’s often an unfair fight. The best way to manage your manager is to:

1. Find a skip-level mentor or sponsor who can look out for you. Keep them informed of your work (and where the credit belongs), have them help call you out in public forums, and put you up for stretch projects.

2. Work on a different scope from your managers as much as possible. Don’t fight for scope. Instead, look for other projects where you can add value and grow on other teams.

3. Support their growth. Keep your friends close but enemies closer. Spend some time helping your manager grow — become someone they trust so they view you more as a partner than a threat. Know that whatever credit for joint projects will primarily go to him.

The Power Keeper

In the least favorable scenario, you have a manager who holds on to their power and is stagnant in their career. These managers have very little to offer their team in terms of career growth (it may still be a very good, well-paying job!). If you’re looking to grow, the best tactic is to move to another manager. This type of manager will help you grow if there is a large gap between your current skill set and theirs. However, as you close the gap, you’ll soon find yourself butting heads and competing for scope. Get out from under them and seek greener pastures.

Being a Scarce Commodity

Finally, sometimes the environment has a higher impact on the manager’s personal preferences. One scenario is where top-tier talent is scarce, but where a top 10% PM or engineer can have 10X the impact of a bottom 10% PM or engineer. In these scenarios, a great manager is focused on attracting and retaining talent.

To attract and retain top talent, the manager is incentivized to support career progression. Because top talent has a choice on which manager to work with, the manager has to “add value” by being well-known for getting her people promoted. At companies like Meta and Google, it’s generally well-known in the grapevine who are the supportive managers and who have a good track record of team promotions. This becomes a positive self-reinforcing cycle: Great managers attract and retain great talent, who do great work. This gives the manager a tailwind on her career, which then allows her to be even more effective at promoting her team.

A word for executives

If you’re an executive at a company that wants to support and create a culture of growth and supporting careers, here are 3 tips that will help you move in that direction:

1. Make it every leader’s job to build their bench and groom 2-3 others to a place where they can do the job

2. Recognize leaders who give credit to and promote the work of their team

3. Encourage mentorship programs, “donut” style intro meetings, and special projects with high visibility.

When it comes to hiring and nurturing great people and great people managers, having structures in place that promote and support the virtuous cycle of growth and promotion is critical to a business’s success.