Unlocking levels in leadership

I am constantly surprised when people ask me what do really senior leaders do ? Are they working 80+ hours a week?

This is the conversation I found myself in over a coffee this week. Typically what would have been a one-liner response about working on top priority, vision, and communication, I ended up sharing a mental model.

Junior Engineer/PM: You are told what to do, and given strict guardrails to work in. You excel in your assignment you get promoted.

Senior Engineer/PM: Ownership: You have application or component-level ownership. Goals: You set goals for your application/product, and help set milestones for junior members. Responsibilities: You are responsible for enhancing, and maintaining products and applications. Within your team, you are giving enough guidance to junior members and maintaining standards.

Manager/Principal Engineer/PM : Ownership: is now widened to cover multiple applications and components aligned to a customer value stream. You are responsible for providing value to end customers through developing, influencing, and upholding frameworks and standards. Team: Collaborating across multiple value streams and org functions. Goals and responsibility: Not only do you set goals for yourself and your teams but coordinate across the org to make sure the goals are aligned. Primarily responsible for the team output and not just your own.

Senior Engineering leaders: Ownership: Own aggregate KPIs like customer and employee growth, productivity, retention, and satisfaction. Create frameworks and standards to operate multiple teams well. Create vision and long-term roadmaps. Team: Map organization OKR to teams. Empower your teams to collaborate and be enablers for other divisions (think sales, marketing, CS).

Executives: Ownership: Primarily responsible for the overall vision, planning, and strategizing to stay competitive and lead market segment over decades to come. Tasked with secondary but vital functions of Legal, mergers, product development, staff development etc. Teams: Steer all the individual functions like product, technology, sales, marketing etc. Responsible for: Overall success of the organization both internal and external. Think external competition on one end and internal innovation on the other end of the spectrum.