Some key people in a tech company end up becoming a beacon for the professional aspirations of all employees. They act as inspiring role models and serve to retain competent people and attract new hires.
When there isn’t a leading figure like this in the arm of individual contributors in a company’s Y-career path, fewer people may want to follow that direction, and the result is that the technical quality of the organization suffers. That’s why role models are so relevant to the technical arm of the Y. One way of elevating the profile of individual contributors within the company is to include presentations of their work in monthly general meetings and talk about their projects in communications with the teams.
Inspiring people tend to give a company a specific identity, and it’s the managers’ responsibility to ensure that these professionals have visibility. Top management positions are prominent but scarce, and if everyone wants to be a manager, in an environment where only managers are seen as inspiration, individual technical talent is either wasted or not retained.
A company needs to identify each employee’s superpower and how to put it to the best use. Promoting diversity of key people within the company helps different professionals to identify with those whose skills are more like their own.
In technology, there are many ways to contribute, since the roles are so varied: maybe one professional excels by being super organized, maybe they have a vision and can establish new directions for the team, or maybe they are great at a specific type of algorithm, such as the ones used in machine learning systems. Some can have a panoramic view of the area to dictate the architecture.
A company needs to identify each employee’s superpower and how to put it to the best use.
Skilled managers organize a positive environment with clear guidelines, expectations, incentives, and communication channels to enable each professional to reach their full potential.
Marcus Fontoura
Marcus Fontoura is a technical fellow and CTO for Azure Core at Microsoft, and author of A Platform Mindset. He works on efforts related to large-scale distributed systems, data centers, and engineering productivity. Fontoura has had several roles as an architect and research scientist in big tech companies, such as Yahoo! and Google, and was most recently the CTO at Stone, a leading Brazilian fintech.
