A couple of years ago, Lara Hogan shared a fabulous post introducing the concept of a Manager Voltron. The gist of the post is that the types of support needed for career growth are varied and nearly impossible to find from any one given person, so one can formulate a group of mentors, or “voltron,” to fill out areas of support that may be lacking from their manager alone. Lara also provides a handy worksheet to help readers identify folks who might be good components of their voltron. I thought I would supplement that resource by providing some more specific detail on who comprises my manager voltron, which also has a certain skew towards the type of support that’s useful for a senior IC.
My voltron
My actual, real-life manager voltron consists of the following people:
- My manager: My official manager is an integral part of my voltron and provides a form of support that can only come from them, regardless of their particular strengths.
- As the one formally responsible for my professional development and for delegating work on the team, I rely on my manager to have an in depth understanding of the areas in which I want to grow and to grant me opportunities to meet those goals. For example, when I tell her that project delivery is something I’d like to work on, my manager might delegate to me tasks such as writing a planning doc or scoping tickets on our team’s next big project.
- My manager also helps me identify areas of growth that I may not be able to see myself by taking into account organizational values and a wealth of experience in managing other engineers.
- I also rely on her for regular, honest feedback in the areas I wish to grow that align with her own areas of strength, such as communication and leadership. In a previous post I describe how I use 1:1s to solicit this feedback.
- A more tenured peer on my team: A respected peer on my team provides guidance on a day-to-day level and is a lighter weight source of feedback than my manager.
- As I work towards a better understanding of what makes a successful engineer on my particular team, I look to a longer tenured teammate as a day-to-day role model in a wide range of areas, such as development setup for faster iteration, best practices around testing and monitoring, code review norms, and communication with the team and stakeholders.
- As a quick source of feedback, I rely on him as a gut check for ideas that I’m working on, such as whether a given technical approach is feasible or strategies for better communicating with our manager.
- A very senior engineer not on my team: I rely on this person’s broad purview and organizational clout to source opportunities outside of my immediate team.
- This engineer has awareness of the biggest projects folks are working on across the company as someone frequently solicited for architecture advice. When I tell them about projects that I’m working on or thinking about, they’re able to connect me to other folks who may have worked in a similar space in the past or whose upcoming release I may want to coordinate with.
- This person also acts as my sponsor for opportunities for increased visibility within the org, putting my name forward when opportunities for cross-team projects or working groups arise.
- As a long-tenured engineer within the company, they have insight into the promotion process and often give me concrete, actionable steps for career advancement based on their own experience.
- An EM not on my team: Having a trusted manager outside of my reporting chain to turn to for advice helps me play devil’s advocate when conflicts with my own manager arise and provides additional transparency around organizational processes.
- When I occasionally butt heads with my manager, I turn to her to help me better understand my manager’s position, which I can use to help us reach consensus faster. For example, when my manager gives me feedback I disagree with, I turn to this person to understand why that feedback may be important or relevant.
- She also provides me with organizational transparency when my own manager is sometimes reluctant to provide it, which helps me understand things like promotion and compensation decisions and resource constraints my manager may be dealing with.
- A strong technical leader outside of my company: This person gives me important perspective on issues that I deal with at work by putting them in context with the industry as a whole.
- When I describe challenges that I face at work, she helps me determine what’s normal or weird based on what she’s seen in her own experience at different companies. This gives me comfort in knowing of others who share my experiences and helps me understand which of my frustrations I should put aside as industry standard or may be reasons to move on from my current role.
How I built my voltron
Most relationships with those in my voltron have come about organically as folks I have worked with directly, either presently or in the past. When I stop working closely with someone whose guidance I value, I make sure to maintain regular contact with them through a recurring 1:1 where appropriate or by reaching out every so often for advice or catch-up sessions.
If I feel that my voltron has a hole unfillable by someone I already know, I might think about folks in the org or industry with strong reputations and ask a mutual connection to set up an introduction. An important thing to keep in mind is that a good voltron feeds itself: the more trusted mentors that I have, the easier it is for me to find additional ones through their support.
Andrea Heyman 