[hariwb]

I think many readers here have had a pretty negative experience with a new manager parachuting in (usually as a referral from other senior leadership), immediately deciding that the team is underperforming without knowing much about the business context, technical constraints, and company culture that led to the current environment, and making big structural changes without consulting the boots-on-the-ground folks. Usually we hear stories from the engineers who are disaffected. This feels like an anecdote from the other side.

It's not wrong to wonder about your career trajectory, but it's telling to see someone pretty nakedly talk about optimizing for changing their level at a company, before they've even landed there and evaluated if they can help / how they are helping their team. I'm not naive, and I recognize those people exist and can acknowledge that they can do good work. But if someone came into my workplace with the mindset of "aggressively [seeking] to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks" and their goal was going "from Senior Manager to Director in ... 12 months", I'd be skeptical that they weren't going to damage peer relationships and optimize for being recognized at the expense of their direct reports, even if I thought they could be a valuable asset in the short term.

[BowBun]

Totally agree. This reads to me as someone who is more concerned with their trajectory and appearance than actually doing the work. I believe in doing hard work well, then showing it off to earn growth. It should be deliberate, but if your end goal is the title then I will smell then lack of sincerity immediately.

The tone of the writer comes across as mildly entitled as if they, just by wanting it, are entitled to the role. No mention of other senior leaders in the company that may have been on the same trajectory at the same time, and how he was measuring up against his peers. Most of the achievements listed in this post are purely overseeing groups of people, which in itself is the bare minimum for this level of leadership. I also perceive some cultural barriers in this post.

[mhedgpeth]

I'm the author of the post. Yeah you got it right, I think the hiring process got me into that mindset, i.e. "This is a step back from you title-wise but you'll get back there quickly". So the hiring process made all that look too easy and in retrospect got me into the wrong state of mind.

What I should have done, at the point of being hired, is to drop all that, and focus patiently on what I needed to do. And I'm sharing it because not enough people share this side of it, and because I am working on elements that would have made it better. Thanks for reading! :)

[fijiaarone]

I definitely thought like the first commenter at first but the realization that you admitted what you did wrong and accepted responsibility for it really won my over by the end of your post.

[senkora]

It sounds like a very painful experience. Thank you for writing about it and sharing what you have learned.

[paulcole]

Curious what your estimate is for what percentage of teams are actually underperforming?

And then of those underperforming teams, what percentage of those would the team members identify themselves as part of underperforming teams?