Joining a startup is risky for you. But growing with the company is not.
Growing with the company should not be elusive. There should be a concrete way defined for your growth. It is both for your interest and the company’s.
We hire and fire. We don’t wait for someone to grow.
— Some CEO, in private.
We are a family. We do not fire.
— Another CEO, in public.
I don’t take either of the above opinions. A truly great team is hardly just bought from the market. It grows organically, and it unremittingly reaches the next stronger level. Meanwhile, healthy growth pressure is necessary. You may lose if you fall behind.
A well-designed growth path can concentrate your effort and reduce politics in the team. You should know how to grow yourself and get what you want in a meaningful, valuable way. Don’t waste time pleasing someone or suppressing others. But if the path isn’t clear, the effort could be spent on the wrong things.
A clear growth path also puts essential control of your career back in your own hands. It can foster a secure environment for everyone. Without a clear growth path and a sense of security, one would tend to be defensive; the culture would be less collaborative and drive near-sighted actions.
At Merico, your growth path can be abstracted to a continuous loop of the following steps.
- Achieve extraordinary success.
- Duplicate the success in the team.
- Repeat the first step with the next level of success.
Your growth starts with a big objective that fits your role, strength, and interest and that is aligned with the company’s road map. We want your extraordinary success in realizing your objective. Then the process of duplicating your success will be accompanied by your raise or promotion in the company.
Extraordinary Success
Being extraordinary means delivering exponentially stronger results than ordinary expectations. As a marketer, have you brought tens of thousands of visitors to our product despite the limited brand power? As a sales representative or consultant, have you closed the early ten deals with good logos despite the immaturity of our product? As a product manager or designer, have you made any widely and deeply loved features despite many other defects in the product? As a program manager, have you stabilized development cycles with fixed-time releases despite unexpected demands and bugs constantly emerging? As a developer, have you written bug-proof, highly reliable code despite limited development time? … Think about something you’ll be proud to say in five years.
Why must your success be extraordinary? You want an exponential reward from the company. That requires the company to grow exponentially. Furthermore, that requires all of us to deliver exponential results. Meanwhile, an extraordinarily successful experience will be your most valuable asset. It will be the best evidence of your top-tier competence and power. Take our own hiring, for example. We always look for cases in which a candidate does something extremely well, which is vastly different from doing something moderately well.
Extraordinary success is hard to achieve. You need to learn deeply what other successful people have done and always keep purely open-minded. You need to innovate leveraging your and our unique strengths. You need to challenge yourself, train yourself, and reshape your mind. You need to be persistent and face inevitable failures before ultimate success comes.
Duplicating Your Success
The second step may start with you being a leader and end with you being promoted to a management role or more senior level. When you reach a proud milestone, the next question for you is how to duplicate the success to more team members.
There are many approaches to such duplication. You may create a tool for other team members to work more efficiently and better achieve their objectives. The tool can be a substantial technology such as a library, a few services, or a system. It can also be a process, mechanism, or set of best practices. The specific form depends on your role and responsibility. Besides, you may mentor or manage junior team members and empower them to realize extraordinary success like you. You may also hand your work to another colleague who can replace you without any loss of efficiency – this is a remarkable type of duplication and a strong indicator of your being ready for the next bigger opportunity, instead of a career crisis, as it may sound in an ill environment.
This stage of growth has several implications. First, it is based on your own capability of winning success; otherwise, what is to be duplicated? Especially when it comes to a management role, we don’t designate managers without solid roots.
You know who the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is gonna be able to do as a good job as them. … If you are a great person, why do you want to work with someone you cannot learn anything from?
— Steven Jobs
Second, your growth always depends on others’ success. Apparently, it is the meaning of duplication. You can only be promoted by helping others succeed. Conversely, working with a successful team largely enhances your chances of success. No one can succeed without relying on others or learning from others – otherwise, your definition of success is wrong or too narrow and won’t be recognized at Merico. Moreover, your success is nourished by the enlightening conversations and honest feedback that you can get from colleagues.
Next Success
Success is an unlimited resource. It is not zero-sum against your history or other competitors. Never worry about the availability of success.
Now it is time to extend your previous achievements and find the next significant objective. One direction to go is breadth. There are many other exciting challenges, roles, areas, or domains you can explore in the company. In that sense, Herbert Simon can be our model – see the awards that he owned in different disciplines: the Turing Award, Nobel Prize in Economics, APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology…
The other direction is going for depth. You can focus on one thing and grow more success from it. The metrics that define your current success, such as the number of users or the revenue, can be raised to a higher order of magnitude. With a management role, you can further dig out the meta success factors in management as the organizational hierarchy increases.
All in all, we are establishing a framework with you for your growth and success in the company. Define an ambitious objective and strive for excellence. Your successful career will be assured at Merico.