Long term, I believe that your career will be largely defined by getting lucky and the rate at which you learn. I have no advice about luck, but to speed up learning I have two suggestions: work at a rapidly expanding company, and make your peers your first team.

When your team escalates to you, it is not always necessary (or wise) to "accept" the escalation. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to hand the problem back. That doesn't mean being unhelpful, though! The HBR article provides a set of really good questions to help frame these kinds of conversations:

• “What have you tried?”
• “Who—or what—is getting in the way of tackling this?” helps you get to the root of what’s stopping them from solving the problem themself.
• “What support do you need?”
• “What would you do if you were in my seat?”
• “Is there anything else I should know?” leaves them to solve the problem while validating your support.

In most large organizations, a typical CEO’s or senior executive’s calendar is clogged with 1:1 meetings. These are usually seen as necessary for alignment, decision-making, or relationship management. But at the top of an enterprise, the very structure of these meetings is working against the organization’s best interests. While there’s lots of information available about how to optimize or improve your 1:1 meetings, no amount of improvement will help meetings that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. The alternative is to re-engineer the way executive time is used. Instead of relying on 1:1s for operational discussions, CEOs and senior executives should convene small, cross-functional “capability meetings”: 1:2 or 1:3 conversations that reflect how value is actually created.

Interesting article! This makes a lot of sense to me. I'd be super curious to know what C-suite folks think.

There are some excellent gems: it's worth reading the whole post! A few things that really stood out to me:

From an information theory point of view: We want to communicate concepts, but we have to translate them into words. This can lose a lot of information. Examples are another channel of communication, that can identify errors in translation

💯

Startups require different skills (aptitude) and mindsets (attitude) than corporations. Simon Wardley identified three essential mindsets necessary for success: Explorers, Villagers, and Town Planners. Companies benefit from having all three mindsets.

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices.

Dave Kellogg on managers, directors and VPs.

• Managers are paid to drive results with some support.
• Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (“set and forget”).
• VPs are paid to make the plan.

"There are seldom technical solutions to behavioral problems."

• Ed Crowley