Response to “Operate at all levels”
I recently read a post titled “Operate at all levels” by Pedro Franceschi who is the co-CEO at Brex. The post is an internal communication that he has shared to his team about the requirement he has, particularly for managers, to operate at all levels. Pedro provides the example of a director at his company that both leads the AI team and writes tooling for engineering dashboards. Firstly, I agree with Pedro’s assertions that a leader who can operate at all levels earns respect from their team and if you want to be a successful leader in any business you should have the skills of the organisation you are managing e.g. if you are a director of engineering you should have a software engineering background, if you are leading a sales organisation you should have experience with sales and partnerships. I am consistently surprised when I meet people in my work either as a consultant or engineering manager that have not worked in the field they are managing. In amalgamated organisations it makes sense that you may have a person skilled in marketing also managing an ecommerce engineering team if that team does not require a senior leader but it should be a requirement that at some point in that person’s career they were a senior individual contributor (IC). ...