During the last several years of mentoring other Staff+ engineers I've had many conversations with many different people that go roughly the same way:

I recently moved from being a team leader to being an org leader, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing / I feel like I'm failing / I'm overwhelmed by all of the work on my plate / I'm lost and confused / maybe this isn't the right role for me / I feel so alone.

If this resonates with you, I can assure you that you most certainly are not alone! I felt exactly the same way when I first made the leap from being a Staff Engineer on a team to being an Architect with broad responsibility for many teams. I suddenly felt like a failure - adrift and overwhelmed, despite it being a change that I greatly desired and had worked towards for many many years. Even worse, I was afraid to admit that I was struggling for fear that everyone would find out that I wasn't capable of doing the job. Thankfully, my fears were unfounded, and what I was feeling was a perfectly normal response to a massive shift in my role.

The Performance Cliff #

A friend recently shared with me a concept from child psychology called the "Performance Cliff" that perfectly describes the cause of these feelings:

These are moments when a child's previously learned skills or coping strategies suddenly seem inadequate to meet new demands. source.

Typically, this is a common pattern in gifted children: a child does well academically in k-12, but suddenly is unable to cope with the demands of college, where self-direction, time management and study skills - skills they didn't need to learn in order to succeed in school up to that point - are now critical to their success.

The same mechanisms are at play when you move from a Staff+ team lead role to an org lead - you hit a Performance Cliff. You've been cruising up the career ladder for a senior IC, where you have been growing skills scoped to your role on a team and centered around technical execution in increasingly larger and more complex projects. Then, you get to the point where you are responsible for not one, but many teams. Instead of reporting to a line manager, you now report to a manager of managers. Instead of operating within a clearly defined team scope, you now have to navigate near-constant ambiguity. Suddenly, the main thing that you've been focusing your career around - writing code - isn't actually your job anymore.

Simply put, the skills that got you to this point are not the skills that you need in order to meet the new demands of your role.

Additionally, the way that you have been measuring success in your role and the subtle ways that you (and others) have judged your job performance are no longer the things you do every day. Previously, you were directly or indirectly responsible for moving tickets across a Jira board: writing code, reviewing PRs, writing technical documents about problems within your team's specific domain, collaborating with well-known stakeholders, etc. These tasks are clearly-scoped, concrete, and measurable accomplishments that occur on a frequent cadence, often daily. There's a predictable rhythm to being on a team, marked by processes and rituals designed to ensure that your work gets done well and on time.

When you are not on a team, the rhythm changes. More often than not, the work you are doing is much more ambiguous, takes longer to accomplish, and is way more difficult to measure. Instead of having a singular focus, you are often juggling many long-term projects or workstreams at once. There's less of a feeling of "completeness" to your work when you are proposing a change to the org's tech stack, or changing the operational review process, or figuring out how to level up incident management, or any of the other myriad ways that org Level Staff+ engineers must influence without authority. Your job is now to work through other people, rather than doing everything yourself. You have to manage your own to-do lists because you no longer have Jira as an external brain to help you keep track of everything you've done and everything you have left to do.

Another big change is that you are now expected to find your own work. The reason you've been promoted to this level is specifically so that you can use your knowledge and experience to identify and solve problems that no one else has yet identified, or push through work that has proven difficult or intractable. If you're lucky, your manager might ask you to go embed on a team that is struggling and needs your guidance, but more often than not, they are not going to tell you what you should be doing, or keeping tabs on you every day to make sure things are getting done. They can help you decide on the relative priority of the work you identify, but the everyday decisions you make about where to spend your time are almost entirely self-directed.

When you report to a manager of managers, your direct peers in your reporting chain are now Managers, not ICs, so you have to learn how to develop strong relationships with managers - what motivates them? How do they think? How do you influence them so that you can influence their teams? In order to find IC peers you have to build a network across many teams and orgs, and you need to be able to cultivate good relationships and build trust with both managers and ICs from across engineering, as well as cross-functional partners in Design, PM, Marketing, Data Analysis, etc. Before, these skills were just one of many things that were important to your success as a team lead, but as an org lead, you cannot do your job successfully without excelling at so-called "soft skills".

What do you do if you fall off the cliff? #

Now we know that these feelings of overwhelm, confusion, and loneliness, or questioning whether you are actually good at your job are completely normal, and stem from falling off the Staff+ Performance Cliff. So, what can we do to help ourselves feel better about ourselves and our performance?

1. Change your mindset. The first step, while it feels cliche to say it, is to change your mindset around how you measure your own success. Cut yourself some slack because your job is different now! The timescales are different, the artifacts are different, the expectations are different, the skills that make you successful are different, and that's okay! Accept and internalize that spending weeks writing a doc and shopping it around to build alignment will never have the same immediate sense of satisfaction as writing code, but that doesn't mean you aren't getting things done. The internal measures, structures, patterns, and practices that helped you get here don't work now, so you need to create new ones.

2. Figure out an organizational system that lets you stay on top of your to-do list. Since you are now responsible for independently managing your work, it is absolutely critical that you find an organizational system that works for you. I've written about how I adopted bullet journalling when I hit my own cliff. Perhaps bujo would help you too, perhaps you prefer something else. It doesn't really matter what the system is as long as it's something that you can stick to.

3. Find your IC peers and meet with them often. I am lucky in my current role to have a peer IC who reports to the same VP, and we have a daily standup meeting for just the two of us that helps me to feel much less siloed and alone in my day-to-day. We also meet bi-weekly with the Group IC leads in our 6 sub-orgs, as well as monthly meetings with our peers in the other engineering org. It's so great to have time with other folks in the same boat as me to collaborate and strategize with.

4. Set up regular office hours where folks can sign up for ad hoc meetings with you. This helps to keep your calendar organized, and it also helps make it less intimidating for more junior engineers to reach out to you. Because yes, even though you probably don't feel like it, you are now kinda intimidating! Make sure you don't inadvertently end up in an ivory tower because of your role.

5. Keep track of everything that you do. This serves a dual purpose: first, to help you keep your manager apprised of what you're working on and what you've accomplished (because they likely have no idea what you are doing day-to-day), and second, to help you feel like you are actually accomplishing things and moving projects forward. A brag doc is a good start, but oftentimes your most significant accomplishment is having the right conversation at the right time to help ensure someone else's project is successful, and you only know that long after the fact.

6. Learn the manager perspective. Because your direct peers are now managers, you should learn to speak their language and better understand how they think, what motivates them, and how best to collaborate with them. My two favorite books on this subject are Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner, and The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier.

I definitely still struggle with navigating all of the ambiguity of org-level leadership as a Staff+ IC, even after many years in this role! But, hopefully by knowing that you aren't alone in feeling like you are struggling when hitting the Performance Cliff, you are better equipped to reframe your feelings of inadequacy and change how you think about success in your role. If you've navigated this yourself, I'd love to hear about strategies that have worked for you!

Thanks to Allie Jones for introducing me to the Performance Cliff concept and for being an early reader of this post!

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash