Productivity -> Management -> Influence

Ever wondered what types of skills should you develop as you grow in your career?

Each career looks different, but a friend who's a senior executive has shared this simple framework with me that maps to most careers.

At first, focus on mastering your productivity.

At a mid-level, focus on mastering your management skills.

And as you become more senior, focus on influence skills.

The Key "Junior Level" Skill: Productivity

In the first 3-5 years of your career, you should focus on DELIVERING.

You'll have one or more specific roles and you should strive to do them well.

When I say productivity, I mean it in a broad sense:

• Doing your work on time and at a good level of quality

• Being able to work fast when needed

• Being fluent and efficient in the main tools used for your job (Excel, PowerPoint, etc.)

• Being on top of your to-do list and calendar commitments

• Not having a lack of communication skills get in the way

So it's not just about being efficient, it's also about being effective.

Eventually, you'll be very good at your job. You'll be faster, make fewer mistakes and be able to handle more complex tasks.

If you watch a 1-year financial analyst vs. a 3-year financial analyst building a financial model on Excel, or a 1-year management consultant vs. a 3-year management consultant building a PowerPoint deck, you'll notice how much difference those couple years make.

It's astounding.

And getting to that level is what you want to do in your early career.

The Key "Middle Level" Skill: Management

Eventually, your "technical" or productivity skills will level off.

Yes, you'll still make marginal gains here and there, but one more year doing it won't make a huge difference.

At roughly the same time, you'll be trusted to take care of other people who are starting out.

You'll start managing them.

At this moment, you should focus on management skills if you want your career to grow.

Here's why:

While you can only improve your productivity by so much (as you've already had most of the easy gains), you can get a lot of leverage by improving the productivity of others.

So, say you could improve your own productivity by 10% in a year… With good management skills, you could 2-3X the productivity of 5 other people.

This is something like 500-1000% gains. That's a lot of leverage.

Here are a few skills I'd put under the "management" umbrella:

• Training and motivating your team

• Knowing who to hire (and who to fire)

• Managing projects that involve multiple people (and even multiple teams)

• Managing upwards (e.g.: negotiating scope and resources with your boss)

• Managing incentives (carrots and sticks)

• Knowing who to delegate what jobs to

As you grow your management skills, you'll start managing more people and more high-level people.

You'll start getting bigger and more important projects.

And soon, you'll be on the path to being a senior executive.

The Key "Senior Level" Skill: Influence

At the highest level of most companies, people don't do that much management.

They have managers to do that for them!

There's a whole nother skill set to master, though: influencing people.

Here, you're making big decisions that often involve millions of dollars and hundreds of people. Perhaps billions of dollars and thousands of people.

But there's a "problem": you're not an autocrat.

That money and those people aren't yours. There are other executives, partners, shareholders, and employees who care about their careers. Depending on what you do, you also might need to have suppliers, distributors, and even the government and media narratives aligned with your vision.

You need to be able to influence people. To show them and persuade them that your projects matter and your plan is sound and in the right direction.

Some of the skills I bundle together as "Influence" skills:

• Storytelling and setting visions to large teams or even the whole company

• Making alliances with other executives

• Deal-making

• Crisis management

• Negotiation skills

• Networking within and outside the firm

• Public speaking

If you're at this level in your career and you're still doing managerial work, you'll probably hit a ceiling pretty soon. You're not paid to manage people anymore – you're paid to influence (especially) high-level people.

What got you here won't get you there

All this is to say that a HUGE mistake people do in their careers is to keep doing what made them successful up to this point, without realizing that they're now playing a completely different game.

Sure, there are careers where you can do pretty well just on the first "technical" level of skills.

Maybe if you're a programmer, a famous designer, an athlete or an artist, you won't need to learn the whole management/influence skill set to be super successful.

But the common thing about these careers is that they intrinsically have immense leverage.

This leverage makes up for all the rest.

If you're in a profession that needs people or outside capital to have leverage, you'll need these skill sets.

And the tricky thing is to notice when to switch your focus from one to the other.

A lot of people get stuck in their careers for years because they're trying to get even better at what they're already GREAT.

They don't realize that what got them here won't move them forward.

So there's this meta-skill of noticing when to focus on improving each type of skill.

This framework isn't perfect.

Sometimes you need to learn an influence skill or two in your early career to succeed at your job. Some high-level executives would greatly improve if they took the time to learn how a balance sheet works.

But this framework is a good map to have in your head so you can internalize the meta-skill of knowing when to switch gears to a whole nother skill set.

Keep working smarter.