Closing Executive Leadership Skill Gaps: A Portfolio Approach to Career Growth w/ Kathleen Vignos #156
Nov 21, 2023
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Kathleen Vignos, VP of Software Engineering @ Capital One, shares strategies for career growth and overcoming executive leadership skill gaps. Topics include portfolio approach to career development, essential executive skills, facilitation techniques, and negotiation strategies. She also explores the impact of lifestyle trends like non-drinking and taking big risks for career growth.
Shift from being a great executor to becoming a great strategist is a key skill for engineering leaders.
Building a career portfolio by acquiring diverse skills and experiences helps address skill gaps.
Exceptional facilitation and influence skills are vital for engineering leaders to succeed in resolving conflicts and fostering collaboration.
Deep dives
Reframing Strategy: Being Willing to Blow Everything Up
One of the key skills for engineering leaders to reach the next level is to shift from being a great executor to becoming a great strategist. This requires reframing strategy as being willing to completely blow everything up for a bigger, better thing. Many leaders, especially those who are highly organized and goal-oriented, struggle with this inflection point and need to learn to think more strategically. It's important to understand that strategy is not just about executing a plan, but about being open to new possibilities and making bold moves for long-term success.
Building a Career Portfolio: Stacking Skills and Experiences
The linear career progression model is being challenged by the concept of building a career portfolio. Instead of following a set ladder of promotions, the focus is on acquiring a diverse range of skills and experiences. By taking nonlinear paths and embracing new opportunities, individuals can deepen their expertise and become more versatile. This approach allows for greater adaptability and helps in addressing the skill gaps that hold back engineering leaders from reaching the next level.
The Power of Facilitation and Influence in Leadership
Exceptional facilitation and influence skills are vital for engineering leaders to succeed. Facilitation involves directing meetings, conversations, and collaborative efforts to achieve desired outcomes. It requires managing group dynamics, ensuring everyone's voice is heard, and guiding the process effectively. Influence, especially at higher levels, involves influencing peers, superiors, and other stakeholders to align towards a common goal. Skills such as negotiation and impactful communication play a crucial role in facilitating decision-making, resolving conflicts, and fostering collaboration.
Reframing Conflict: Breaking Assumptions and Finding Common Ground
Conflict and contention often arise when different teams or individuals have different perspectives on a particular issue. To address conflict, it is essential to reframe assumptions and find common ground. By debunking misconceptions and openly discussing perspectives, it becomes easier to shift the focus from interpersonal clashes to problem-solving and collaboration. This approach fosters a more productive and inclusive work environment where teams can work together towards shared goals.
Effective Decision Making: Considering Multiple Options and Trade-offs
Effective decision-making involves considering multiple options, understanding trade-offs, and involving stakeholders in the process. It is crucial to gather all relevant information, including different viewpoints and potential solutions. By presenting different options comprehensively and objectively, decision-makers can make informed choices and find common ground. This approach reduces biases, encourages transparency, and helps teams arrive at decisions that align with their goals and values.
Kathleen Vignos, VP of Software Engineering @ Capital One, shares how to overcome executive leadership gaps that prevent eng leaders from advancing to the next level in their career. She covers how she applies a portfolio approach to career growth, how that helped her build exec skills in a way, and tips for people who are reorienting their approach to career growth. We also cover how to bridge essential executive skill gaps like facilitation, negotiation, and influencing! Plus strategies for exceptional facilitation, balancing option limiting & option exploration, dealing with conflict / reframing, and negotiation strategies to aid in decision making.
Kathleen Vignos is a VP of software engineering at Capital One. Her organization, Customer Resiliency, builds web, mobile, and backend applications to meet customer needs in times of financial hardship so they can resolve their debt and get back on track. These applications run on a modern stack with ML decisioning and serverless components hosted on AWS. Previously in her 6 years at Twitter, Kathleen worked on promoted tweet review, tweet translation, abuse tooling, and infrastructure automation across on-prem, Google Cloud, and AWS environments. She also ran Twitter’s development programs for engineering managers, personally training 300+ managers across the topics of people management, hiring, technical skills development, and project execution/delivery. Outside of strategic technology work, Kathleen is a distance runner and loves travel. She lives with her husband in San Francisco. They have 2 adult children and are working on plans to visit their sixth continent.
"I was hearing this message, 'You need to be more strategic.' I realized my definition of strategy in my head was not actually strategy and I needed to reframe strategy as being willing to completely blow everything up because there's a bigger, better thing you need to do and I think that if you are very organized and very goal oriented, you don't want to blow up your plan. You want to execute your plan. You're a great executor and that will get you to a certain level. So I think that's inflection point number one, at least it was for me and I think that's true for a lot of people. I see it over and over again.”
- Kathleen Vignos
SHOW NOTES:
How the career portfolio concept strategically drives career growth (2:33)
Surprising discoveries in Kathleen’s transition to tech (5:07)
Parallels between Kathleen’s early work & current eng leadership (7:12)
The impact of a career portfolio on acquiring skills in a nonlinear way (10:47)
Kathleen’s tips for someone reorienting their approach to career growth (15:18)
Common gaps / blocks people encounter on their career growth journey (17:08)
Understanding your audience & the reach of your influence (20:13)
Navigating the shift between being a great executor to a great strategist (22:23)
Key principles of influencing & facilitation (24:49)
Strategies for option limiting as a facilitator (27:01)
How to facilitate to achieve time efficiency & positive option exploration (30:01)
Applying facilitation strategies during the candidate hiring process (32:39)
Examples of “polite interruption” phrases to use (35:31)
Approaches for dealing with conflict & reframing (36:49)
Recommendations for negotiating & decision making (39:47)
Rapid fire questions (44:13)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World - Based on Professor Stuart Diamond’s award-winning course at the Wharton Business School, Getting More concludes that finding and valuing the other party’s emotions and perceptions creates far more value than the conventional wisdom of power and logic. It is intended to provide better agreements for everyone no matter what they negotiate – from jobs to kids to billion-dollar deals to shopping.
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works - A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success— where to play and how to win.
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music - Dave Grohl’s memoir chronicling his early days growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, to hitting the road at the age of 18, and all the music that followed.
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts - Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.
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