- Sai Chiligireddy worked with nearly a dozen managers at Amazon.
- The engineering director has already had trouble with his performance rating after working under three managers.
- He advises to document the achievements and prepare for meetings to quickly establish confidence.
This test also filed is based on a conversation with Sai Chiligireddy, an engineering director at the Amazon office in Seattle. It was published for duration and clarity. Business Insider has checked its employment history.
Amazon was one of my first jobs outside the university, and I landed in 2017 after a year of work at Juniper Networks.
Over the past seven years, I have worked with 11 managers – in part because of the realization of teams and companies in my owners, but also because I asked to move teams when I stopped To see growth opportunities or when I realized that the comments on my performance were vague.
The first two times, I was worried about the frequency of managerial changes would have an impact on the growth of my career and the type of projects I would get. But it improved during subsequent changes when I learned to better communicate my goals.
Here are four actions that I took To make sure that my transitions between the managers were smooth and helped me gain their confidence. These pointers helped me stand out and grow up quickly.
1. Have your career
I have always discussed my career in the state of mind that I am responsible for it and my manager is a facilitator. This mental mode guarantees that I communicate before I am asked and that I am looking for advice beyond my immediate manager.
I used to spend about two hours each month to Hand hand to several managers At Amazon to ask how they develop in their careers and get comments on how I could do things differently.
2. Document everything
I maintain a boastful sheet with a newspaper of all my achievements and summaries of all the projects on which I worked, including the comments of my previous Managers and team leaders and all stakeholders. I took 30 to 45 minutes aside every week or two weeks to make sure I don’t miss anything.
There is a lot of mobility in technology. If the people you have worked with in the past year, there is no one to guarantee for your work. My performance note suffered once when I worked under three managers who all had different perceptions about what I worked on, and I did not take any active measure to rectify it.
I share this document with all my new managers so that they have my history at hand and have a context on all my current projects.
3. Prepare yourself in head
When I started my career, I used to wing individual meetings with my managers. I got very little out of these meetings.
I started to take the initiative to set up introductory conversations with all my new managers, where I share my short and long -term goals. I also share the boastful document that I keep in this call to give them an overview of the place where I am with my career and what are my current projects.
After this first meeting, I went to a different format for the rest of our sessions. I borrowed from a book entitled “The art of meeting your manager” and I divided my meetings into six sections. I modify this according to the different managers and their preferences.
- Icebreaker: to facilitate conversation.
- Employee section: I share recent contributions that my manager may not have on their radar, the challenges I have faced and the updates on the discussions I had with other members of my team.
- Manager section: I proactively ask for comments.
- Development and growth: We discuss where I am currently and reflect on ideas and projects to make sure that I fill these shortcomings to meet the criteria of the next level of employees.
- Align priorities: we discuss what I should work immediately on.
- Action articles: My manager and I both notions our action elements for the next meeting and monitoring on all the action elements of the previous meeting.
4. Divide and conquer
Growing up in my career, I started to assume more leadership responsibilities. I started supporting new engineers in my head-to-face team and installing Slack channels where they could ask for help.
Collaboration with other teams has definitely changed. My manager and I divided and conquered. I would take the property of five to six teams and my manager would manage three to four.
I started trying to see myself as a support system for my manager instead of working under them.