Career Development

Over the course of my career — across Comcast, Capital One, and now AWS — I’ve worked alongside a lot of people for a long time. Long enough to watch careers arc in ways that aren’t visible in any single year, to see who stayed effective and who didn’t, and to notice that the pattern doesn’t follow the obvious script. The conventional theory is something like: the people who last are the ones who found a comfortable niche and settled in. Job security through indispensability, deep expertise in a specific domain, low enough ambition to avoid the burnout that comes from pushing too hard. The long-tenured person as someone who’s optimized for staying rather than for doing. ...

The career conversation that most managers have sounds something like this: a direct report doesn’t get the promotion they expected, or they get it but felt the process was opaque, or they come in and say they’ve accepted a role somewhere else. And then the manager has a very intense, very real conversation about what that person actually wants from their career, what they see as their next step, whether there’s something that could have been done differently. ...

A few years into my time as a people leader, I started noticing a gap between what I thought I was doing for people and what I was actually doing. I was mentoring — regularly, I thought, genuinely. Giving feedback on their work, talking through career paths, offering perspective when they were navigating difficult situations. I felt like I was investing in people. And I was. But I was doing it in a way that stayed largely inside the room. ...