As I’m looking over this mountain range in Brauneck, Bavaria I’m falling in love with the depth of the view, its shades and complexity of details. It’s not the view that I’m falling in love with, but how I feel about myself when I’m here. That kind of a balance brings you in peace anywhere in the world, in any situation.

I’m getting to know new professionals from networking events almost every week, and often when I ask women with 8 to 10 years of experience and employment in corporate, they don’t talk about their salaries, career growth and success, their achievements, founding companies, their investments or building new strategies for their business. I understand there are one million other things in life, but men never have an issue or have other priorities in conversations other than what brings food to their table.

Why is finding the best version of you, securing your career, dreams and getting out of your comfort zone to thrive financially so difficult and stigmatized? How can women and men become more supportive to themselves and others at rock bottom, and stop being oppressed with fear?

After years of asking these questions I can finally reflect on principles of a successful leadership summarized from career choices, recruitment and the work environment. I am leading my own path and would like to support more women in their career decisions and career change. My decisions to teach programming courses and engage in conferences has been an impactful realization, and I have plans for more. If you would like to share your story, please contact me via email syntia.birgele[@]gmail.com, let’s connect.

I have learned and worked through the lessons from the authors such as Claire Hughes Johnson, Mikael Krogerus, Nate Silver, Erin Meyer and Gloria Jean Watkins. Here is my few key takeaways:

Obsess over talent

The number one success factor for being a good leader is being able to pick talent. That, and create followership. The quality of the people you attract and retain defines your team, so developing a keen talent radar can be your biggest competitive advantage. Create a culture of developing critical talent and finding challenging work for your strongest performers.

Pace and energy for ambitions

To know where your team is headed next year, in the next 4 or 10 years, you need to develop a vision for that future. Guide your team up for bold goals, articulate a plan to achieve them faster than expected, and focus on making this energizing, rewarding and fulfilling for your teams.

Lead with clarity and context

It’s not always clear who should make a decision. Effective leaders embrace decision making to drive the outcomes, clearly communicate decisions and hold themselves and their teams accountable for results. You need to be able to translate chaos into a clear plan and be a persistent force for progress, especially when solving problems that are hard to deal with.

Focus on growth

Understanding that progress is only inevitable through focused effort. Generate an energy and warmth that is infectious across teams and throughout the company. We are genuinely excited about our work and about creating an exceptionally welcoming environment for all employees.

Giving others a chance

But the hardest lesson I’ve had to learn is that you get to that point where it’s impossible for you to be successful without trusting others to do things better. And that breakthrough is when you go beyond being a manager.

You can be a leader without a title, and that’s the most successful leadership– when you’re actually influencing what’s happening around you. While understanding your own impact you’ll eventually get where you see yourself. It’s your mindset that makes who you are.

A good leader has to spend their time on things no one else can do. If you’re doing something that others in your team could do just as well, you’re just wasting your time.

Your connections

For the people to work together well, the whole must produce something greater than the sum of its parts. How does that happen? By forging formal and informal connections.

Although running into someone in an actual or virtual hallway helps, you need to actively identify and cultivate relationships that you can draw on to succeed even as you’re helping the other person do the same.

Seek out who you need to work with, especially those who might create or prevent obstacles. Remember that other leaders are great resources– there’s nothing better than 1:1 with another manager to understand what matters on the top – handling tough situations and how to flourish in an organization. It’s easy to neglect those relationships when you’re too focused on your job.

Take an action

Honor your commitments, listen thoughtfully and be supportive. If you have an issue with a fellow manager or their team, make sure they hear it from you, and then work to resolve it before it becomes anyone’s problem. The more you can put yourself in the shoes of other parts of the system that you’re interacting with, the better. Especially if you can do it before there’s a reason to. If you could better understand both the personality of the person that you’re dealing with and their stresses and strains, that’s very helpful.

People who have that natural curiosity and that natural willingness to learn about the things that are directly critical to getting your own job done – that’s a trait I’ve seen in many leaders.

Map your team’s partners and stakeholders

Either hold 1:1 with them or sit in meetings with key individuals or teams. Share your team’s objectives and discuss how you can best work together.

Identify leaders you admire

Ask them out to know each other and compare notes on management practices and the work of your respective teams and companies. It will help you get connections you can call on to test your ideas or seek advice.

Working with your own manager to make sure you’re making connections and getting integrated within an organization outside your immediate area of focus is also time well spent.

Giving away your title

In a hyperscale environment, it’s hard to give up the things you’ve built and the multiple jobs you hold. But the only way for you and the company to grow is to get over that emotional response and realize that there are going to be a lot more Legos– and probably better Legos– the more you let go. You have to give away your job every six months. That’s especially true for leaders and founders.

You also want to be constantly vigilant about gaps in capabilities– both your own and those if the company’s leadership team– that are becoming critical to the future success of your company. In the spirit of being self-aware, you have to know what you don’t know and what you’re not good at. Being able to set ego aside and be ruthlessly critical of yourself and your division is hard. It’s not just about where you have gaps today but also about what you’ll need in the next three to five years. It’s a fine line to walk. On the one hand, you’re still fighting for survival, so it’s hard to imagine that you’ll need more experienced people.

Ask your leaders

What motivates leaders to work and what are their awards? The real reason you should want to do this is because it gives you the ability to have an impact that enriches and improves the lives of others. That’s why I want to hire and support really strong people. If you can do that and you have enough self confidence to be in a room full of people who might be smarter than you, then you can lift an institution.

Understand what matters

Just as you understand your report’s values, you should work to understand your founders’ values. Better ask them to write down company values if they haven’t already. In particular, ask them to articulate the trade-offs they’re willing to make. For example, what they’re willing to give up for the level of quality of products? Are they willing to push back deadlines, or are they okay with losing a large potential customer base to do so?

Consider your career

Sometimes great leaders spend too much time thinking about achieving business success or paving their direct reports’ career paths that they neglect their own path. No one knows what’s inside your head, heart and the gut the way you do, and your number one job is to be your own career coach.

I’m always surprised when someone is waiting for their manager or some other exogenous force to tap them on the shoulder with an opportunity or an idea for their career. It’s great when someone else has ideas or advice, but you’re the person who should be the expert on what’s best for you. For me, this has meant periodically taking a step back and assessing whether I was learning the things I wanted to learn and having the kind of impact I wanted to have.

Build self-awareness

So, how do you chart a career course? You won’t be surprised to hear that my main advice is to build self-awareness. Much like how you manage your energy, it’s critical to track which potential jobs or capabilities come naturally to you and which ones are motivating you. You’re seeking the combination of your own motivators and passions, your amplitude, innate or acquired.

Ask yourself

I recommend keeping a personal document, starting fairly early in your career or in change of your career, in which you note various roles you’ve tried and seek to answer the following questions:

• Were you good at it? How do you know that? If you weren’t good at it, why not?

• Did you enjoy it? Why and why not?

• What did it reveal about the type of work you do or don’t want to do?

• Where did you have clear gaps in abilities?

• What skills did you need to acquire? Was that easy or hard to do?

• Were you interested in the work? Did you want to keep going and learn more?

The biggest trap I’ve seen people fall into is getting stuck either chasing someone else’s version of success or in a role that doesn’t prioritize their strengths or make them feel fulfilled. They’re often procrastinating. Stay conscious of your opportunities and consider using some of your own time to help others who may not have these choices.

If you feel like you’re roughly on the right path, shorten the time increments and ask yourself:

Every 6 months

Does this feel like the right role to learn what I want to learn in the next 6 to 12 months? Am I clear on how I will acquire that knowledge and from whom? If not, I make a change toward where I think I need to be.

Every 12 months

Should I be making changes or seeking changes to my role to augment my learning and stay on my five-year path? If so, how do I make that known to my manager or leaders who mentor or sponsor me? How do I demonstrate additional aptitude via new projects or responsibilities? Outline potential directions your role might take or alternate roles you might move into depending on the course of the company and your own ambitions.

For example, I imagine that if I stay the course, I might end up managing managers or adding an adjacent team to my remit. If I toggle a new path, I might work on a new area of the business and learn new functional skills. In either case, I need to be growing in roughly the time frame I’m picturing based on the organization’s growth and feedback on my progress.

Make sure you have self-awareness to check whether your ambitions align with your demonstrated impact. The more impact you have, the more you earn the right to have these ambitions.

Every 18 months

What have you learned in the past 12 to 18 months about your skills, your energy and your motivators? Based on your own motivators and demonstrated abilities, this is the time when while looking back– you realize you might be wrong about your goals or need a change of course.

Company building and managing people are both tremendously hard but rewarding. Understand your energy, your abilities, and the constraints and the guidelines you need to place around yourself and your work to maintain strength and stability. Delegate, reframe your thinking, ask for help. If your foundation is strong and you’re charting your career instead of letting it happen to you, you can be all of these things. When you feel less in control, marshal your resources and return to your starting point: you.

If I interview anyone, that’s the number one thing I look at: Do they really want to learn? If they want to learn, I don’t care about their background anymore. In the end, the success of the company is measured by how well you are able to work together.

Determine what kind of leader you need

First, I need to understand the core of what my business is. Then, from that, I peel the layers off everything and understand where I need to be better, or where I need to hire someone who can help me fulfill those tasks.

Ideally, your outreach will validate whether you need the new leadership role. Your discussions with others should also help you create a rubric– a framework– with which you can assess potential candidates.

Here’s some of questions you can start with to develop that rubric:

• How is the role defined at your company? What is the person accountable for? See if the answer matches the definition of the role you’re envisioning. If it doesn’t reach out to understand why not. Is it because of the business model, or is it more about the skill sets of the company’s other leaders?

• What are the most important skills or capabilities needed for success in the role? Create a list of abilities and consider how you might test for them in your interview/

• What was it in the person’s background/ your background that made them/you qualified? You’re looking for the must-haves in their experience that earned them position and seeing if these align with your own conception of the role.

• Can you share the biggest challenges you faced in your first year? Consider whether they will face similar challenges and figure out how you might test for the ability to overcome them.

• How do you work with the founder or another close leader in the company? Clarify responsibilities to understand how decision-making and ownership might work for those who will work most closely with the new leader.

• Do you have any advice on finding strong candidates for this role? Are there particular companies that do this well? Do you know anyone I should talk to? Hopefully you’ll emerge with companies to research, or even names of people you might want to meet and recruit as candidates.

We instinctively trust people who are similar to us. If someone speaks with the same accent, listens to the same music or has shared backgrounds. That’s why, when we put together a team, we unconsciously tend to choose people who are like us. This is called ‘hiring for culture fit’. It means that everyone thinks alike, but it isn’t useful, because it means that everyone thinks alike. Instead, you should hire people who extend, rather than mirror you. Hiring for culture contribution means that diversity trumps uniformity. It is more than ethnicity or gender, you should see the qualities, talents, strengths and skills that you need and that would augment your organization.

People can only thrive in their career if their needs are met on an individual level, acknowledging their motives, skills and their true talent that brings success in the organization.

Find where you are and don’t be afraid of making a choice

Do you have a fresh fruit basket in your office? Does your organization offer mindfulness training, hybrid readiness workshops, stress management courses, table football and nap room? Good. In that case, your employer understands that it has to improve the way it deals with its toxic corporate culture, and discussion about it is a starting point.

How about not teaching people how to deal with insecurity, but making them feel more secure? What if we didn’t train people how to be resilient, but sacked abusive patterns? What if we got rid of oppressive rules and stopped micromanaging staff, rather than spending time refining our position statement? What if, instead of installing a slide in the office, we paid people more and offered them better contract terms? Why always try to increase efficiency, rather than simply give staff more time and fewer tasks to do?

Mindfulness, positive thinking and team-building activities are powerful techniques. They can be incredibly helpful, however, the problem is that they allow organizations to get away with ever more precarious employment terms and tougher cuts, by transferring responsibility to their staff: you have to change your life; you have to work on yourself; if you’ve stressed, that’s your fault, not ours. Many organizations try to find individual solutions to structural problems. This should be banned.

Women in non-leadership roles are often set in their career position of making everyone else decide the future for them, and they often are fighting the abusive patterns one against the world. If you do have table football, yoga mats, but don’t have secured safety, trust and respect of your staff, it’s time to consider your needs before everyone else, and ask yourself where you want to be.