Embracing Risk to Grow Your Impact with Tamar Bercovici (Podcast & Transcript)
"The imposter syndrome doesn't go away. The stress about being asked to do something that is going to stretch you does not go away. So I think realizing that something being a stretch is not a problem. In fact, that means that there's an element that you don't already know how to do and so you're going to have to figure it out. And that is exactly the signal for growth and learning." - Tamar Bercovici
Tamar Bercovici is the VP of Engineering at Box, where she leads the Core Platform team in scaling the foundational platform for the Box Content Cloud. In her 13 years at Box, she scaled the cloud content management and file-sharing service to handle millions of queries per second, searching hundreds of billions of records. Named one of Forbes’ Top 50 Women in Tech 2018, Tamar also ranked #1 on Okta and Business Insider's Tech Up and Comers list 2019. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Technion Israel Institute of Technology and a technology patent for updating data in cloud computing systems.
In this episode we discuss:
The scope and responsibilities expected from a manager to a vice president
The pros & cons of having a long history at one company
How to create space for new voices on a team and influence team culture
The parallels between managing and parenting
Leading ambiguous, complex projects and managing risk
How to be ready for opportunities when they arise
Transcript has been edited for clarity.
Karen Ko: Hey there. Welcome to Engineer Your Career, a podcast brought to you by WEST, a learning community, empowering women technologists through mentorship. Join us as we hear from inspiring women tech leaders who are challenging stereotypes and paving the way for future generations. We hope their career journeys inspire you with new ideas to engineer your career. Let's get started.
Heidi Williams: Hello everybody. Welcome to our latest episode of Engineer Your Career. I'm Heidi.
Karen: And I'm Karen.
Heidi: And we are super excited to introduce our guest, Tamar Bercovici. Welcome, Tamar.
Tamar: Hi, nice to be here.
Heidi: So glad to see you. We've known each other for a long time, so I'm very excited to have you here and to dig into the stories that I know we have there. So, actually, to get folks started and get folks knowing you a little bit better, for our first question, can you share your origin story? How did you get into programming? What did you want to be when you grew up? Tell us how it all started.
Tamar: Oh gosh. I think the first career I can remember myself wanting to have is to be an astronaut because I was super fascinated by space, but then I realized you needed to be like a physicist or a fighter pilot, and neither of those resonated with me.
And I honestly went through a very roundabout path and landed on computer science by process of elimination. Both my parents actually have PhDs in computer science, and I think as kids we imagine that we're going to figure out something better than our parents. And so I think I just had to go on a journey of realizing that they probably had it right and that I was going to follow in their footsteps. So that's how I ended up in engineering.
Heidi: You've been at Box for 13 years. Was that your first programming job?
Tamar: Not quite. So I started working at a startup company sort of in parallel to my undergraduate degree, as kind of like an internship that translated or shifted into a part-time for many years. Actually took a semester off in college to work full-time, and then I did end up following in my parents' footsteps, not just in the choice of CS, but actually going for a PhD.
And so at some point, I basically realized if I want to get a PhD, I need to stop with this additional job. So I officially left and focused on my PhD research, which was in theoretical computer science.
But then when I finished that, and I kind of knew this from the beginning, I had really enjoyed working in that startup environment and I kind of liked the chaos and not needing to know ahead of time what you wanted to do there, but just sort of putting yourself in an environment where you could figure it out alongside with the company figuring itself out.
And so after I graduated, I was explicitly looking for software engineering jobs at a startup company, and I wanted to work at a web company. Box was the first web company I worked at because prior startup was like shrink wrap software, if you can imagine. So yeah, so that's how I ultimately ended up as an engineer at Box.
Heidi: That's amazing. Good for you for finishing your PhD. I feel like so many folks in the industry have stories of mostly finished PhDs, but they ended up, the draw of the industry was too [crosstalk].
Tamar: I was not that far from the mostly finished crew, but somehow got it done. Yeah.
Heidi: Yeah. Well congratulations. And so do I have it right? You've been at Box about 13 years now, is that right?
Tamar: Yeah, yeah, it was 13 years this past February.
Heidi: That's amazing. And tell us a little bit about your trajectory, your sort of journey since you've been there, because I know you started as a software engineer, but tell us a little bit about how things have evolved since you've been there.
Tamar: Yeah, so when I joined, Box was actually on the larger side of the, because I remember I was sort of looking for that kind of early days chaotic experience. Box was about six years old and had around 130 people at the company, give or take, at that time. But the engineering team was only around 30 people.
And so I told myself it would still be at that phase where I could know everyone and know what they were working on. I liked the product, I liked the direction, I liked the people that I met. And so I was like, okay, we're going to give this a try.
Never in a million years would I have thought that the company would last this long, that I would last at the company for this long. So it was not at all planned ahead.
I got to work on building out our first database scaling tier because Box was exactly at that phase where, as you start hitting product market fit in certain areas and you start having more traction for your product and more traffic against your services, your simple backend infrastructure no longer cuts it.
And so you start building out more sophistication across the stack.
And so I happened to get to work on the database stuff, which was exactly what I was looking for. No one would have hired me for that since I did not have any business working on these things. But given the opportunity, it was fascinating, and I learned so much from that project.
And then at the end of it, we had a more sophisticated database infrastructure, and it made sense to build out a little bit of a specialized team to own that infrastructure. And I went through one of those, 'what is my role on this team going to be' debates with myself, and decided to try my hand at management, and ultimately did end up managing that initial database infrastructure team.
Heidi: That's awesome. And what is it that really drew you to management? What is it that you love about it and made you stick with it?
Tamar: Well, initially, I just wanted to try it out because it felt like something I knew less about. I could have sort of envisioned my path as—I already was the technical lead on this team that had been created.
And especially... even though my research was in a different field than what my work was in, I think I had more of a notion of what it meant to kind of dive deeper on that side, on the individual contributor kind of architecture side. And I wanted to see what management was like.
And so I really initially just wanted to try it out. And when I tried it out, I realized I think I'm the kind of person that likes to look at all the facets of a problem. And in a way, if you think of delivering value through software as a manager, you're basically delivering value through a team. And so you get to think about not just the technical strategy and all of those considerations, but actually, how do you set up the team as a component within that?
And so I just found that fascinating, and I think I've also learned that I just really love delivering things with teams. And so being a manager lets you create that environment for yourself and for the people on your team. And I dunno, I just enjoyed it and found that I was good at it and kept on it. And that's been my career path since then.
Heidi: Yeah, I love that. And I actually feel like that way of looking at a team strategically and not just thinking them as cogs to apply to a problem that needs to be solved in code, but more thinking about the strategically, how can you put them together and help them operate their best or solve hard problems. I think I approach it a similar way, and I love that you called it out. I think that's really, really cool.
And so along the way, you have then actually become a director and then a senior director, and now a vice president. What do you see are the differences in, yes, it's all still problem-solving, it's still strategic, but what are the differences you see between the different levels from engineering manager up to VP?
Tamar: It's kind of funny when you stay around in one place, then it lets you keep a bunch of variables constant, and then you can kind of have a cleaner comparison of roles. So I think that initial shift from individual contributor to manager is definitely one of the stranger ones because you're used to delivering value by coding and then shipping your code. It's such a concrete way of thinking about impact delivery.
And then you become a manager, and you're like, what is my job here? How do I assess my success on the team? But then hopefully you navigate that shift and you realize, okay, I'm now accountable for delivering value with this scope that I've been given. This scope is this set of X number of people who own these particular products or services, whatever it is.
And so now, if you think about maximizing impact with this scope, it often ends up meaning all of those things that become part of the first-line manager job.
So you have to make sure you have a clear roadmap and well-groomed stories in your backlog, and you've aligned with all of your dependency teams, and the people on the team are the right people, and they're getting the right feedback and coaching and support and mentorship, and they have the right team structure to work effectively together and so on and so forth.
So once you understand that, I think it helps you better capture the things that you're doing to make your team successful, and then you can better assess yourself, but you're basically owning that scope.
And then as a senior manager, it's just kind of the more advanced version of that. So you now have more experience, more expertise. Maybe you're managing multiple teams, maybe you're managing a more complicated team, like something that requires a more experienced manager, but it's effectively a similar role.
I think that the jump to director is more about understanding how to drive. So if with a manager, senior manager you're, you sort of know, okay, here's what we're meant to accomplish. Now, how do I maximize impact within that context? As a director, you're expected, part of your job is to figure out where you should be headed, like okay, what's the broader context of what we're trying to deliver within the product and engineering team? How do I line up my now larger scope to deliver impact within that context?
And so it often means thinking about a longer-term strategy, it means maybe working more cross-functionally, and it also just means making those decisions. So, not just given a goal, how do you execute, but what should that goal be?
And then the same thing, senior director, more advanced, complicated version of that. And then VP was again a complicated one for me to wrap my head around because it's sort of what is the difference?
And I think initially I was sort of doing the VP role as a successful senior director, and I wasn't necessarily doing a bad job. I actually got the VP title without getting any new or different teams. It was just sort of me and my team kind of got a promotion, and that almost made it harder to figure out what I should be doing differently.
But I think over time you realize that as a VP you're really sort of running a part of the organization. So yes, there's a strategic element to it often with a longer time horizon because if your directors are sort of thinking about the coming year, then you have to be giving them some kind of structure that's broader than that, but also the operating system for the organization, how we work together, why we work together, how you set up that structure and cadence for the team.
And you need to do that in a way that makes sense for you and for your team, but also that fits in within the broader engineering organization. And it's almost like there's an API that we all need to implement together for all the parts to fit, but then so you have to make sure you're adhering to that API and also influencing what it should be because you're a part of the leadership team, but then how do you set up your organization to successfully deliver and execute towards that?
And it's been really fun now, understanding what the role is because you have so much more flexibility and leeway to do things differently.
Heidi: I love that. I love that. And it really resonates for me. You were sort of talking about you're sort of going deeper, you're going broader, you're going longer distance, and looking out further on the horizon. I imagine also as a VP and part of the leadership team, you're influencing maybe not just other engineering teams, but outside of engineering and building the company and the business, and it's beyond just your part of the product, and that you're really going way wide internally as well.
Tamar: I'm a big believer in the whole first teams concept from Patrick Lencioni, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I was introduced to that early on, and I think that's actually what helped me understand my initial manager role. It's the fact that you're not on the team that you manage, you're on your team of peers and trying to accomplish the goals of that team. And what you're bringing to the table is sort of the team that you manage, your scope. And so that also, I think, helps understand the different roles.
Usually, as a manager, a senior manager, you're part of kind of a functional domain, so you're thinking about your team's execution within that functional domain's goals, versus, for example, as a VP, you're part of the leadership team for engineering and product. And so you're thinking about it in that broader context.
Heidi: I love that. I love that. And speaking of context, I think one of the interesting things that you sort of mentioned, you have run this interesting experiment of the Box context has stayed the same as you've progressed through your career, which is fantastic.
Do you think that, in general, has that been super helpful to always have the context? I mean, maybe from the early days you were coding and then managing the team that was coding on the thing you had just been coding on, maybe later different parts of the stack. But tell me a little bit about, has it been helpful or maybe sometimes a challenge to know as much as you do about everything?
Tamar: Well, I think first off, a lot of us who become managers become managers after being the tech lead or at least one of the very strong technical contributors on the team that we were on. So that initial shift from tech lead to manager is sort of a common rite of passage, I think.
But then, regardless of whether you switch companies or even if you stay at the same company but you grow your scope, at some point, you're going to take on a team or multiple teams for which you are not the technical expert.
And so I think that's an interesting exercise in what information do you need to be aware of so that you can still do your job well without maybe having that kind of nuts and bolts context?
Specifically for just staying at the same company for a long time? I think it's a superpower, but like all superpowers, it's also a liability, right? Often, the things that we're really strong at are the ones that help us be successful, but we also need to watch out because we will tend to lean into them too much.
So even though this one is not necessarily a personal characteristic or skill, but obviously, if you've been around for a long time, you know a lot about a lot. You know why decisions were made, you know where bodies are buried, you know who to go talk to about certain things, you know how to navigate the organization, and absolutely, that is something that is very helpful for being successful.
And I think for me, especially, it has helped me kind of take on bigger and bigger roles and offset the risk of having that jump into a bigger role with the fact that I knew how to operate within the organization. At the same time, I think the liability to watch out for is that you are maybe more beholden to how things are at the company or more jaded about what you've maybe tried.
I've now had this fantastic experience where one of my teams will come and just figure something out and solve it that I thought was a lost cause because I tried five times and failed. So I think sort of really challenging yourself to keep an open mind to new perspectives that come in and valuing whenever someone new comes in and valuing that new perspective and figuring out how to harness it in an effective way such that you don't want to let them stub their toe on every single hurdle you have in the way, but you also don't want to guide them so specifically that you don't benefit from some of that new perspective.
So I definitely have been called out in the past a couple of times for like, Hey, you're just saying it's impossible because of your historical background here. And so I think being conscious of it and making sure not to lean into it too far has been really important.
Karen: I think I've also heard you say that in past talks that having that fine line of balance between folks that have been on the team for a long time versus the new folks that are joining is really important to be able to let both voices be heard.
Tamar: Yeah, absolutely. I'm really proud that actually I have a lot of quite tenured folks on my team, over 10 years, over nine years.
But then at the same time we've brought on a lot of new people that have been incredibly successful and incredibly impactful and I do think that that is a really important balance for an organization to show that you can be successful as a new person and influence and have your voice heard, but also that we are recognizing and valuing the perspectives of folks that have that tenure and have that sort of deep understanding and that both are able to partner together. Creating that tone of valuing both, I think, really sets that up nicely for the team.
Heidi: Are there particular things you do to raise those new voices or elevate those new voices so that they are heard, or tell me a little bit about how you build team culture so that folks can do that.
Tamar: Team culture....As a leader, you have to connect to the broader corporate culture. So actually, another interesting thing I had the opportunity to see was Box's own evolution as a company.
Because when I joined, again, it was very sort of, they weren't brand new, but they were still in those early days where they hadn't set corporate values, and as I said, career rubrics and all these sort of mechanisms that we have to define and then uphold culture.
And through the years, it was really interesting to see how those kind of got introduced. But definitely as a leader, at the end of the day, it's part of your job to model and manage to the culture of the company that you're in. So you got to make sure it's somewhere that resonates with you.
But then I think it's really connecting how you show up, how you reframe conversations to align with the tone you want to set for the team, and then also in the coaching that you provide to the people on the team.
So there's sort of two modes, maybe. One is in front of the whole team, you're doing an all-hands or some other team event. How you frame things, what you emphasize, what is celebrated, is important.
And then in the other mode is if you're working with either your leadership team as a group or one-on-one, or if you're leading a program or an effort with that group, how you reframe the conversation to focus on the important things. To not, if someone's complaining about another team, for example, then that's fine. People sometimes need to vent, but then reframing to say, okay, now what's the constructive path forward, recentering on company goals around shared ownership and focusing on our customers.
So you can kind of coach your leaders to help model the same culture that you model yourself, and that ultimately permeates through the organization, and works in particularly well if it's connected to the broader corporate culture. So they end up reinforcing each other.
Karen: Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Switching gears a little bit, I'd love to hear about how you managed growing your career while raising a family and any advice you might have for others who are in a similar situation.
Tamar: It's interesting because, I would say earlier in my career, and I see this for other people in general and women specifically, I think there's sort of a worry about decisions that we're going to make and how impactful they're going to be.
It's kind of like we feel like we're choosing our life path and every choice that we make early on, and then also trying to project those out and think how is that going to fit with having a family and other things that you want for yourself?
Now, with the benefit of a little bit of perspective back on that, I think first off, a lot of those choices are not as consequential as we think they are in the moment. I think what is consequential is more, given a choice or given a set of constraints of whatever's happening within our life at any given point in time, how we optimize that situation, how we lean in to get the most out of it, how we learn from that process and from that phase and then how we translate that into a next step and a next choice.
So like we mentioned before, trying out management and realizing, hey, maybe that's not for me. That doesn't mean you made a mistake or did a bad thing. It means A, you learned something about yourself, and B, you probably will now bring that perspective of what management is to your career as an individual contributor, which will make you a better individual contributor.
So I think we often sort of put too much weight behind some of those things. And then in terms of balancing career and parenthood or sort of other considerations, I think we all give ourselves..if you look at your...say you're not dealing with this yet and you have your career and you're probably able to deal with a lot of really complicated things and handle a lot of complex situations and your job and in a way...you become a parent and it just becomes an extension of your life and there's an element of sort of trusting that you'll figure it out, trusting that when you get to that moment, when you get to that juncture, you will figure out how to balance all the things in your life.
It's not, I think I viewed it almost as kind of this left turn that you don't know how to come back from, but it's not as binary. And I think I have found it to be sort of a life challenge, and I think any challenge that we're faced with, you grow from.
So I can definitely point to a lot of personal growth that I've had through my path of becoming a parent that then I bring back to my job, and also things I've learned in my job that I can bring to being a parent. We are all one whole human that you bring to wherever you are in your life. So I think maybe having less of that dichotomy between, how will I balance between these opposing forces and just realizing that it's kind of a complex equation that we need to balance, but one that we should give ourselves a little more credit for being able to figure out when we get there.
Heidi: I think it's interesting too, I've always thought that being a manager and being a parent have some scary similarities or funny ones at least, and sort of thinking about my child behaves better if I give them structure and they know the rules and the consequences and the guidelines, and I give them some direction, and teams do too. They really appreciate structure and guidance and things like that.
So I think you're totally right about, there are definitely things you can learn in each to apply. Maybe just another one too is just being more efficient with your time that you want to get out by five o'clock, then you need to be more efficient during your day. Have you found that something that you've gotten better at?
Tamar: Yeah, I think it definitely makes you more focused for sure. I think kids can also do a good job of snapping you out of work mode. And it's interesting even if you're not maybe taking a break, but the fact that you're using your brain in a different way, I think, can be interesting too.
And actually, a big one for me is sort of the difference between being passionate about something and caring about it versus being emotional, right? As both a parent and a manager, if you get worked up emotionally, your ability to handle the situation successfully is very compromised. And just like you said, Heidi, it's scary how much that's true in the same way for both scenarios. So learning how to channel your inner patience and calm, and center yourself around what you're trying to accomplish and how you constructively guide the situation in that direction, again, whether it be toddlers that need to get out of the house or some other work challenge, but at the same time, I think it's really important.....
This is something that's important to me at work. Sometimes we forget that there's certain policies or whatnot at work that can feel a little bit like you're running a kindergarten. So in my mind, whenever you see that, go the other way. We should absolutely be acknowledging at work, we're all adults, and the more we can handle each other and treat each other that way, the better a result I believe we get. And again, that a lot of times comes back to corporate policy. Does your HR department treat employees as adults or not, is something important in my mind. Whereas kids are kids, so there's still differences too, but I do think that you learn a lot as a person in both modes and bring that across that divide.
Heidi: That's such an important point. I feel like I've had experiences where the organization doesn't necessarily confer trust to the employees, and really weird things happen. And if you actually do confer trust and say, I'm going to imagine that you are going to use your best judgment here and you're going to behave in the interest of the company, and I'm not going to have a ton of guardrails around that because we don't need them because we trust you. It really sends a positive signal to folks.
Tamar: One thing I learned from my first manager at Box, who was awesome, was to optimize everything you do around the best-case scenario. And in the case of a manager, optimizing around your best people is a better strategy for fantastic outcomes than optimizing around guarding against the worst-case scenario. And I think that's something that I just come back to so many times, am I optimizing for the best case or the worst case here? Really checking myself on that because it's such a good insight.
Heidi: Fantastic. I love it. So speaking of optimizing for the best or the worst case scenario, my understanding is that at Box, you've actually led some really ambiguous and complicated projects, which can be super difficult to handle. I remember when I was there, bumping my head up against one that I did not successfully solve while I was there, and I think went on for many years, and you may ended up having to work on it. Tell me how you approach really ambiguous and complex long-running projects. It is a super hard skill. What's your approach?
Tamar: Step one is, let yourself freak out a little bit when you realize this is going to happen. Because I think these projects can often feel so daunting and stressful, and often something, either there's a really important outcome we need to deliver, or there's something really wrong that we need to fix, or there's some sort of urgency around the inception. And I think that can often feel stressful.
And I know that I have often felt stressed when first asked to step up and take point on something, but then working through that, setting it aside, and adopting more of a constructive approach.
So I think with all of these efforts, first and foremost, getting super crystal clear on what we're trying to accomplish. I think a lot of times when things are either there's a big opportunity or things are wrong in some sense, it can get a little muddy as to what we're trying to accomplish because there are a lot of similar or adjacent goals and there's this sort of instinct to like, well, let's optimize for cost and performance and availability and the architecture being better.
We want to and it all because they're all important. We don't want to set anything aside, I think, or we jump too quickly into, there's all these problems, so we're going to refactor this system. And then the refactoring becomes the program or the effort itself, and you kind of forget about why you ventured off on that journey.
So I think actually being super crystal clear on the business impact-framed goal and making sure that whoever asks you to take point on this program agrees with you on your framing of the goal. Because that would be even worse if you solve the wrong problem.
But then leveraging that clarity to align everyone who's going to take part in this, because you want to make sure— This is actually true for management in general. You can't go look over every engineer's shoulder as they do their job day in, day out. You might think you can do that when you first become a manager and you only have like 3, 4, 5 reports, even though then you'd be rightfully accused of being a micromanager.
But definitely, as your team gets bigger, it just becomes infeasible. And so, how do you make sure that people are doing the right thing? You have to orient them around having their own independent, clearly understood understanding of what they're trying to accomplish, and then that enables them to make good localized decisions that are synergetically aligned with the other folks on the effort.
So again, in particular in a complicated, unwieldy, maybe high-stress program, making sure that everyone is super crystal clear on what we're trying to accomplish is very important. And then we're all still probably stressed because we're like, shoot, we know what we need to accomplish. And it still feels very daunting and very hard, and it feels very risky.
And that's where I think leaning into the risk is the important part. We often perceive risk to be a sign of a problem, and so we try to avoid it. But actually, I would say that any kind of important outcome is always going to be risky to accomplish, otherwise it wouldn't be important.
And so the fact that there's risk is not in and of itself a sign that something's wrong. And so okay, we accept that there's risk. Next failure mode is, oh, let's just pad the estimates. We have unknown unknowns. We don't know what's going to happen, so maybe we succeed, maybe we don't. That's not a way to run a program either.
And so now it becomes a question of, okay, let's actually list out what are we—I often start, this is a good joint therapy session as well as really informative.
Let's sit down and everyone list out everything that you think could go wrong. What are you worried about concretely? Not just say it's risky, we don't know, but actually spell it out, write it down, and then we figure out what's real. Can we cluster those into some themes? And then what do we do to de-risk? That's the best you could do about risk is de-risk, right?
And this is very, very specific. It depends on the type of risk, but can you build a proof of concept? Can you do a stress test? Can you route shadow traffic through.... Depending on what it is you're trying to do, different risks have different modes of de-risking, but often, if you frame it that way, now you have the team thinking constructively around ways in which they can proactively reduce the risk.
It's never going to be zero, but it's a much more defensible strategy than just being ambiguously worried about this ambiguous risk, but not really dealing with it head-on and just operating on the happy path, which usually does not really exist for these types of efforts.
So I think being very clear on the goal, identifying what the risks are, and then making a plan to actually proactively de-risk, and then as you go along, just being very communicative on this clear narrative of what's happening because you want to keep everyone continuously aligned on what they're trying to accomplish together so that they can continue to make good choices and continue to focus on the right risks and on de-risking the right risks as you go through.
And if you have that clear notion of goal, you'll be able to also assess whether you hit or not, so that you don't just have an ongoing.... It's okay to finish a program and still have work to do, but now that falls under the next set of goals that you're going to set for yourself.
Heidi: Can I come join your team? It sounds fabulous.
Tamar: We're hiring. [laughter] You can absolutely come join our team.
Karen: I love that. So I'm hearing a lot about leaning into risk and listing out things that could go wrong and thinking constructively. I'm curious how that plays into your personal career when you're thinking about risk for you and potentially saying yes to opportunity. How do you find that list-creating for you?
Tamar: It's such a good question, because it's also such a good point in the context of these particular programs, because again, somehow, almost every one of them, I think my initial kind of gut reaction when I was asked to play whatever role on them was like, oh, I am so stressed about this. I don't want to do it.
In fact, I remember one particular program, I sat down with sort of a trusted confidant at the company and he told me something along the lines of like, yeah, this is really is in a really messy spot and it's a really risky endeavor and if you pull it off it'll be great, but most likely this is going to go sideways because of where things are right now and make sure to not get tanked with it. And I was like, oh, wow, this is validating all my anxieties.
But again, I think understanding that feeling worried about something, or this goes from imposter syndrome, too. I dunno if the two of you can empathize with this, but I used to, when I was earlier in my career, I'd see these women who were further along and looked so confident and so competent, and I was like, oh, one day I will no longer have imposter syndrome and I'll just be like these, I had something to aspire to.
And the further through my career I go, the more I realize that that's not what that is, it's like the imposter syndrome doesn't go away. The stress about being asked to do something that is going to stretch you does not go away. So I think realizing that something being a stretch is not a problem. In fact, that means that there's an element that you don't already know how to do, and so you're going to have to figure it out.
And that is exactly the signal for growth and learning. And so similarly, why are you stressed? What are you worried about, and how can you get ahead of those and make a plan? And again, for me, with these programs, a lot of it was just getting the program on a good track, but I think that can also be true for stepping into a new role or joining a new company. What are you worried about? What could go wrong, and how can you be proactive about leaning in and burning down that risk while also at the same time having a clear notion of what you're trying to accomplish? What is your goal with this endeavor?
And you don't have to be perfectly delivering across all things. It doesn't have to be going perfectly across all things. Are you learning? Are you progressing? Are you delivering value in the way that you set for yourself, and you aligned with your manager, is ultimately the measure. And I think that can be helpful for looking at your personal career as well.
Karen: I think that I've heard you say that sometimes management can be opportunistic, and you take a systems view when taking on new teams. Would you say that's similar to how you take on new risks for yourself as well?
Tamar: Yeah, I think, honestly, all roles are opportunistic to a degree in the sense that you need a project to work on or.... Which is why I think working at a company that has a steady stream of opportunities and challenges is just a good career move in general.
I think management is probably the most extreme version of that because a person can only have one manager at any given time. So your career is very much beholden to open management positions within your organization, and that's not something that you can perfectly plan out or your manager can perfectly plan out for you. So I think ultimately you have to build up a track record of trust so that when opportunities arise, you're able to be tapped for them, and then you have to say yes when that happens.
And of course, being aligned with your manager in terms of the type of things you want is really helpful. At the end of the day, their success and your success are aligned together. So being transparent about what you're looking for and what you find challenging and things like that is useful. But then it's not about—you can't perfectly project out when certain opportunities are going to arise.
So it's just about doing well within the scope that you have and stretching yourself and taking on more and impacting more and influencing more, and building that track record of trust so that you get asked to take on more.
Heidi: Well, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. I loved all of your insights on management and leadership and advice for, and frameworks, honestly, for how to navigate each of those. I feel like it was just amazing wisdom. So thank you so much for being with us today.
Tamar: Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.
Karen: Thank you, Tamar.
And that wraps up another great episode of Engineer Your Career, brought to you by WEST.
Are you ready to take control of your career? WEST can help. The WEST Career Accelerator is a six-month learning program that combines one-on-one mentorship and group-based career coaching to help women gain clarity, save time, and define success on their own terms. We're here to help you create a path towards the career you'll love. Check out how West can help you succeed at joinwest.org.
Special thanks to our production team, Scott Williams and Alona Matokhina. If you have questions or nominations for future speakers, please email podcast@joinwest.org. Thanks for tuning in.
