Being in management does not make someone a leader, and providing leadership does not necessitate a managerial role. Despite what it might look like from the outside, leadership is much less about delegating tasks, implementing goals and controlling for risk, and more about guiding, influencing and inspiring others.
In fact, according to business consultant, educator and author Peter Drucker, “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
This more nuanced approach takes many forms, such as offering mentorship to junior colleagues and inspiring team members to achieve a mutual goal. And when an organization enables an individual contributor to step into a leadership position, it benefits not only the professional but the team at large.
Sophia Burt, paid media analyst at Aceable, said that the opportunity to mentor her junior colleagues has allowed her to not only develop her own career but also see the value in each individual. “The growth of any teammate elevates the whole company,” she explained, adding that she enjoys playing an influential role in that process.
There are two conditions that must be met for an influential leader to emerge, noted Mike Balajewicz, lead machine learning engineer at Realtor.com: having passion for the work and the desire to share it with others. Built In Austin sat down with Burt, Balajewicz and individual contributors from four other tech companies to learn about the work they’re doing and how their passion propels them to pursue opportunities to lead.
Realtor.com simplifies the process of buying and selling real estate through its online platform.
What’s your role, and what is the most exciting project you’re working on?
I help lead a team of machine learning engineers to bring higher levels of personalization to our home search product. Accurately matching homes with our customers has always been one of Realtor.com’s many strengths, so contributing to this high-impact project has been extremely rewarding.
How have you shown leadership in your current role, and what did you learn from that experience?
If you can inspire your team, leading follows naturally. Inspiration usually requires two conditions: you have to make sure you are passionate about the work you do, and you have to ensure this passion is shared with the rest of the team.
If you can inspire your team, leading follows naturally.”
It’s extremely important to help my colleagues, especially those just out of college, to understand and appreciate all the interesting mathematical connections between the machine learning algorithms we use. Removing the mystery provides much more intellectually satisfying, deep mathematical insight.
What do you see as a potential career path, and who or what will help you get there?
While I like to keep an open mind about potential career paths, the most important component to professional growth and development is building up a mentorship network. Find people who you respect and look up to, and then shamelessly pick their brains as much as you can. In most cases, I find that senior leaders are happy to share their wisdom, and all you have to do is ask.
Project 44 powers a cloud-based platform that provides visibility into shipping and logistics to increase efficiency.
What’s your role, and what is the most exciting project you’re working on?
I support the work of our customers and help them realize value by aligning our solutions with their business goals. We’re growing quickly as a company, and that creates countless opportunities to contribute beyond my role. For example, our organization is working to refine onboarding, and I quickly raised my hand to help. I enacted a plan to collect candid feedback about functional onboarding, and then analyzed and distilled the insights into actionable opportunities. I love contributing to this project as it leans into an area of interest for me as well as my expertise in learning and development.
How have you shown leadership in your current role, and what did you learn from that experience?
While I’ve been able to exemplify my leadership abilities on the onboarding initiative, I have also learned the hard way that raising my hand for every opportunity to participate leads to overcommitment.
To choose where to invest my time outside of my main responsibilities, I hold opportunities up against my personal mission statement and ask three questions: Do I find it interesting? Does it contribute to our team goals? Does it contribute to my long-term goals? If it checks the three boxes, then I’m likely to learn, grow and add value to the company through my participation.
How is your company helping you develop your career?
The winning combination for career development is opportunity and support. As a member of our women’s leadership development program, I have been able to access high-quality coaching, and the support from the people at project44 is a real difference-maker. Our leaders and colleagues give their time and feedback to help others reach career goals.
Every engagement is a learning opportunity to build skills and perspective.”
Every engagement is a learning opportunity to build skills and perspective. Use your drive to clearly communicate what you want to achieve and how you can contribute, and use your network within or outside of your organization to provide support and advice.
Wix enables business owners and individuals to design and develop high-quality websites.
What’s your role, and what is the most exciting project you’re working on?
Each day, I get to interact with our customer care experts and be a guiding figure for them, whether it’s improving product knowledge, delivering tips and tricks about a better process, or developing soft skills. As our products continue to evolve, we are always releasing new technology. The most exciting project that I’m working on with our other mentors is helping our customer care experts integrate our new user success platform into their process so that we can continue to help our users build the best sites possible.
How have you shown leadership in your current role, and what did you learn from that experience?
Being a mentor at Wix has given me the opportunity to step up as a leader in many ways, but the largest day-to-day impact I have is as a resource for our customer care experts. Being able to use my knowledge and skills to help others cultivate their own future is extremely rewarding. I have also had the chance to collaborate with many of our company’s leaders to pilot new programs for our users.
These experiences have taught me that the best leaders are people who allow others to take charge — leaders who listen to those around them and give and receive feedback when needed. I have also learned that you grow from not only receiving feedback but also giving it.
You grow from not only receiving feedback but also giving it.”
What do you see as a potential career path, and who or what will help you get there?
Being a mentor has opened me up to many different avenues and departments that most employees don’t see on a regular basis. It has given me a better understanding of how they come together to create the bigger picture, and this has allowed me to consider multiple career directions. Whatever my next step is, I want to keep increasing my influence as someone who is able to impact our experts on a larger scale.
Hypori develops mobile protection and privacy solutions for corporate enterprises and federal agencies.
What’s your role, and what is the most exciting project you’re working on?
As a member of the development team, I’m helping migrate Hypori’s existing product line to the cloud to become a SaaS product. At my previous job I was on a larger team that went through a similar migration. I learned new skills to succeed in that role, and a few mentors inspired me to continue learning and sharing. Now I have the chance to bring that experience to Hypori as we push toward a cloud-first model.
How have you shown leadership in your current role, and what did you learn from that experience?
I’m co-leading a cross-functional team focused on resource automation and optimization. My partner has a wealth of knowledge specific to the Hypori product, and I bring experience with cloud migration, infrastructure automation and operating in the SaaS environment. Sharing what I’ve learned from previous projects and seeing our team’s skill set expand has been a fulfilling experience. I’ve learned that I enjoy being seen as a technical expert, and as we continue to grow our team, I look forward to future mentoring opportunities.
Sharing what I’ve learned from previous projects and seeing our team’s skill set expand has been a fulfilling experience.”
What do you see as a potential career path, and who or what will help you get there?
I believe our team’s growth will lead me into more technical leadership roles, and I love that we promote from within at Hypori. I regularly attend Austin-area tech meetups and conferences to learn new skills and solutions, as well as to network with practitioners who may provide new insights or even become co-workers.
Tecovas is a digitally native e-commerce company inspired by the fashion of the American West.
What’s your role, and what is the most exciting project you’re working on?
I help process design, creative content, photo and video requests. An important part of my role is to schedule and assign tasks to the appropriate team members within the marketing department and coordinate the delivery of assets. I love to be a part of each product launch and help bring to life the work of our creative and product teams. We are also implementing a new project management platform that I am setting up for our marketing department.
How have you shown leadership in your current role, and what did you learn from that experience?
One of the first projects I led was to revamp our packing slip design for e-commerce orders. I worked with stakeholders on our product, customer experience, operations, logistics and creative teams to consolidate messaging and incorporate a return QR code on the packing slip. Throughout the project, I learned that clear communication is key. It was critical to communicate the marketing department’s progress to cross-functional teams that were waiting to implement their part of the project.
I learned that clear communication is key.”
What do you see as a potential career path, and who or what will help you get there?
I would like to continue in marketing project management, specifically in product launches. In order to improve in these areas, I will continue to work cross-functionally as well as within our marketing department. It takes each of us to be successful in our work, and I have been able to learn so much from my directors and team members.
Aceable is an edtech company that develops engaging and affordable educational content.
What’s your role, and what is the most exciting project you’re working on?
I help to create the strategy for our real estate vertical’s paid accounts and implement day-to-day changes for Google, MSN and Facebook paid accounts. I’m currently working on expanding our remarketing through YouTube campaigns to reengage potential customers. The best part of this project is getting to work cross-departmentally to repurpose product demo videos created by our learning experience team. These videos give us a better picture of what value propositions and product features are resonating most with our users so that we can improve our efforts.
How have you shown leadership in your current role, and what did you learn from that experience?
I joined Aceable with several years of experience in paid ads, which put me in the position to mentor some of our junior team members. I love sharing my copious Excel and platform knowledge with my team members. It’s extremely rewarding to see their growth, and I learn from them as well. Working in a mentorship role helps me see the value of every individual in the company.
Working in a mentorship role helps me see the value of every individual in the company.”
What do you see as a potential career path, and who or what will help you get there?
I am working with my director on moving into a management role. We continue to hone my mentorship skills and add larger-scale initiatives to my workload so I can work more cross-functionally. The goal is to get to a place where I have direct reports of my own and can take our real estate paid vertical to the next level.
