When I became a manager, one of the things I was told early on, was that as you move up in leadership levels, you need to be thinking in longer time scales.

Individual contributor time scale

In an IC role, you’ll typically need to think about the immediate tasks in front of you, and some of your immediate priorities. At the extreme end, you may be contributing to quarter planning which could make you think about things in the next 3 months.

Management time scale

When you get into management, you’ll need to spend more time thinking about things in a longer time scale. Sure you’ll spend some time helping people through some immediate blockers, but you’ll be guiding them through blockers with a view on what solution provides more options in the future.

For example, today we were discussing a blocker related to how we would classify some data. These data points have synonyms and parent/child relationships, but the way the source information was written, data points from 2 groups (A and B) were merged into 1 group (C), then split into 2 different groups (D and E). Not exactly a simple synonym or parent/child relationship. We discussed a few potential solutions for which groups would be parents and which would be children. Creating a more complicated relationship is not in scope for the project right now, but could be a future option. Someone on the team made a recommendation for D and E being the parents because they contain the actual data we want. For our current use case, that’s a perfectly fine solution, but we were sure to make note of this decision. We recognized that these groups are currently connected to 1 other data set. If we connected these groups to 2 or more data sets, there is potential for our decision to come back to haunt us. We made the choice that solves the problem today, and recorded it for the future so that we don’t have to rediscover our choice further down the line.

Director time scale

At the director level, you may be thinking in 1-2 year time scales. The manager’s are handling the delivery of quarterly objectives and key results, but you need to be thinking about what those objectives are actually building towards.

If we succeed in this quarter’s objectives, what will that unlock and allow us to do? What changes have happened in our industry or in the world, that may impact how we execute our strategy going forward? What have the last few quarters built towards, and what adjustments do we need to make going forward?

C-level time scale

At the C-level, you need to be thinking in terms of the next 5-10 years. Is the plan to have a lifestyle business, bootstrap, blitz scale through VC funding, IPO, get acquired? These plans will dictate how strategy is developed and communicated down through the ranks.

Wrapping Up

Generally, the higher up in a company hierarchy you are, the more you need to be able to consider what’s happening today, and how that impacts the future. Because my role involves working with anyone from individual contributors up to the C-level, I’m trying to take what’s happening this quarter, boil it down to today for the individual contributors, extrapolate the current quarter to the rest of the year with product leadership, and work with the CTO to consider strategic moves for my team, that will have an impact on the next several years at the company.

By making these time scales more explicit with your team, you can help make sure that everyone is focused on exactly what they need to create leverage for the company.