Recalibrating Success as You Grow

What it means to measure progress differently as your role changes.

By Kari Wilhelm

If you’ve recently been promoted and taken on a larger scope, it’s common to suddenly feel like you’re not doing a good job. The reality is: you may be doing just fine - your brain just hasn’t caught up yet.

Let’s take the example here of becoming a Sr. Software Development Engineer - a clear step change in scope and responsibility. Your work isn’t just about the hands-on tasks anymore; you’re probably still coding, but you’re also scaling through other engineers on your team.

Your brain may expect instant gratification from writing code and seeing it work. That’s quite a nice dopamine hit! We see things work, it validates what we’re doing right away, and we keep going.

However, when working through others, how do our brains get a dopamine hit to reward us and let us know we’re doing a good job?

Patience. It takes longer to see your impact when working through others. This is something we all go through as we shift from being hands-on all of the time to scaling through others.

Recognizing Your Impact

Teach yourself to recognize the signs that you’re having a positive impact. Here are some that have worked for me in the past and I see help those as they find themselves in this kind of role:

  • Notice what others pick up from your thought process and apply in different ways. Maybe you demonstrated something by example, and someone followed suit, making it their own.
  • See the different work streams on your team come together successfully. Your mental model for the work across the team is invaluable. It helps you recognize when to pivot, and keeps things on track over time. Each action you take here is a sign of your impact.
  • Recognize when the plan improves through leading discussions on design points or technical issues with the team. Especially when your team members contribute to improving the plan. That’s what you want as a team lead.
  • Launching successfully as a team

As your scope grows, the feedback loop changes. Recalibrating how you measure success can take some active awareness and introspection, but noticing these signals helps you see your impact more clearly — even when the dopamine hit takes longer to arrive, and reminds you that you’re doing better than you think.