When I was a principal engineer at Amazon, I gave two developers on different teams the same feedback: “Work on your communication.” This accompanied more important feedback, so I didn’t have the opportunity to guide them on what “better communication” looked like.
One of the developers took my advice literally. He immediately started speaking up more in meetings and writing longer emails, with bigger words. His documents grew longer, covering more topics.
The other one went quiet for a couple of weeks. But then I noticed something shift. He began his emails to senior leadership with executive summaries that surfaced the most important issues in largely non-technical language. His documents became more focused but with depth.
One of those engineers was still at the same level the last time I checked LinkedIn. The other got promoted within a year.
I’ll let you guess which one is which.
Last March, I wrote about the first 7 behaviors that separate juniors from seniors. That article became th…
