How to Transition from Individual Contributor to Senior Engineer or Leadership Role | Varun Negandhi

E38 - How to Transition from Individual Contributor to Senior Engineer or Leadership Role | Varun Negandhi

How do you transition from individual contributor into a senior engineering role or a leadership role?

As well as how to determine which path is right for you and what's the difference between the two.To help us navigate this, I have special guest and LinkedIn influencer, Varun Neghandhi with me, and he's gonna share his best strategies and insights with us on this because this is how he helps people.

Stay tuned.

Doug Howard: Varun, would you mind introducing yourself?

Meet Varun Neghandhi

Varun Neghandhi: Sure. Hey everybody. I'm Varun Neghandhi. I am an automotive engineer and I have a side business called Beyond Grad, where I help immigrants boost their income with intention using three tracks. Getting promoted at work, landing a step up job, and then earning on the site. I'm excited to be here today and chat with my friend, Doug.

Doug Howard: I'm excited to have you here. We've met a few months ago, and before we get into the tactical strategies and how people can use your insights to their advantage to increase their income.

Tips for Personal Branding on LinkedIn

Doug Howard: I first gotta acknowledge, you're a rising star on LinkedIn. When we first met a few months ago, I think you had, maybe 5,000 or 6,000 followers. Now you got 30,000. You've probably gained another thousand since this introduction started. I just wanna hear, what's going on. What's the secret to your success on LinkedIn? What's going on?

Varun Neghandhi: Yeah, I started doing LinkedIn regularly from the start of this year, January, and then over the first five months. I put out a post daily and I can got like 5,000 followers, and I think that's where we met, like somewhere in around 3000, 5,000.

Doug Howard: We were neck and neck when we met. And you've left me in the dust.

Varun Neghandhi: I think to your point, what switched in me was I was starting to get frustrated because I thought I had great things to say, but I was not reaching as many people as I thought the content should reach.

One thing that I did, which was I reverse engineered all the best creators because from coming from an engineering background, what we do during research is we look at, okay, what's everything out there? And find innovative solutions using that research that's already out there. So I created an Excel sheet, put down all the creators that I knew that were doing really well, and just started to reverse engineer the posts that they had, which were very popular. And then how can I bring my expertise, my angle, my experience to it? So that I'm also speaking with the templates and the systems that I have, and that I think looking at which ideas were gaining traction and then putting my angle to it was what propelled me from like the 5,000 followers I had to the 30,000 that I have today.

Doug Howard: I love hearing how engineers use their engineering skills to conquer different things that aren't related to engineering.

I think the best advice, one of my early mentors in my career told me in engineering, he told me, College doesn't teach you how to be an engineer. It teaches you how to think like an engineer and just solve problems. You just see the world a different way.

You're living proof of that when you say you didn't just go into LinkedIn, I'll just see what happened. You went with intention, you observed, you did your research, basically did the scientific theory process and evaluating to perfect it. I think it's so cool to hear that.

Varun Neghandhi: Yeah, because I was seeing that there was a system that is working. I didn't have that system. Okay, what's that gap? And I started to fill that gap in and sure, I am a creator who has a side business helping other immigrants. So it is important for me to get in front of people who are in my target audience, but all of us at this point, trying to create a personal brand, wanna make sure that we are talking about things that people want to hear about. So one, one switch that is, is you wanna give people what they want and then give them what they need. I'm not saying I've figured out the exact puzzle or what people want because I think it's such a complex puzzle to solve, but these different posts are at least giving me some data point as to, okay, this is working. People like to hear an interview advice in this format. People like to hear promotion advice in a different format.

And coming back to personal brand, every person right now is trying to build one, whether they don't want to be a creator or want to be a creator. I think it is great to get inbound job offers as a creator on LinkedIn who's not really looking to get any side business going.

But is just trying to share what they know and the credibility of what they know, because I think the credibility part is where a lot of the benefit is on creating.

Doug Howard: It's funny, I wanna talk about LinkedIn for a few more minutes before we get into the strategies for career path and boosting your income.

I just had another interview with a career coach for engineers and he specializes in how do you write your resume in a way to climb a level? A lot of what he teaches is, LinkedIn too. How to just basically overhaul your LinkedIn profile to be more marketable for a roll up. That episode is my interview with Nader Mowlaee, if you're interested and you're watching. I'll put a link to that episode in the description. But make sure you stay here 'cause we're gonna cover some really good stuff before you jump onto that one.

Varun, I wanna ask you, how do you think LinkedIn can be used as a tool for engineers to boost their income, whether it's climbing roles or finding just more lucrative opportunities. What do you see there?

Varun Neghandhi: The one thing that I've learned from entrepreneurs is that they are trying to solve a problem, and they understand very keenly what the pain, hopes, fears, and dreams are of their target audience. What LinkedIn helps you do is to test that for even a job search process, for example. I know my customer, if I am in the market to get a job, is a hiring manager or a recruiter for that particular company. They are my target market, they are my customer. I need to get into the mindset of an entrepreneur and see what are their hopes, fears, and dreams. If I can figure that out, then I can start to position my product in a way that can help them.

So I'm an engineer, an automotive engineer, for example. I can use my simulation skills, I can use my testing and validation skills. And then now position it in terms that they can understand or they, or not just understand, but they get influenced by. They get impressed by. So taking that entrepreneurial mindset and then positioning it with your communication skills, is it great practice to start in LinkedIn. Now you get real feedback from either peers who are in your space or other hiring managers, other recruiters can look at that. And if you start to get more people coming to you and saying, oh are you interested in this kind of a job, in that kind of a job. Once you start getting headhunted, you also start to realize that, oh this thing worked.

If more people liked it or more people commented, you know that, okay, if I position my skills in this way, it's generating some interest. So taking LinkedIn and then positioning your expertise is a great way to showcase credibility .

Doug Howard: Now I, I have a feeling we might hover around that topic on and off as we continue, but I don't wanna make the listeners wait anymore.

Why don't we just start, we're talking about increasing your income. Obviously that means career advancement or, shifting to another company that maybe pays better or a different region or maybe a different, slightly different market.

Let's just start with, this idea of a career path. Back when I was an engineering manager and a director, a lot of engineers, when I would have that first discussion with them about where do you want your career to go? It was like a black box to them. I can't picture beyond what I'm doing. What is the next step? A lot of people just assume it's leadership. It has to be leadership. It's either engineer or manager. There's so many misconceptions around that.

So I guess I'd like you to just start with what do you say to someone who's asking that question? In the first few years of my career, what are my options? Where do I go? How do I know what's right for me?

Navigating An Engineer's Career Path

Varun Neghandhi: I was in that shoes, I was somebody who was trying to figure out what's the part that I should take. So I'm an engineer for a small company, but I was contracted to a Fortune 500 company.

That has some advantage in what I'm gonna share and I'll get to it. At some point, I was doing a lot of simulation work. Think about it as being somewhere in the research and development phase. I'll say, okay, I know what this is. I have figured it out. I know how to be a master of this. Now what are my parts ahead?

Four answers came to mind. One, I could either go the technical leadership route, so be an ic, be an individual contributor, but be a tech lead, or be the one who is leading the project. Technical specialist role. The other was people management or middle management. The third one was doing program management. So you're not a technical lead, you're just managing the program. And then the fourth one was entrepreneurship.

My intention with figuring out what to do here was I took people out from each of these parts to do something called mentor talks. To try and understand what they did in their career to get to the path that they were on, what sacrifices did they have to make? What was their lifestyle like? How would they do things differently?

For example, I took my manager out who was, let's say, on the step of getting into leadership, like senior leadership. I took the CTO of the Fortune 500 company out for lunch. Then for the technical specialist I took all the tech leads that I had access. To for the program managers, I reached out to people who were doing program management at that Fortune 500 company, took them out for lunch. Then for entrepreneurship, I was working for a small company who was led by an entrepreneur. So I took them out for lunch. So I must have done like 10 lunches where I paid. I took them out for lunch and just asked them questions about their career.

My intention was not to talk about myself. My intention was not to ask even questions that would help me. My intention was to ask them questions about how they had made decisions, because decisions are what we are gonna make going forward over and over again. So I wanted to know that part. That gave me complete landscape of the pros and cons of each path.

Those are the typical four parts that everybody has. Every individual contributor has. Then for me the draw was the entrepreneurship aspect. That led me to actually, after a few years of continuing in that Fortune 500 company as a contractor, going back to my small company and take a partnership and a leadership role in that company.

Doug Howard: Wow. So I have so many questions from that. It sounds like you've talked with tens of people, if not more, and people give complex answers. They don't give data points. So just how did you track that? How did you quantify it? How did you find the trend?

Varun Neghandhi: Frankly, I was not very analytical about that process. I was very anecdotal. I just took in all their insights and tried to kind of form opinions. Every time I thought that they said something very significant, I would write a blog post about it. So I have a couple blog posts of people who shared their strategies to me, and I just put them on a blog post because I thought they were great.

Also made me realize, so much expertise around us. Yes, so much technical, know-how and so much just brain power that is around us where we can just tap that. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. We just can use what they have learned and then make decisions that we think are right.

Doug Howard: I wanna share an insight here that's a little unrelated, but I think I know why you were able to absorb all this. Part of what I do, a slight small branch of what I do is with memory training. I think there's a lot of overlaps there with leadership and soft skills and by you absorbing someone's wisdom and then writing it down and translating it into your own story, basically, it went into your brain and then it got absorbed before it left. You probably really not just understood what they were saying, but it stuck with you. I'm guessing you just almost like the matrix, your brain got implanted with all these people's wisdom in a sense, and you've kept it.

Varun Neghandhi: Yeah, and I think a lot of it also comes from front loading the work before going into the meeting. I was spending a lot of time just creating questions, either by going through their LinkedIn page or by knowing them personally and just writing down the questions, seeing if I can answer the questions by myself, because if I can, or if a simple Google search can tell me, then I just reject that question and move on to the great questions that I've thought like four to five.

I think what that helped me do is because, I had already negated all the cliches of all the questions that I had asked. So when they were really giving me the nuggets or that personal experience, I was hooked onto it because now I could really see that this is not cliche advice.

Doug Howard: I'm gonna make you a blush here, but obviously you've had a lot of success in your engineering career and you have a side entrepreneur business that you're running and you're having a lot of success on LinkedIn. I've met with more engineers that I can count, hundreds of engineers maybe thousands. One thing I noticed that's very different about you than the typical engineer, whatever that means, is you're very people curious. You're very interested in what makes this person tick. You wanna listen more than you talk and learn more than you share. I think that's just really interesting. 'cause I think a lot of engineers, we tend to be introverted. We tend to just stay within and not reach out. I think that holds us back from gaining more wisdom. 'cause the fastest way to learn is by connecting with people versus reading a book. So I just want to ask, do you agree with that assessment of you and do you think it's had a big impact on your success?

Limiting Yourself with Limiting Beliefs

Varun Neghandhi: I appreciate you saying that. Yes. I'm very curious about motivations of people. Again, coming from that entrepreneurial side of things as to, okay, this is my customer. Let me understand my customer really well. I appreciate you saying that. I think the introverted part that most of us engineers feel, I think is in my mind a very limiting belief.

So what I mean by that is because I want to dig deep into this, is that we are all on the spectrum of introvert to extrovert. We are all on it. Also at different times, we are at different levels of that spectrum. I think what we engineers, because we are analytical data oriented, I think are biased more towards the introvert side, but I think I felt I was an introvert or didn't really take anybody out for lunch or didn't really do any kind of a relationship building activity because I didn't really know that was possible.

A lot of times I think we slide ourselves on that spectrum without knowing what is possible or without even pushing ourselves to think about, okay, how can I move just a little bit on the right towards the extrovert. Just a little bit, and just developing these frameworks such as the mentor talks, asking the right questions and investing in personal development courses from which all of these frameworks eventually come from. That taught me things that I didn't even know existed, and that helped me get more out of my shell, especially as an immigrant in a new country.

Doug Howard: You hit on a really good point there, and just to share, you basically said, you put a label on yourself and then it becomes a limiting belief.

Oh, I am an introvert. Or whatever you call yourself something and then that automatically means to yourself, I can't do that thing. I can't do this thing, I can't change. It sounds like you've recognized that we have limiting beliefs and I guess I'd like you to expand on that. Do you feel like that's part of advancing in your career? 'Cause I see some overlaps too, with people. Just I couldn't do that. I couldn't approach that person. I couldn't be in that meeting. Share your insights on that, please.

Varun Neghandhi: I think I paid to be lucky. Here's what I mean by that. I paid enough or invested enough in personal development courses to really know what I didn't know, that this is available to me. Top performers find jobs without having to apply online. Performers get promoted without having to, hobnob or play dirty politics or stuff like that. I invested in enough courses that taught me things that I was just lucky to learn.

I wouldn't say that I was intentional in decoding my limiting beliefs and then working on them. I was not intentional. I just happened to take that one small step of investing in one personal development course from a person that we know, Ramit Seti. That opened a can of worms into investing multiple courses. I wrote a post about this. I've invested something like $29,000 in the last five years just on entrepreneurship and personal development courses. That is what actually propelled me to do a lot more of these activities because, as an Indian, as somebody who's money minded or maths focus. I always wanted to get an ROI on my investment. The only way to do that was to take action. That cycle is what I think contributed to a lot of the success. If I say I was very intentional about it, I would be lying.

Doug Howard: Everything you're saying just makes me want to ask a dozen more questions and I promise we're gonna get into the tactical strategies here.

The ROI of Personal Development

Doug Howard: But you hit on something that I know a lot of engineers struggle with, which is, we have r o i based minds and decision making. Personal growth and development, it's hard to quantify on the front end. Afterwards, flash forward three years after you've went to college or taking a course or whatever. Then it's easy to be like, oh yeah, I got in this position and I made 20% more in my salary because of these skills. But it's hard to see that on the front end. So how did you approach that? How did conquer that ROI mind thinking with something that's hard to quantify.

Varun Neghandhi: Frankly, I didn't conquer it. I think that led me into like really investing into courses that I thought would increase the ROI of my investment. Which is why I think the first few courses that I invested in were trying to get a better job or trying to start a freelancing income on the side. I was always paying with the potential of earning more.

The inadvertent effect of that was these creators or these entrepreneurs, these coaches talked about mindset so much in those courses, that led me to then, purchase software skills products like Success Triggers is probably an example, which is all about different triggers for success. Then there's communication courses that I bought. Then there are even photography courses that I bought that. Now the ROI is not that clear. I'm not a person photographer, but again, the ROI mind led me to invest in some courses. The mindset in that courses led me to expand my mindset to all these different things where even if it was not clear what the ROI is I was investing, because I knew I would make something out of it.

Doug Howard: I think that's an awesome approach. 'Cause it looked like you're approaching it for more than dollars, not just, what dollar, but it's, what value is it? Like just quality of life, these abstract things. You gave that some equal weight in the equation, right?

Varun Neghandhi: Later on. Yes. Later on. Yes. For when I was beginning, when I was starting out, it was very focused on, if I'm investing a thousand dollars, is this going to help me make $2,000? I think even that is something that people don't make that investment. They try to put into stock, they try to put into a real estate, which is all well and good. But I think when we don't have enough capital, the thousand dollars invested in myself is going to be worth a lot more than a thousand dollars invested even in an index fund. The thousand dollars, the limited capital is the beginning. I think when invested in yourself is worth a lot more than any of the other investment vehicles that we may have.

Doug Howard: I agree. It pains me to see so many engineers kinda struggle to take action because they, okay, I can't quantify this ROI on this move, whether it's taking a course or a program. Or it's time, 10 hours to read this book. I don't know if it's worth the time. So if, for you guys watching, if you struggle with this I actually have an episode called How To Quantify The ROI on personal growth and yourself and investing in yourself. It's a different framework for kind of quantifying things that are intangible and abstract. I'll put a link to that HERE, if you wanna check that out.

Varun Neghandhi: That is awesome.

Doug Howard: Let's get into the meat and potatoes of this interview here now. I'm dying to know this too. Let's get into it. I think you've told me that you have these cardinal points for figuring out your career path and whatnot, so let's just, let's dive in that, explain what that is and just tell me what I need to know.

Cardinal Points for Promotion

Varun Neghandhi: I think the biggest invisible scripts we have with promotion are all related to technical skills for some reason. It's either I have so much good technical skills, I should be noticed and get promoted. Or I'm missing this technical skill, I'm missing that technical skill, and I should just learn more about it, get a new certification. Maybe that helps me get promoted. Not just from an individual contributor to a technical lead or people manager role, even within the ranks of individual contributors, I think a lot more people focus on technical skills .Where I had to come in and see that technical skills are table stakes. Everybody has that. Yes. It's like playing poker and if you are the dealer, you are gonna put a big blind in. That's technical skills because everybody has that to some varied extent. But I think the top performers, once you start noticing who are the people that are getting promoted, they do things that are different.

Which is then bringing us to the cardinal points of promotion. I think when you want to get promoted, just that is north east, south, west direction. These are the cardinal points of directions. There are four areas that we need to grow in as an individual contributor to get promoted to a leader or a people manager. And these four cardinal points for promotion are people skills, communication skills, mindset skills, and entrepreneurial skills. I didn't say technical because technical you've already taken care of.

I think these four areas are the areas that you need to grow in now because these soft skills, to take your point, have now become hard skills for promotion.

Doug Howard: One thing I noticed, technical skills are, they're not complex. They're complicated. And what I mean is you can learn it, there's a, if this, then that there's a logical order to technical skills.

But the four cardinal points you just talked about, they're complex. In that it's, how do you measure soft skills? How do you say this person has enough soft skills? This is complete. We hear these vague terms like you need good soft skills. You need to be a good communicator. You need to have a confidence and mindset. How much is enough confidence? I think that's very interesting that it's all these things that are complex. What do you think about that?

Varun Neghandhi: They are complex, which is why we need systems to learn them and then indicators to track them.

So let's take an example. Mentor Talks is a principle that I teach for anybody who wants to improve their people skills. Mentor talk is taking somebody out for lunch and asking them about how they made decisions in their life. That's a framework. Now you know that you need to take somebody out for lunch, ask them about themselves. In turn, your relationships get stronger because now you know more about how they make decisions. So that's a framework to turn an esoteric thing into something that is doable and repeatable.

Within that, another concept is leading indicators versus lagging indicators. What I mean by that is in any measurable goal that you set, I want to be a better communicator by the end of this year.

That's a lagging indicator. You are only able to do that with some leading indicators. Like every time I write an email about a hundred words, I'm gonna add a bullet summary. Every time I'm gonna create a presentation where an executive is going to see the presentation, I'm adding an executive summary, like giving away the story right in the first slide so that the executive doesn't need to go through the entire presentation.

So those are micro actions or leading indicators, it's trackable. Now every time I'm writing an email over a hundred words or just subjectively this is a long email. I'm gonna add a bottom line upfront bullet list. Anytime I have a presentation, I'm gonna add an executive summary. So micro actions and systems can help make this esoteric thing the four cardinal points into something that is repeatable, trackable, and doable.

Doug Howard: That makes a lot of sense because, I teach leadership skills to engineers and that's where I come from is the same mindset. It's so how do you quantify the unquantifiable and how do you turn these things into, I don't use the same terminology you said, but you said leading indicators. I think that's such a great way of putting it. We always say these vague things like, I wanna be better. When you don't quantify it, you can't measure it and you can't do it. I think that's brilliant.

Why don't we talk about each cardinal point for a little bit. Why don't we start with entrepreneurial? 'Cause that's probably the biggest black box to our audience. What is that and what are our leading and lagging indicators for it?

Varun Neghandhi: I'll share at least two tactics or two systems within each so that it's tactical and it's meaty rather than me talking about like theories or strategies.

Embracing An Entrepreneur Role

Varun Neghandhi: So for example, if we want to take talk about ownership, then what does ownership mean essentially? When you have to start thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur and yourself as a product. Now you are the product. What does the customer want? What is the goal that the company is looking for?

So you do this five why analysis as to what? What is your team doing? Let's say your team is trying to create a component that is improving the efficiency of a automobile. Why are they creating a component? They're trying to sell more of that component. Why are they trying to sell more of that component? Because they're trying to be more beneficial for their partners. Who are their partners? Their partners are other automotive OEMs. They're trying to buy this component from you. Okay. Why are they doing that? They're doing that because they want to sell more efficient cars. Once you become an entrepreneur and start to look at things as to why the company does what they do, now you are able to start being more of an owner of your role because now you're not just doing the work, you are seeing the impact of your work in sales for your company, and even going forward, what that means to your customers of your company.

So now every time I do a project, if I am improving the fuel efficiency by 1%, let's say. I am saying that means $50 per car to an automotive OEM, because now I have a clear viewpoint of what that means, and that helps me with ownership because now every time I start a new project or every time I have an idea, I can come in and say, Hey, here's something that we should do. The reason why we should do this is because it impacts the company's objectives in so X many ways. So you start to become more owner of your role rather than an employee who's just doing what they're told.

Doug Howard: Yeah. Passive bystander, following instructions and cooperating. That's the difference, right?

Varun Neghandhi: Yes.

Doug Howard: I wanna point something out, just to make sure everyone understands what you said, because I think I'm, I think I'm getting it. This is a technique I call empathic listening, to make sure I got it. You're saying ask why five times to just dig deeper. So that's pretty simple, for people listening right now. Just keep asking why. I think that's so powerful because the way I look at it, our engineering brains. We don't like just facts. We're comfortable with facts and rules. But at the same time, it's like we really wanna understand how something works. Why it's relevant, why it matters. Notice when that you're at work and you don't like doing something a certain way and it's because you don't understand why you're doing it. What's the relevance? So I think that's so important. It's such a great technique that should really resonate with engineers. Just really under wanting to understand the why behind something.

Varun Neghandhi: The other I would say entrepreneurship aspect of that. Another strategy is entrepreneurs always have to make decisions. You have to make decisions without knowing what's coming in the future.

So one thing that we can do to start being more autonomous in the way that we work, which is a key quality of an entrepreneur, is being better at direction setting. For example, if there is an easy choice to make that is not going to not gonna delay things by more than a day, then make the decision without having to ask your manager.

So if it's a small decision make it, it's okay to be wrong. You might be delayed by a day. You can cover up your work over the weekend if you make that mistake. Now if it is a bigger thing that might cause a big delay or might if wrong, can create a big problem, there are two approaches we can take.

Here's A, this is what we can do. Here's B, this is what we can do. I think we should do B because of X, Y, Z hypothesis. So now again, you are starting to set direction, for yourself and for your company. You are saying, these are the two approaches. You recommend X because of whatever your hypothesis is.

Then you take it to your leadership and let them take the final call. But again, you are starting to show a lot more initiative, a lot more autonomy of the way that you work. So another tactic to come under the umbrella of being an entrepreneur at work.

Doug Howard: You're saying it's a spectrum, but there's more or less two types of decisions.

There's the ones that aren't that impactful and not in a bad way. They're just, they're not going to save the world, they're not gonna wreck the world. Those ones don't let those fester any longer than they need to make the decision within a day of being prompted to make that decision.

Don't spend eight hours trying to figure out what to watch on Netflix. That's simple teasing, but that's a dumb decision. Pick what you're gonna watch. You can always redirect later on.

But then on the other hand, you're saying these bigger decisions, give those more weight. Those are what you should spend the more time thinking of and go through the approval channels and make sure you're getting the right people involved.

Varun Neghandhi: Yep. The entrepreneur cannot wait five months to make a small decision about software. Just make a decision and move on. Whereas if you're gonna make a decision about a product feature, then you want to spend more time getting your customer to say, okay, they value this, or you should do this versus the other.

And at our workplace, our customer is our leadership team.

Doug Howard: What's a good cardinal point to move on to from here?

Maximize Your Mood & Attitude

Varun Neghandhi: I would say mindset is something that we've talked about a lot and I can share a couple strategy with mindset as well.

Doug Howard: What would be an example of how to quantify that? Or how do I know what mindset is?

Varun Neghandhi: Yeah, so one, one interesting thing that came up during my research for this product is I researched or I went to all the different managers that I knew and asked them what separates out in normal performer versus a top performer, somebody that you promote.

And interestingly, a lot of people talked about attitude and mood. If somebody shows up with a consistent mood, a same mood going into it, then I am more trusting of that person. I'm able to give them more of the bigger projects or I'm able to give them more of the more responsible projects.

Mood and attitude was very interesting in this, and I'll share a couple tactics. So for attitude there's a psychological concept called a locus of control. People who have internal locus of control think that they are the ones doing things. People who have an external locus of control think that things happen to them.

For example, if somebody has an external locus of control, they'll be like, I'm waiting on so and so, and they, I am not getting the right answer from them, or things are not moving along. But as a person with an internal locus of control, we will say there are, there is a dealer in this project. Here is how I am trying to solve it.

So that shift in attitude between whether you have an internal locus of control or external locus of control, that shift in attitude is seen very favorably by people in decision making power because they are now, they are saying that, okay, this person is making things happen versus letting things happen to them. So that's the attitude part.

The mood part is we are all on something or concept called Mood Innovator. There's a great book on it and I don't think I I don't remember the person, but I'll give you the information and you can put it in the show notes. The Mood Elevator by Larry Senn

Doug Howard: Check the description if you wanna check this book out.

Varun Neghandhi: It's basically, that you are coming into work, at a certain mood, at a certain level, of that elevator. And it starts with the lower floors where you are not being creative, where you are frustrated, where you're irritated. And that impacts the work that we do. If you're coming in higher where you are joyful, you are open to ideas, you are open to creative thoughts, then you are doing better work on that day.

I'm not saying that you and everybody should show up on that high floor every day, but I just like the concept of this mood elevator knowing that, okay, I can put myself somewhere along this elevator every day. And if I feel that I'm in that negative floors where it's impacting my work, then you can do a state change, go out for a walk or listen to some music that you like, whatever state change may be to see if you can come up a few floors.

So just that ability to know that, okay, there is a mood elevator. There are positive modes, negative modes. Where am I at? And then obviously things like meditation and state change and all that helps to rise up the floors of the mood elevator.

Doug Howard: This is probably something that you're getting at here. But my biggest takeaway is, you are in control of you. Some people don't look at it that way, but you're saying, you, you look at it like, I can't control my mood or I am in control of my mood. And it's important to realize that because, think about you for the audience here.

Do you like being around someone who's in a bad mood? When someone who's always complaining, someone who's always, this is terrible. I can't do this. This is a problem. Whether they're right or not, I'm not even getting at that, but you don't like being around that person, it just feels negative.

It makes you feel a tension when you're around them. And with career advancement, if you're the type of person that's always, complaining about how other people are the cause of your problem or how you're waiting, or you can't fix this, or you can't solve this. Wrong or indifferent, people aren't gonna want to work with you. They're not gonna want to elevate you. So that should be a good incentive to listen to what Varun's saying here, about taking control of that and not having a passive attitude. Do you agree with this?

Varun Neghandhi: I completely agree with it. People are promoting people.

If I'm not gonna like working with somebody, especially when shit hits a fan and they have a bad attitude about it, then why would I promote them? I have seen people get promoted because of longevity in their career, but they never get, like the group that is the biggest moving group of that company. They never get the business unit that is the most important business unit.

Not only are you trying to accelerate your promotion through the company, you're trying to make sure that you end up in a business unit that is performing well and then your job is valued and you are not just getting promoted for the sake of seniority.

Doug Howard: I've seen this all the time too, that I guess would be like the Peter Principle too, in a sense.

If you're not developing in these areas and you're not having this self-awareness, then you're not really growing and honestly, just gonna say it like it is, you probably don't deserve to get the better opportunities. I'm getting sold on these cardinal points. I never was aware of these things before, but I see what you're saying. You are a product. And you need to improve the product. And you need to enhance it and you also need to take market feedback. Outside people and, okay, this is what people are saying about me and maybe I don't agree with it, but I at the same time, I'm trying to market myself, so I need to keep that in mind, right?

Varun Neghandhi: Absolutely. Feedback is one module or one video of the entire mindset course. Feedback is gonna help us uncover blind spots, and nobody's very proactive with feedback. So how you can get there. We can talk about this for many hours, but yes, each of these cardinal points has frameworks and systems. Even if you just start researching online as to how I can improve X. You'll start getting some different systems out there that you can start implementing.

Doug Howard: I wanna keep us moving here just so we can get everything, for these viewers here. What are the remaining cardinal points?

Communication for Career Growth

Varun Neghandhi: So the remaining cardinal points are people skills and communication skills.

In people skills we've already talked about mentor talks. We've already talked about uncovering or discovering motivations of your leadership team. So by doing the hopes, fears, dreams, kind of analysis. And you do that by asking them questions during this mentor talks. So let's skip on that people skills, because we've already covered that.

I think the last one is communication skills, and I think the biggest one in that, is talking to the audience in a way that speaks to that. So I'll give you an example of that. In this Fortune 500 company, I was about to give a big presentation in front of a lot of people from a lot of different business units and divisions within the company.

To make sure that I was on track, we had set like mock presentations. I gave one mock presentation, attended widely by 15, 20 people within my group, the CTO of the company was part of that group as well. After a while, the CTO came to my desk and he gave me a strategy of creating presentations.

He said, on one column, write about everything that you want to share in this presentation, and on the other column, write everything that the people care about from being part of the audience. Once you have written those two things down, scratch the first column completely and write and create a presentation for the second.

That insight was so crucial because I can look at my slides and now say, will the people care about this or not? Or people care about this or not. Because I think as engineers, we wanna be thorough, we wanna be complete. Whereas it doesn't matter. The people in the audience, everybody has different motivations. If it's a marketing team, they are looking into seeing how can I market this product based on the information that is being shared? What is the quantitative benefit? What is the qualitative benefit? That's all they care about. They don't care about all the technicalities inside it. They especially don't care about acronyms that they don't understand.

It's obvious what the, what your working team caress about. But then what about lateral working teams? All they care about is why is this project cool? Why is this project innovative? What is something from the working systems or the workflow that I can model in my project? That's all they care about.

Now, the executive, all they care about is how can I boost this result within my peer group, within my customers? How is this aligning with the company goals so that I know that this project is in line with what we want to do?

So everybody is caring about different things. Nobody is really caring about the in-depth technicalities. All they want to hear is like a synopsis of the story rather than us showing the entire story to them.

Doug Howard: The big thing I'm hearing, people care about what they care about and they don't necessarily care about what you care about unless it's coincidence. They don't care about it just because you care about it. And we tend to just think in things of I'm gonna explain why I think this is important and why I think this matters. And that's where we lose people. If we did this whole episode about what we thought was important, we people would've tuned out by now. Maybe they did. I don't know. We try to put content out there that we think people will want to hear. And it's the same thing you're saying.

Varun Neghandhi: Exactly, and I think our egos are still involved in that. It is our work. So if we be even egotistical, we want more people to learn more about our work rather than just share it like we want to share it. It is our work is how we present it, it matters.

Doug Howard: Just to give a one-on-one example of this for people you know, 'cause like you gave a big picture. You're giving a presentation to the marketing team, but a lot of people watching this aren't in those type of roles, but maybe a more grounded example is, how do you win over your boss? If you're not someone who's naturally good at reading people just try to think what are the things my boss is asking me about? With all the interactions I have with my boss that are about work, what are they asking me for? They're probably not asking about the how's or the specifics. They're probably asking like, where are you at with this project? When are you gonna be done? Where are you stuck? That means they value things moving. Things getting done. When you're giving a, an update to your boss, you should be talking about those three things then. When am I gonna be done? Where am I stuck and how can I get unstuck? Talk in terms of their interest. It's basically making momentum in your favor. It makes it easier for the other person to want to listen versus losing them. Are we on the same page with this?

Varun Neghandhi: Absolutely. And you are basically giving them what they want. Yes. And then giving them what they need. Again, coming back to where we started with this in terms of LinkedIn, and it's very similar here as well. Giving them what they want, which is, like you said, where are we on this project? Is it on time? Where you stuck? How are you trying to solve it? And when do you expect things to move on? And that's a simple status email in every week. The one thing that we talk about in the course is every week just write a status email to your boss highlighting the big things, and set the expectation from your boss that you don't need to reply to this email unless you want me to change something about what I have talked about.

So again, thinking about where they are, they're busy. They have other people that they are also trying to manage. Give them what they want and get out of their way.

Doug Howard: Exactly. Give 'em what they want. That's what it all boils down to.

To wrap up this episode how can people use the cardinal points to advance their career in a high level?

The Path to Promotion

Varun Neghandhi: That's great. Thanks for asking that question, because what I preach is just introduce the system with your manager. I think getting promotions right is like dating somebody. A lot of times you are flirting with the fact that you want a promotion without ever asking for it or laying the foundation for it. You're never asking somebody for a commitment and just expecting that. They will say, oh yes, I wanna move in with you tomorrow. So promotion or the path to promotion starts with having that difficult conversation.

And the way that I help people do that is by, again, giving a system, because I think a system helps people take action. The system in this case is that you tell your senior leadership, maybe your manager or even your skip leadership, that you are trying to get promoted to X in the future. And to do that, you know that you need to grow in these four different cardinal points. You need to grow in your people skills, communication skills, mindset, and entrepreneurial skills. You share that again, they will know that, okay, now you're starting to work on these things and not just being your technical brand.

You ask them flat out that, can you rate me on a scale of five in these four different areas? Find whichever area that you are ranked lowest in. And based on all the insights that I have shared or that you can find online or within this promotion fast track course. Look at that and see what systems I can use and then start tracking that with your manager. So that is just setting the stage and then down the line you can plant the seed, you can nurture the seed, and I have different strategies for that.

Doug Howard: That's super insightful. My last question that I've been dying to ask this whole time is tell us about this course and for anyone who's interested in learning about this course that you're offering, how can they find it?

Varun Neghandhi: Absolutely. This course is called The Promotion Fast Track for Immigrant Professionals. I have specifically made this course for immigrant professionals because that's what I am, and we have a lot more invisible scripts coming into this with promotion and stuff like that. You can find it on beyondgrad.com. And I think a lot of engineers also feel like immigrants because we are analytical, we are a little bit of an introvert, and we feel that we should be recognized, but it doesn't work that way and my entire course is based on how you can get that promotion and go after that promotion.

Doug Howard: This is super valuable. I'm not an immigrant, but I wish I had a course like that early in my career 'cause nobody spelled this stuff out for me and I could see the value in this and I can see how this is gonna help a lot of people basically accelerate and move faster because they're not waiting for the lucky chance that they have a good boss to spell these things out for them, which unfortunately that doesn't happen for most people.

It's been a blast. I really appreciate you sharing all these insights. Varun my last question. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you if they wanna reach out to you?

Varun Neghandhi: The best way to get in touch with me is from LinkedIn. You can find me on Varun Neghandhi and I think nobody's named that. So I think I should be one of the first few people. If not on LinkedIn the best way I would say is to probably become a subscriber to my newsletter and just reply to an email that I send because it goes directly to me and I am, I'm responding to all the emails that I get.

Doug Howard: Excellent. So I'll make sure to put a link for you guys watching. I'll put a link to Varun's program, his LinkedIn, and his newsletter in the episode description. So if you wanna get in touch with Varun, please do. He's a wealth of knowledge and he can help you out. It's been a pleasure chatting with you, Varun, and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all these insights.

Varun Neghandhi: Thank so much. It was a pleasure.

Doug Howard: Before we go, for you guys watching Varun hit on a great point at the end, getting comfortable with having difficult conversations, that's a very important part of this so if that's something you struggle with, you'll want to check out my episode on this. I'll drop a link to “5 Keys to Navigating Difficult Conversations at Work | Leadership Training for Engineering Managers”. All right. Thanks for watching.

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