Shadow programs give employees a peek into leadership roles
about.gitlab.com
about.gitlab.com
What I learned was that communicating your vision (or implementing the vision of your boss) is not enough, you've got to be in there next to your people and show you understand why they are not able to get to where you are leading them, so you can find new ways to unblock things and get them to do what you need them to do.
Also: sometimes the only way to prevent shit from rolling downhill onto your people is to take it on yourself. You pay a real price for the perks of rank, if you take your responsibility to your people seriously.
What I learned about being an IC is to have some empathy for management: they can be trying but the results can look like they are not because of the enormous inertia of groups of people.
As a manager of managers, I frequently tell them that one sign their job is going well is when they're able to go away for vacation and it's almost like they never left, but if they left for a couple months, we'd start to see the cracks form. Managing is the challenge of having genuine empathy for your team, holding them accountable for the things they should be accountable for, and eating s*t for the stuff they shouldn't be. When you're managing in a good environment, there's not much of latter.
Our values were frequently referred to during discussions and decisions were often debated in the context of our values. I had been working at GitLab for about 6 months when I joined the program and it was amazing to see our values be such points of emphasis to our leaders.
Having worked in a number of other organizations in the past, I can't recall one single "company value" from any of those orgs. In contrast, I don't think I'll ever forget GitLab's CREDIT[0] values.
During the shadow program, I realized such emphasis on our values starts at the top.