A question that frequently comes up with both folks I coach for interview prep, and those I manage or coach for career growth, is “What do I need to show a perspective employer or my manager to be considered valuable?”

The answer crystallized for me as I was prepping for a talk with the students at Kennesaw State University about the role of AI in software engineering, and what threat, if any, it presented to the careers of current and future engineers. 

The four attributes that differentiate humans from AI are precisely the ones that differentiate rockstar interview candidates from mediocre ones, and that differentiate stellar employees from average ones.

This article is about these four attributes. Each one is equally important, and the more of them you can demonstrate through the stories you tell in your interviews, through day-to-day action, and through directed growth, the more successful you’re going to be in your career.

The audience for this article, therefore, is three-fold:

1. You are a candidate who wants to optimize their interview answers for maximum impact.
2. You are an employee who wants to optimize the way you approach work for maximum impact.
3. You are a manager who wants to optimize the culture on your team for maximum productivity and retention.

This article will be a high-level overview of the ECCO (look ma, I made an acronym!) attributes. The subsequent ones will drill in further into each.

E is for Enthusiasm

This attribute is also known as Passion. In Microsoft, we called this competency Passion for Technology. I’ve written about this in the past, and every time I have, the effect has been polarizing. 

Some don’t consider Enthusiasm to be a prerequisite to career success. Perhaps that’s true in some cases, but I’ve found that those who are genuinely interested in their work will be more engaged and more productive than those who are phoning it in. This doesn’t mean that to be a software engineer you need to have no interests outside technology. I would hope that my directs have something in their lives other than software.  But I also hope that they have a passion around the domain they’ve chosen to spend a third of their lives exploring.

What does that passion look like? Here’s a short, non-exhaustive list. Obviously, very few people will exhibit all behaviors on this list, but hopefully you’ll see one or two that look familiar.

• You read software engineering / technology blogs and bring what you learned back into the team.
• You commonly engage in tech-oriented conversations with your coworkers, just because you find them inherently interesting.
• You have software projects outside of work, such as contributing to OSS, or working on something on your own.
• You have a favorite language / library / framework / approach / design pattern / etc, and are prepared to defend it at length against the barbaric horde trying to minimize its impact.
• You explore emerging trends in the IT industry and use these explorations to uplevel not only yourself but your team.

Hopefully, you get the idea. It’s relatively easy to see Passion for Technology in interview settings; it comes through in the points above.

C is for Competence

Competence is the mastery of the skills you need to do your job. If the other attributes mentioned here are a car, Competence is the road. 

If you’re an interview candidate, you can show your Competence through the Action part of the STAR (Situation/Task/Action/Result) template for your answer. Make sure to mention specifics of what you did, highlighting the challenges encountered and the steps you took to resolve them.

For ICs, Competence is displayed through systematic, high-quality, and timely output. Competence here is about resolving ambiguity via expertise and critical thinking, and (synergy with Collaboration) working as a team to execute on the required work. 

For managers interested in developing competence in their employees, many well-known avenues exist: structured learning, pairing up with a more senior colleague, mentorship, and so forth. The important point I want to make here is the necessity to view Competence as separate from the other attributes. Yes, a competent employee is more likely to be engaged, own their work, and seek others’ opinions, but it’s also possible to exhibit the other attributes without having the competence to back them up, just like it’s possible for a car to drive through a field… it can do it, just not very well.

In other words, don’t mistake enthusiasm or even ownership for competence. This mistake seems to be more prevalent at higher levels, where someone highly visible and loud gets the accolades over someone quietly competent.

C is for Collaboration

The days of locking yourself in a room to pound out thousands of lines of code are over. Collaborative teams outperform most individuals, no matter how brilliant, and are far less prone to unexpected work disruptions such as illness, vacations, and so on.

As an interview candidate, it’s vital to show your ability to collaborate through the stories you tell about your past work. Even in cases where the project was inherently siloed, stress how you collaborated with the client on the requirements, how you worked closely with them to keep them up to date on the progress, etc. In other words, in an interview, avoid the “I locked myself in a room and pounded out code” type of answers. A hiring manager wants to hear about your success as a member of a team, because they’re hiring for a team.

Back in early 2010s, in response to its growing reputation as a collection of individuals constantly competing for the highest bonuses at the expense of their peers, Microsoft changed the way it evaluated its employees from a pure “what did you get done this year?” to a set of three questions:

• What did you get done this year?
• What did you learn from others?
• What did you teach others?

This was an effort to foster Collaboration across its workforce, and the effort paid off. Gradually, collaboration began to be more valued in the company culture, and the results spoke for themselves. (Just look at Microsoft’s stock chart over the last 15 years.) 

In other words, as an IC, Collaboration should be your go-to tool for solving problems. Never allow yourself to become completely siloed in a task. Lean on others. Take the opportunity to teach others. The payoff will be incredible. 

As a manager, you will find breaking down silos in your team a highly effective strategy for maximizing engagement and knowledge spread. But the attitude of leaning on others for support doesn’t come easily as it requires trust. This is where you must step in and set a climate of psychological safety to encourage your teammates to be genuine with each other, knowing that they have each other’s backs.

Ownership

I saved the best for last. An owner is proactive, engaged, understands the business context within which they operate, and is empowered to make decisions within (and somewhat outside) their direct scope of influence. Let’s take these one at a time:

Proactive

You don’t wait for problems to escalate. When you notice an issue, especially a hidden one, you raise it with your team, and drive it to resolution. Notice I’m not saying, “resolve it yourself.” That’s not scalable.

So, a proactive owner is one who notices “Somebody Else’s Problems” (thank you, Douglas Adams) and emerging issues with the project/task they’re tackling. It doesn’t matter whether you’re leading an organization-wide initiative or a tiny feature of your team’s product, the principle remains the same. Issues come up, and a proactive owner will jump on them. ‘Nuff said.

Engaged

An engaged owner is one who is interested in the work they’re doing. This means they show curiosity, keep a beginner’s mind, and always look for opportunities to improve their ability, process, and execution.

Of all the sub-attributes of ownership, this one may be the hardest to pull off if the work you’re doing is one that doesn’t align with your intrinsic interest. If this happens often, perhaps it’s time to have a frank conversation with your manager. Remember, they’re motivated to keep you engaged, because when you’re engaged, you produce more. Be honest with your manager about the challenges you’re experiencing and what sort of work you want to do.

Understands the business context

I’ve written in the past about code monkeys, i.e. folks who just execute tasks they’re given, and the limitation that mindset creates to their career growth. When an owner is thinking about the task in isolation from the larger context, they miss opportunities to propose better solutions (and different tasks), and thus uplevel both themselves and the organization. As a manager, it’s vital to break your directs out of this mentality, encouraging them to look at the larger picture and ask questions.

“Think like the CEO” should be a mantra of every member of your team. Apart from emergency situations, when hard questions are asked, avoid defensiveness, and instead, engage in a genuine, curiosity-fueled exploration of the larger context at hand.

Empowered

There’s a lot to say about delegation and the value thereof. The key is to understand that delegation is unavoidable if you want to scale as a manager, and the only way for it to be long-term successful is for you to trust the work to the person you’re delegating it to. In other words, don’t micromanage them as they execute the task you asked for. Don’t look over their shoulder. Rely on them to come to you when they need assistance and be prepared to have their back if something should go awry.

Obviously, there’s a degree of judgement to exercise around what to delegate to whom. You wouldn’t trust a business-critical project to a fresh college grad with 2 weeks on your team, at least, not until they’ve shown they can handle it.

Conclusion

And there’s ECCO for you. I hope you see how these attributes reinforce each other. There’s an inherent synergy between these four, which also makes cultivating them easier. As you lean into Ownership, Enthusiasm and Competence naturally follow. And so on.

What about you? What attributes do you consider most important for your career success? Anything missing from this list? Join in the discussion, and let’s raise our Competence together!