You're in the <1% Club

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has 55 direct reports!

With that many people to manage, and the world's third most valuable company to run, it leaves no time for any one-to-ones or performance review meetings.

Even with much fewer direct reports, a manager can only spend an very small amount of their time thinking about the development of their team, despite best intentions.

An Harvard Business Review study found that this is how managers spend their time on average:

They only use 7% of their time to manage stakeholders and develop their team.

So if a manager has a team of four, plus a handful stakeholders to engage with, they will be spending less than 1% of their time thinking about your development:

You are an afterthought.

Caught in the drift

When we are younger we have parents, then teachers, all telling us what to do and when to do it, with the aim of helping us develop.

We get used to our lives being managed by people whose main priority is to help you learn and develop.

Then all a sudden we are unleashed into the workforce.

And now there’s a group of people that ‘manage’ you.

But they’re fundamentally different because helping you learn and develop is right at the bottom of their priorities.

No one tells you that this switch has happened.

For years people can drift along still expecting their managers to guide their development and careers.

And people get annoyed with ‘the management’ when their development seems to have become limited.

You’re the manager now

Your manager is only going to be your manager for a couple of years, but your career is going to be 40+ years.

You’ll have good managers at times and bad managers at others, so help will be inconsistent and you will not have much control over what sort you get.

The one person who can develop your career and dedicate enough time and effort to have a significant impact is you.

You can spend significantly more than 1% of your time thinking about you.

It’s only because his team all effectively manage themselves that Jensen Huang can handle having 55 direct reports.

Those 55 people are the senior leadership of the world’s 3rd largest company.

They all got there by taking control and consistently developing their own careers.

And they’re all in the other 1% club too.

"Smart people focus on the right things." - Jensen Huang

"Never stop asking questions and seeking answers. Curiosity fuels progress." - Jensen Huang