The Ambitious Leader's Guide to Avoiding Burnout

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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I was in my fourth year at Amazon, and my career had been growing quite well. During those first four years, I'd received two promotions. This was excellent and a point of pride. This pride was certainly part of the reason I ran into trouble.

I was a newly promoted level 7 manager, which meant I had managers reporting to me for the first time in my career. I've since decided that this point in the career of a manager is likely the hardest. On one hand, your scope goes from one team (call it something like 8 engineers of work) to multiple teams (call it 30 engineers of work). This is a huge increase in scope. "But Dave, they have managers to deal with all those people!"

This is true. However, when you're a director (level 8), you have senior managers working for you. And those senior managers are competent and experienced. So they mostly want you to stay out of their business. This means delegation is relatively easy.

As a junior level 7 manager, you're likely managing relatively junior managers. You were just level 6 yourself. No experienced "ready to be promoted" level 6 manager will want to report to you. That'd hamstring their career. Instead, you frequently have many new managers reporting to you.

So instead of 30 engineers of work to oversee, you have 30 engineers of work to oversee, plus 5 managers who need coaching.

You don't get promoted quickly by working slowly and methodically. I'd been working quite hard. My meeting schedule was always full from 9am until 5pm (or often 6pm, because many of my coworkers felt the same way I did). I would catch up on emails before my meetings started, and I'd work for a couple of hours after my meetings ended, since that was the only time I could accomplish my personal tasks.

I was intimately familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix and made time for the important things. However, I was slowly drowning as my work continued to increase every few months. I hadn't figured out how to solve this yet.

Go go go time.

I was in the Retail Marketplace group. From Thanksgiving to mid-December things were crazy for teams related to the retail website. There was a date in mid-December each year that was the last day you could order with super saver shipping to get your items by Christmas. After that date, traffic would drastically drop.

What ends up happening is that every major project is due before those big traffic spikes. Because, of course, every project thinks that they're going to earn Amazon another $100 million. So a dozen projects would be landing over the weeks before Thanksgiving. And then the delayed projects needed to land (if they were allowed to launch). And operational readiness had to be done to make certain we didn't crash when we hit those peak days. Anyway, the point is that this is a relatively frantic month or two.

We finally entered the standard downtime during the holidays. What often happened is that everyone suddenly realized that they had 3 weeks of vacation saved up, and it was time to quickly take that time. Or we'd spend hours in the kitchen, drinking spiked eggnog at 3pm, smiling that we'd managed to not cause any massive disasters this year. Very little work was done in the last couple of weeks of the year.

Rather than taking my foot off the gas like many employees, I ended up spending those quiet weeks almost alone in the office. It was like a ghost town. I'd sometimes walk down the hallway and see the lone engineer with Cheetos watching Netflix at their desk.

I thought I could finally catch up and relax. I aggressively finished documents I'd promised. I caught up on people management issues, writing feedback for some employees, and updating some promotion documents I needed to write. I cleaned out my email inbox, and updated spreadsheets.