*95% of the time.  (And other out-of-the-ordinary advice to reach the C-Suite)

Every day I run experiments. I am constantly creating and testing little hypotheses during leadership meetings, project meetings, 1:1 conversations, and other daily interactions.  To test my understanding of organizational dynamics, I make predictions about how individual people will react when I say X or Y and then observe the results. The accuracy of my predictions helps me measure my true understanding of organizational dynamics and individual positions. Everybody does this to some extent, but in my experience the best leaders do it in an organized and consistent way.  Understanding people and organizations is a key skill that you must master if you desire to advance your career in technology.

This is an example of advice I’ve used to advance my own career. As President of the Board for the Seattle Chapter of The Society for Information Management I also continue to feed my curiosity, plug into the local IT ecosystem and keep learning. Who knows, some of the advice I’ve folded into my professional DNA over two decades in tech might help power your next career move.

With this in mind, here are four of my top tech leadership beliefs:

1. You’re always on display. That small blow-up with a developer or rude comment to an executive assistant? They are all public record. Make no mistake; people notice this stuff and the more responsibility you have the more closely you are scrutinized by your team, your peers, your executive team and others. You must consistently practice self-discipline, knowing that your intellect and energy may have got you your current job, but your character is a crucial third component that helps set your reputation and earn you that next promotion.  Early in my career, I was fortunate enough to be coached by a great boss who noticed that I frequently came across as dismissive to people whose technical skills I did not respect. He pointed out that even if my assessment was correct, this behavior was witnessed by others and did not reflect well on me.
2. The Full 90. Own the first 90 days of your job. Produce a 30/60/90 day plan. Knock it out of the park by presenting the plan to your boss in your first few weeks on the job. Focus on tactical elements and report progress to your boss at regular intervals. Here’s the key though: keep your expectations modest. You don’t need to unleash a firehose of changes, just be consistent over the full 90 days.  If you’re too aggressive with introducing change, the corporate auto-immune system will rally around you and spit you out like the foreign anti-body you are. I have watched several people make this fatal mistake and the outcome was not pretty.  Be constantly recalibrating and introduce change at a rate the organization is capable of absorbing.
3. Know who’s in charge. When you walk into a meeting, you should know why you are there and exactly what you expect to get out of the meeting. To this end, if you cannot tell who is in charge in the first five minutes of any meeting, your leadership skills need work.  Your success rests in understanding systems, people, and organizational power hierarchies. Developing and honing your skills in this area is critical.  In the meantime here is a quick rule of thumb that will help keep you out of trouble: “Prioritize company first, then your team, then yourself.”
4. Give 5%. You should be entirely predictable to your team 95% of the time, bordering on boringly predictable. Here’s why:  if your team can consistently and accurately predict your position on various issues, they will get to work without waiting for you to weigh in.  This increases team efficiency exponentially.  The larger the team, the more critical this becomes. You also reduce stress and improve morale by being a leader that doesn’t jump frenetically around based on the crisis of the day. But reserve 5% of the time to shake things up and say or do things that people don’t expect. This helps the team avoid complacency and keeps you relevant. Use this 5% wisely and reserve it for strategic goals, like leadership training for the person who will take your seat, when you earn that next promotion.

One last bit of advice; learn to be comfortable with your imperfect self. Realize that management books and articles are  filled with advice about how to be a perfect person in a perfect world. In reality, the world is messy and no one lives up to these ideals. So when you (inevitably) fall short of these ideals, don’t beat yourself up.  Reflect on what happened, how you could have handled the situation better, then pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again.

Join Paul and more than 100 other senior IT practitioners at Seattle SIM’s monthly networking and leadership events or at SIM’s 2016 Seattle Technology Leadership Summit on May 18.