Career Paths: How do I become a director?

How do I become a director? Seriously, how does it work?

Lately, my career clients are asking how to get promoted. Sometimes, they’re looking to move to the manager level, but most often, they’ve got an eye on the director’s chair.

If you’re in your early or mid-career, you may be wondering:

How do I become a director? What are the criteria?
How do I prove I’ve met them?
What will convince a hiring manager or a recruiter that I’m ready?

There’s considerable nuance to the answers depending on your discipline, so I’ll stick to the broad strokes here.

In my experience, successful directors at any organization:

Shape their department’s strategic vision and help drive the organization’s success
Participate in financial planning and build budgets for their department
Manage people
Have a clear, results-driven performance track record and the communications skills to share it

Let’s dig into what that means.

1. Shaping your department’s strategic vision and driving organizational success

A supervisor once told me, “Elizabeth, it’s no small thing to be the director of a company.” Those words were truer than I knew.

Directors sit between the executives developing corporate strategy and the managers and teams carrying it out.

That middle seat means directors hear aspirational conversations about new priorities and the dissonance with rollout on the front lines. They can also look across the organization at what’s changing, progress blockers, and where collaboration can make the whole thing run smoother.

Working with their executive leader, directors set a vision for their department’s performance indicators. They determine what success looks like (e.g., setting targets for KPIs, which are monitored and measured across the reporting period).

But all that direction and insight is useless if no one else knows about it.

Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale of Raw Signal Group will tell you that the most interesting work happens where departments intersect.

At the director level, building relationships with your peers to facilitate those conversations is a big part of the job.

How do I learn more about strategy and develop a track record? Look at your existing position and dig into how you fit within the organization.

Ask yourself:

How does your current role move the organization forward?
Which weekly or monthly tasks specifically contribute to that momentum?
What indicates successful performance?
Confirm your assumptions with your supervisor. Ask how your performance aligns to your department’s overall key performance indicators (KPIs).
Develop a plan to focus more time on tasks that increase your impact. For example, can some of your repetitive, time-consuming tasks be off-loaded to LLM systems? Can you reduce your time spent another way or take items off your plate?
Talk to your peers in other departments. Where does your work intersect? How can you help each other?

As you go, document your successes and lessons learned over time (we’ll come back to this idea).

2. Financial and budget planning

Directors need to:

Understand how budgets work.
Know the format your organization uses (they’re more or less the same but a little different in the details).
Have the experience to predict, track, and measure expected versus actual costs for your department or division.

Budgets are an area where professional depth helps. It’s easier, for example, to build an accurate budget model for a large conference if you’ve had experience running events. You’ll know the unexpected and hidden costs that newbies don’t anticipate. Veterans know what shows up during or post-show to kick you in the knees.

Likewise, it’s easier to estimate the seats you need on a third-party software tool if you’ve used it before (or a similar offering).

Budget lines can also creep up over time. Long ago, a past director with signing authority said yes to a subscription or a service. Today, it’s no longer relevant but is still eating up the cost center. Repeat that cycle for five or six quarters. You may inherit a budget full of bloat based on decisions that weren’t yours.

Dealing with this fallout and building a more accurate model is your responsibility. Having insight into what’s a useful spend and what’s not helps make those calls.

How can I learn more about budgets before becoming a director? If you’re a manager or a team lead, your boss may let you build your piece of the departmental budget.

You could also take a course on budgets or spend some time on YouTube. Building a personal budget (e.g., for your household or a wedding) can also help you learn the basics.

3. People management skills

Directors are generally people leaders with proven management skills. While a few tasks may remain in their job description, the department’s work is typically too wide for one person.

They hire, provide motivation, give performance feedback, and conduct the day-to-day work of having a team. Directors also have to know enough about what’s happening in the department to ask good questions.

That doesn’t mean you have to have an expert-level understanding of every task. You do need to understand results well enough to know what success looks like and when the situation’s changing. That’s especially true if you’re leading unmotivated staff or if people fear consequences too much to be transparent.

Experienced leaders build testable hypotheses about what’s going in the department, gather data, adjust, and respond. Acquiring that perspective takes time. That’s why it’s rare for recent grads to become directors. (Early-stage startups are the chaotic exception.)

Management skills with strong communications skills are crucial contributors to a director’s performance. You’ll give clear instruction on your team’s deliverables, define success, and set expectations for how the work gets done.

On the org chart’s flip side, the same skills will help manage your leadership’s expectations for you. It takes acumen to know when your to-do list is sustainable or when you’re being pushed into a pit.

Experience as a supervisor or manager is almost always required before becoming a director. Management skills can be learned, but you’ll need time and experience to practice how you apply them.

How can I gain people management experience without being in a leadership role? There are a lot of ways to expand your leadership skills outside of your current position, including:

Volunteering as a coach, group representative, board member, etc.
Building a side project that you manage with a team.
Asking your boss what’s keeping them boss up at night. Is there a time-bound project you can take on and lead? There’s a lot of value in being a troubleshooter.
Taking courses (I did this one) and reading about the topic to get familiar with the terms and current trends.

4. A clear, results-driven performance track record

Back in section 1, I suggested that documenting your work builds a case for your readiness for more senior roles.

Most successful directors have a robust case history that captures their learning, failures, insight, and best practices over time.

People in portfolio-driven careers, such as software development, marketing, or design, gather such details as part of standard hiring processes. What we talk about and the tools we use to share our work differ, but the thinking is the same.

Why bother? I once worked with a team pitching the federal government for a $15-million grant. We showed a pitch draft to a board member, who noticed we hadn’t fully brought in the voices of our member organizations and captured their support. “That way, if they say no to your application, they’re also saying no to you and all your members,” she observed. “That’s a harder no to give.”

Case studies are one way to bring more evidence and proof of your learning to job applications or promotion conversations. It’s harder to say no when you have clear evidence proving that you know what you’re talking about.

Building a strong history of your work can also help identify gaps in your learning and performance. You can then explore targeted opportunities to fill that gap. That might be through a new job, a volunteer role, or ongoing professional development.

Having an excellent reputation outside your organization in your chosen discipline helps. Make sure your social profiles and portfolio account for the public-facing pieces of your career footprint, too. If it’s relevant, look for opportunities to speak to peers about your work. Represent your company at events or conferences.

Depending on what your profession values, such experiences may help to make your case for a more senior position.

How can I learn more about what that looks like for my profession? As with all career moves, patience, perseverance, and a willingness to get out there will be core to your success.

Reach out to peers and get curious about how directors in your network got promoted. Sometimes they can be blunt about the ins and outs in ways people you work with directly cannot.

Sample questions:

How did they make the jump? What positions did they hold along the way?
What work did they deliver in those roles? Which milestones were most impactful?
If they’re well into their leadership journey, what are they seeing within their organization?
What performance indicators do they want to see in their teams to consider them for promotion to the director level?

Hopefully, that will give you areas to explore as you figure out what a director role looks like for you.

If this post has your brain turning about how it applies to you, let me know. If you’d like bsome personalized career strategy support, book a free 15-minute call to see if we’re a fit.

I support human creativity. The stock photos in this post appear under an Unsplash free license. I’d like to credit Lucie Hosova for her stellar forest shot.