| title | draft | type |
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Chapter Three: How to be Coached as a Tech Lead |
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guide |
Getting coaching in your career is probably a new experience, and it likely is a fairly new experience for your coach as well since the Tech Lead Coaching Network is quite new and still a work in progress. This chapter is intended to give you both some ideas about the "broad strokes" of coaching as well as some specific, practical details. The goal of this chapter is threefold: (1) give you some confidence or reduce your anxiety about this new relationship, (2) provide you some very actionable advice about how to receive coaching (including some dos and don'ts), and (3) giving you some instruction on how to get the most of the relationship.
We discussed this in Chapter One, but it bears repeating over and over what coaching is since this likely is such a new experience for you.
The term "coaching" has become pretty popular lately. It's taking more and more mindshare in the corporate world these days. Managers are routinely being told that they need to do more to coach their employees. Outside the corporate context, here in LA, where I am writing this from, it seems everyone has a coach for something, from their wellness coaches to their happiness coaches.
There is good reason for the growing interest in the coaching industry, in my opinion anyway. Our society has changed quite a bit over the past few decades and even though we seem more connected than ever through things like Facebook and Slack, we have also lost the deeper, more supportive relationships that our grandparents (no matter what generation you currently are) likely had. Largely, when it comes to our careers, it can feel like it is just us and the internet. Some have it better, some have it worse, but one thing is for sure -- we all need more supportive relationships in our lives.
For some, the concept of a "coach" reminds them of a grade school or college sports coach screaming advice from the sidelines. We certainly do not want the Network coaching experience to be like listening or seeing Bill Bellichik scowling at your mess ups on the field (maybe a little like Phil Knight, but that is aspirational).
The coach in this relationship is not supposed to provide too much advice; instead, they are supposed to listen to where you are an ask questions to expose your own innate capabilities to solve problems. For the Tech Lead Coaching Network, we encourage our coaches to simply create a peer to peer, one to one relationship where the only goal is to listen and ask questions. Their first objective is to support and affirm you and your ability to do this -- because you can.
Our goal with the Network is to pair up experienced tech leads with less experienced tech leads. We are striving to put together a transparent process for matching tech leads with coaches based on each individual's unique desires, but have not crystallized the process yet.
Ideally, your coach will be another tech lead just like you -- just with a bit more experience than you have. The goal of the Network is to grow broadly enough that each experienced tech lead will take on a small handful (less than five) less experienced tech leads to coach.
Since the Network is still growing, however, it is possible that your coach may be a first level engineering (or similar, depending on your tech industry) manager who is not exactly your peer but should still be close enough to have recent experiences similar to your own.
Also, because the peer to peer tech lead concept is a new one, almost all of our coaches are going to be relatively inexperienced. Similarly, all of them are doing this on a volunteer basis, so it is important to stay patient with them as they work through the framework (including the five Pareto skills) as well as giving them some space to get comfortable in the role.
In summary, just like you, your coach will be new to this experience so it is very important that you bring your best supportive attitude to the relationship.
[Logistics and set up] [Start with the organizer, the matchmaking process and confirmation, and the handoff.]
This section of the chapter gets into the details and describes the logistics for how the coaching relationship starts. The process starts when you sign up on techleadcoaching.com and sign up as a tech lead who wants to be coached. Within a few days, a community organizer will reach out to you to schedule an initial discovery call.
In the discovery call, the community organizer will run through an informal intake intervew taking between thirty and sixty minutes. The organizer may ask questions such as:
- your basic career demographics,
- where in the world you are,
- what kinds of communication mechanisms work for you,
- what communication restrictions you have in place (e.g., legal or confidentiality limitations),
- your goals for coaching,
- any specific concerns or reservations you have about coaching that we should call out in your profile,
- how often you are hoping to meet (monthly is usually recommended),
- where you are in your career now, and
- any preferences you may have in an ideal coach.
The organizer will write up a short paragraph characterizing your Coaching Profile and send a draft to you via email or other mechanism to make sure that he or she has not misstated or characterized something incorrectly. There may be some back and forth on your Coaching Profile, which could take place via email or on a platform like Google Docs, depending on your shared preferences.
From there, the community organizer will review the bench of coaches and try to align your preferences to the available coaches. Once a few candidate coaches are selected, the organizer will reach out to the candidates to share your profile (which is why it is important to get it right). The objective here is to find a coach who is a good match. This step could take a few days, weeks, or even a few months.
Once the organizer thinks there is possibly a good match, the organizer will contact you and review the coach's profile with you (they have one too). If you are comfortable with the coach's profile, then the organizer will set up an Introductory Call (or physical meeting) with all three parties: you, the coach, and the organizer. That call should take no more than thirty minutes but you will leave with a scheduled first meeting.
From there, you and the coach are on your own to take the coaching in any direction you want. However, we advise our coaches and our tech leads to structure the Seven Starting Conversations into the following 45-60 minute conversations:
Session One: this should be a more in depth "get to know you" conversation than the Introductory Call. The call should have two halves to it:
- The first half of the conversation should be a bidirectional conversation about how you each got engaged with the Network, how you ended up as a tech lead, and the coach's background.
- The second half of the conversation should be an in depth conversation about what your goals are for your tech lead role and career as well as what your current challenges are.
Sessions Two to Six: the goal of these five sessions should be to get comfortable with the coaching relationship and to rely on the Tech Lead Coaching Network five skills as a framework to lean on as the two of you develop your relationship. The calls should roughly follow the following structure:
- your coach starts by reaffirming your goals (3-5 minutes) and you align on any adjustments
- the coach should ask the critical question: "how are you doing?" (5-15 minutes) and you may check in on goals set from the last call
- review the five Pareto skills and decide on which one to explore for this call, and then dive into it (~ 30 minutes)
- make a list of actions for you to work on until the next call (10-15 minutes)
- review whether structure of the call is working and what adjustments you each might want to make
- confirm schedule for the next call
Session Seven: this could be a short, relaxed check in call to confirm how the relationship is going and whether you and the coach want to continue. Future calls can continue the pattern set in sessions two to six, but by now you and your coach probably have something that's working for you that may differ from the structure proposed. If so, and it is working, then by all means continue. If not and you want to continue the relationship, this might be a good session to reset and review the structure to see how you might want to revise.
So now that you have an idea of the basic structure that we recommend to tech leads like yourself and our coaches for your first conversations, you may be curious about the parameters or the protocol of what should be said or not said in these conversations. In this chapter, we will start with some guidance about what the conversation is not. We do this because we think it is a good way to draw useful lines around the relationship from the beginning -- for both you and the coach.
While the following are guidelines we provide to both you and your coach, you and your coach are free to go anywhere you are both comfortable with -- so long as it is ethical and you are both comfortable with it. At any time you are not comfortable, you are free to reach out to your community organizer (more on this below).
First, remember this is a professional relationship. Your coach is not a therapist and is likely unable to help you with personal issues beyond professional context. That said, we do tell our coaches that our personal and professional lives are very hard for any of us to truly separate, so it is worth talking about your personal motivations, struggles, and desires that drive who you are and how you show up as a tech lead. Just remember your coach is there to listen and support you but they are not therapists and they can only really support you in a professional context.
Second, stay in the here and now. You coach cannot time travel to help who you were or where you are going. Your coach can only really talk about what is happening right now and your next steps. Stay in the now.
Third, respect each other's boundaries and be patient with each other. This is related to the first guidelines to "keep it professional" but these conversations, when they go right, can be pretty vulnerable, which can be great so long as you each respect each other and are careful of each other's boundaries. Go slow. Sometimes when you start opening up to your coach it can be hard to know where to stop. We guide our coaches to be cognizant of it, but remember they are peers like you and not perfect. If you feel like you went too far, don't sweat it; be patient with your coach and yourself too.
Fourth, respect the confidentiality of your company and your team. Invariably, as a tech lead, a large part of what will be causing you challenges and you will want to talk about with your coach will be the struggles you have with other people on your team. Since there is a good chance that you and your coach are in the same industry and possibly in the same geography, please be careful how you identify people -- remember the people you work with have not given consent for you to share your experiences with them with your coach, so please do not share the true identity of anyone on your team. When talking about team members, please choose a gender neutral nickname (IDK, "Turtle 1"?) or something generic like "Person 1."
Having set some boundaries around the nature of the coaching relationship, let's get positive and talk about the things you should be exploring and talking with your coach.
First, make the meeting. If your coach is taking time to meet with you, make sure you make the meeting. Of course there are times when there are meeting conflicts that you cannot resolve, but keep in mind your coach is a volunteer and is sacrificing time too. Make every meeting you can. If you have concerns or insecurities about the relationship, contact you meeting organizer.
Second, show up. More positively, come to the meeting with your most optimistic self. Your coach is there to show you that you can push through any obstacle you have, and you can because you are human and humans are incredibly powerful. So show up for your coach as the incredibly powerful human you are :-)
Finally, be real. We ask our coaches to ask you, "How are you doing?" This is more than a passing question. It's intended to prompt you to really think deeply about how are you doing. When you were driving to work today, what were you worried about? What actually happened? How do you feel about it now? That software engineer that you have been struggling to reach that you talked to your coach about last month, how is it really going now?
"Fine" is almost never the right answer, and only you know if you are telling the truth. Lying to your coach will accomplish nothing; being real will make this a great relationship.