I spent some time looking for engineering coaches for others a few years ago. While conducting early interviews to understand what they do and how they measure their success, I got a lot of puzzled looks from potential coaches. Most of them measure their success by the size of the fire they have put out via their coaching, and almost none of them were being asked to coach people where there were no issues.
I was equally puzzled by this. Having coached many people on my team and a few outside of my team, surely the executive teams at most companies understand that you want to invest universally in improving the outcomes of one of your biggest cost centers. I am wearing my shocked Pikachu face right now. I was going to see if I could find some Amazon merch to pimp for this, but all of the shocked Pikachu merchandise there is super sus. Or is it suss? I cannot keep up.
It turns out that companies spend on coaching when their engineering organizations or products are on fire. It is far easier to get the blessings of the bean counters for reacting to a problem than it is to invest in proactive coaching that might keep you out of trouble in the first place.
Why is this true? It seems that there should be more appetite for proactive coaching rather than just reactive coaching in much the same way that people say, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
I recently attended a CTO talk in OC. The speaker blew me away by describing how they upgraded their internal data platform using Databricks. At the end of the talk, I asked her where she had learned the soft skills needed to get approval for this project. She attributed it to her career coach, which she paid for alone.
I decided to ask another question at the end of this talk, similar to one I asked during an engineering presentation at GDC in March. I asked the audience how many people have coaches or mentors. In both cases, far too few people put up their hands.
I was disturbed by that. Many people blindly trust their managers to look out for their careers. I have had engineering leaders with incredibly scarce mindsets at some companies where I have worked. It is dangerous to trust your own potentially abundant success in the hands of a zero-sum game thinker. Unfortunately, I am speaking from experience here. The vast majority of times I have had an engineer as my boss, they were generally very poor leaders. Early in my career, I confronted some of them with their poor thinking (I was not thinking in terms of abundance and scarcity until at least 2012). Later in my career, I would gently suggest abundant alternatives to find what justifications they claimed to adhere to their course of action. In either case, I seldom convinced anyone to adjust their thinking.
Coaching people on your teams is possible if you are diligent about it. You just have to be very mindful about cannibalizing your coaching in favor of business outcomes. As a coach to people I manage, I often have to include caveats to ensure they know there is sometimes a lack of alignment between these two things. Sometimes that lack of alignment is not subtle.
If your boss is tunneling too much into their own work outcomes and objectives to be an effective coach for you, it may be time to reconsider where you work. Many companies offer lifelong learner paths that include coaching resources and learning opportunities.
Alternatively, see if your company will pay for an external coach to help improve your outcomes. It does not hurt to ask. If they say no, you might be able to find a coach willing to give you a “stingy company” discount that takes into account that your personal budget for self-improvement is smaller than the line items in the L&D budget for the company.
Give me a shout if you think that is interesting. I coach people myself, and I am connected to about half a dozen other coaches right now who have tremendous engineering leadership experience and can help you ensure you are maximizing your career potential.
This is enough of a sales pitch that I do not wish to sully it with an Amazon Affiliate link.
See you all next week!
