Accidentally in Code

Tag: coaching

  • The next weight

    The next weight

    Credit: NeedPix

    Something that comes up regularly in coaching is the idea that you get stronger against the weight you can lift, not against the one you can’t.

    If your goal is to bench 100kg you don’t get there pushing at that weight on a bar you can’t move. You start lower and work up. You build your strength. You manage your fatigue.

    Pushing on the 100kg bar will tire you out. It will feel like you’re working hard. It won’t make you stronger.

    The same is true at work.

    If you struggle to set boundaries and work in an environment where boundaries are discouraged, that might be the 100kg weight. Working somewhere that’s always on, but where people are expected and respected for setting their own? That might be the weight you can lift.

    If you need positive feedback, a manager who only tells you what’s wrong might be the 100kg weight. A manager who is matter of fact – who tells you when something is fine and moves on – might be the weight you can lift.

    If you struggle to rely on others it might feel more comfortable to work for yourself, but it’s not growing your capacity for collaboration. An environment that is super team first might be a very difficult adjustment. That could be the push you want – but know that going in.

    Something we talk about in DRI Your Career is that we’re not – mostly – different people inside and outside of work. The struggles we have show up in multiple areas of our lives. It’s easy to complain about the job being the problem, and I would never deny that there are very toxic situations out there. But more often than not the problem is the person and job in combination.

    It’s amazing to me how much stays the same when we make dramatic change in our lives. It’s been more than six months since I upended my life, started doing something completely different. My partner still says I work a lot. My boss – despite being a different person – would probably still say my tolerance of bullshit is low. I still get anxious, and I still struggle with things that are boring or feel pointless.

    It was overall a really positive change. But it didn’t change everything. I’m not a different person.

    The other idea in coaching is to focus on what you can control. This always starts with your own choices and behaviour. You can’t stop your colleagues messaging you out of hours, but you can stop checking Slack. You can’t change the feedback culture overnight, but you can ask for what you need today. You can’t control whether or not someone will show up, but you can give them the opportunity to live up to some better expectations.

    I love how in the tech industry we have normalised the extended break. But I worry that it’s become an expected cycle of burnout and crash. I think we can learn to self-regulate, even as capitalism will always aim to maximally utilise us.

    A few years ago I switched to the Whoop as my fitness tracker. The appeal was its focus on recovery. It’s been difficult to use something targeted at pro athletes – at times in my life that would have led to some destructive tendencies. But it did help me regulate better, to work out more sustainably, to move away from the sprint and crash cycle.

    There is no equivalent for mental self-regulation. The closest thing I’ve found is PQ, which helps bring awareness to these tendencies and gives you a way to actively work through breaking them. Some other suggestions:

    • Ask for what you need. Make reasonable requests and expect reasonable answers – at least the first time.
    • Get clear about what it would serve you to work on, and make a plan for that.
    • Invest in the quality of your life outside of work. Connect to that, rather than disconnect from it.
  • Four things I learned from coaching that made me a better leader

    Four things I learned from coaching that made me a better leader

    A raccoon sits at a campfire holding a map and a compass, looking thoughtful.
    Credit: Joe Groove

    About two and a half years ago, I finally completed CTI’s coach training courses – about 18 months after I started them, and much longer thinking “I think this would be useful and one day I will take it”. I find some people conceive of coaching as being a professional advice giver, or asking questions, but for me it’s been a fundamental mindset shift that changed the way I approached my role as a leader. Here are four core things that I use day in day out.

    1. Articulate what is going on

    How often have you been in a meeting, and listened to people talking, and lost the thread of what’s actually happening? How many of those have you thought it was just you, and stayed quiet? One of the skills of coaching is to listen to a garbled word salad, and summarize it back. “It sounds like you’re saying you will only meet the deadline if someone else can take this piece of work and ensure it’s completed. Is that correct?”

    It may or may not be correct, but the skill of succinct summarization – or “bottom lining” can help you extract core points from chaos and move things forward. Whilst – bonus – making people feel heard.

    2. Meet an argument with a question

    Have you ever found yourself in the middle of an argument and not been sure how you got there? People tend to match other people’s energy, so if someone comes in hot you might – naturally, no judgment here – meet them hot in return. Learning to replace reaction with a question can diffuse a heated reaction and make sure you’re having the conversation that will actually move this forward.

    The next time someone seems annoyed, take a deep breath and get curious instead. See what you can learn – rather than what you can win.

    3. Let go of control

    You’re ultimately responsible, and you need things to be done to your standards, therefore you need to enforce your standards by getting in all the details. Right? No! This approach is not just exhausting – it’s also ineffective. When you’re controlling, you steal other people’s responsibility. This erodes people’s ownership, making them less effective, whilst your workload will only increase.

    In coaching training, you learn that people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole. And it turns out, the more you operate from that belief the more effective they are. This makes sense – research shows that students live up or down to the expectations their teachers have on them.

    4. Sometimes the answer is doing less

    Often we think we fix things by doing more, but sometimes what is needed is space, and learning how to give that space and let things play out can be a huge adjustment – especially for your average type A overachiever! Creating systems that force you to look at things in a different way, or asking more fundamental questions can help you move things forward.

    An example from my own work – I was pushing my leads to think about how to scale their teams, and it wasn’t moving as quickly as I wanted. Eventually, I flipped the question. I gave them the scenario that I went to the spa and never came back, and was replaced by “Dave”. I told them, Dave does half as much for you and expects you to do twice as much for him – what do you need to survive Dave? After we all agreed how much we hated Dave, we all got more creative and many scaling issues started to shift.

    A core part of all of these lessons is boundaries – I expected coaching to teach me some skills, and it did, but the thing I am most grateful for, a topic that I come back to again and again as both a coach, a manager and a person, is boundaries. The knowledge of what is my work, and what is someone else’s – and the wisdom to tell the difference.

  • Book: Coach the Person, Not the Problem

    Book: Coach the Person, Not the Problem

    I really got a lot out of Coach the Person, Not the Problem [Amazon]. Whilst the content was covered in the courses I took, it approached it in a different way – deconstruction versus experiential – and that was really helpful for solidifying my learning.

    At it’s core, it’s about switching your focus to the person, because the temptation to focus on the problem is what leads to advice, solutionizing etc. By focusing on the person, you make them bigger than the problem and support them through the process of deciding themselves what they want to do.

    Reflective enquiry is about making people feel really heard. By reflecting back to them you allow them to see themselves more clearly, define steps forward. Sometimes people have the impression that coaching is passively asking open ended questions. Reflective enquiry is crucial for more effective coaching. It helps the person step back and see their actions / themselves from another perspective.

    In terms of the writing, one thing I really appreciated about this book was that it took the time to really explore the topic without feeling excessive. As such, it took me a while to read it, but I felt the time was worthwhile. Definitely recommend if you want to better understand coaching.

  • Co-Active: Synergy

    Co-Active: Synergy

    The last course in my coach training journey – for now – was Synergy. This follows Fundamentals, Fulfillment, Balance, and Process.

    The final course, this tied everything together. We learned about the attributes of a coach (fierce courage, aliveness, and connection), worked on range (including silent coaching!) and the idea of “stories”.

    Going into it, I was focused on the finish line – this has been a significant undertaking, and I was excited to be “done”. The intention I set for the course was to stay present and “enjoy the last mile”. Mixed success here, 4.5 hours is a long time to be on Zoom, but at the end I felt somewhat bereft. Each course has created a small community, and this was the last one.

    It has been quite a journey. I took fundamentals at the end of 2020, after wanting to take it since 2018-19. Spacing out the courses meant that most of my previous classmates had left me behind, although it was nice to reconnect from someone from Process and even another person who had been in my Fulfillment group! Most people get through the courses more quickly, but I’ve been glad to give things space. It makes each one very distinct for me, and that’s helped cement my understanding of the tools that get introduced each time.

    I’m glad I chose to make time for it all, I got much more out of it overall than I was anticipating. It has fundamentally changed my thinking and how I approach things. Beyond the impact on me, it’s spread to my team. Four of my teammates have now taken Fundamentals! It’s been fascinating to see what they got out of it, and the overall impact on the team.

    As for what’s next, despite the certificate, this still feels like very much the beginning. I continue to bring this mindset to my day job (where useful/appropriate) and the handful of external clients I work with. I continue to stay in touch with some of my classmates, which I love. Beyond that, I’m debating whether (and when) to go through the certification process, and other options for continued learning, but likely nothing more in 2022 as I want to focus on other things for a while.

    So much gratitude to everyone who has supported me in this adventure.

  • Co-Active: Process

    Co-Active: Process

    Continuing my Co-Active coaching training with course 3/4, Process. Earlier this year I took Balance (2/4), and Fulfillment (1/4), after taking Fundamentals last year.

    Once again, I took the 5 days. This time it coincided with moving, which was a bit of a nightmare organizationally – especially as our apartment wasn’t ready on schedule and we were living in a hotel. So I was taking the course from 10-1430, then frantically running around Rotterdam trying to get things organized. I can’t imagine trying to do a course like Fulfillment under such circumstances, but luckily, Process is all about being with the emotions.

    Whilst Fulfillment is about living your best life, and Balance is about getting unstuck, Process is about being in the moment, especially the hard ones. We learned about emotional range, and work on expanding our own, because you can’t take others where you can’t go.

    What I got out of it

    • One of the core concepts in Co-Active coaching is “The Client is Naturally Capable, Resourceful and Whole” – this feels more present than ever to me after this segment. Truly seeing someone that way is so core to being with them in the space of difficult emotion.
    • Before this course, I thought I spent a lot of time on people’s feelings, but now I see how often I let them label and move on. But whilst we use the same labels (“insecure”, “anxious”, “lonely”), underneath them our experience and meaning is often wildly divergent. I will continue to explore the distinction between when to take the shortcut (label) versus when it’s worth taking the long way round.
    • As ever, I confronted some of my own emotions. Once again, I got front of the room coached and it was both brutal and clarifying.
    • Perhaps not something I got out of it, but it feels remiss not to mention it: this was the first course where I had a bad experience in one of the breakouts. I’m not talking about coaching that didn’t land, because it’s a learning experience and giving yourself and your classmates space to try and fail is part of it, but a sequence of events that felt genuinely quite horrible (especially given how this course is really about getting very vulnerable) and left me upset and anxious in subsequent breakouts (although the others were extremely lovely). This was the first time I really felt the downsides of the online format, which I felt both made that situation more possible and exacerbated it.

    What’s Next?

    • My next course (Synergy) is now pushed back to February so I have a break for a bit.
    • I’m continuing to practice and maintain contact with my classmates, which is nice. I much prefer taking this online, but I do miss the opportunities to meaningfully connect with other people also on this journey.
    • I continue to love my work coaching engineers, and am looking forward to taking on 1-2 more clients over the next few months.
  • Co-Active: Balance

    Co-Active: Balance

    Balance is course 2/4 for me this year (I’m hoping to get through the training this year, and then potentially do certification next year). Previous I took Fundamentals (coaching 101), and Fulfillment.

    Similar to Fulfillment, I opted for the 5 half days (0900-1330), which is exhausting enough – I can’t imagine doing any longer each day on Zoom. As it goes through the weekend, I took a day after to relax and decompress. Giving these trainings space is a big part of enjoying them for me, as well as getting the most out of them. Whilst I was a bit sad my previous classmates have left me behind (the majority of people work through the courses much faster), I know this is the best way for me to do this, especially on top of a job I have no intention of quitting. Approaching this learning as an investment in my own growth (versus a box to check), and coaching as a very enjoyable side project has only become more important to me the further I go with this.

    Balance is about getting unstuck. It’s more in the tactics of helping someone live their best life, versus fulfillment, which is about helping people determine their values and purpose. It’s more concrete, and as such it felt more immediately applicable. I’m excited to try it with more people (versus Fulfillment, which is still vaguely terrifying to me).

    What I got out of it

    • It helped me get unstuck. I got front-of-the-room coached (client in a demo with one of the instructors) on the first day, and it helped shift my perspective on writing. Still more work to do, but I do feel like I’m heading towards the other side of this miserable writer’s block.
    • I saw more concretely what co-active coaching can bring to engineering leadership coaching, which is helpful in making me feel more integrated in my approach.
    • It was fun! Balance is all about getting out of your head and escaping the current perspective. Much more fun and joyous than fulfillment coaching (more deep and meaningful).

    What’s Next?

    • My next course (Process) is not until October, so I have a break for a bit.
    • I’m continuing to practice and maintain contact with my classmates, which is nice. I much prefer taking this online, but I do miss the opportunities to meaningfully connect with other people also on this journey.
    • I continue to work with engineers to develop, mainly with BestPracticer. I am really enjoying it – I worried I would struggle to find the time or energy, but actually I find it so energizing it’s easy to make it work.

  • Co-Active: Fulfillment

    Co-Active: Fulfillment

    After taking Fundamentals in the fall, this year I registered for the four courses I need to take next, the first one: Fulfillment. Having learned from last time, I gave myself a little more space for it – I opted for the half day sessions (0900-1330), planned a day off afterwards, and as it fell right after St Patrick’s day, I had a day off before as well.

    The other thing I learned from last time was to create the WhatsApp group on day 1. As a result, we had a vibrant backchannel, social zoom calls, and a lot of peer support. It made so much difference to my experience personally, and given the lovely comments from others in my group I gather it made a difference to them as well! It also allowed me to direct people interested in being practice clients to my classmates, which so far has seemed to be a win all round. It was really nice to be able to help people in that way.

    Whilst Fundamentals is coaching 101, Fulfillment is about the tools you use to live your best life – figure out values, purpose, and give some form to your inner strength and wisdom. It seemed like an intimidating first course, but as I went through it that made sense – helping people find fulfilment is the ultimate work of coaching.

    What I got out of it

    • It was very clarifying for me, and made the work I’d done (in coaching, therapy, and the PQ program I did recently) feel very concrete.
    • Going through this experience in a focused and immersive way, and seeing the impact on other people showed me the power of these tools that don’t resonate with me superficially, that I’ve probably been resistant to in my own coaching at times.
    • The course recommitted me to this process. I was worried that it was a lot of time on top of work, and maybe I need vacation instead (pandemic burnout! omg!). But in the end it was very recharging – I felt that I had gone on an emotional journey with a bunch of lovely people.

    What’s Next?

    • I’m registered for the next course in June, which gives me time to digest this one (and do some other things… like prep the talk I’m giving soon…).
    • I’ve started working with BestPracticer as a coach. Their model of combined coaching plus learning curriculum is interesting, and for it’s a nice way to combine this learning with a core competency of engineering management. And above all… I love helping support people’s development as engineering leaders!
  • Lead Time Chat

    Lead Time Chat

    My friend Jean and I recorded a little video for her Lead Time Chat series on the topic of coaching. Some topics we covered…

    • The difference between an external coach and a manager.
    • Working with an external coach across multiple jobs.
    • Finding a good fit with a coach.
    • Whether an engineering background is what you need in a coach.
    • When external coaching can harm a situation.

    There are other videos and space to discuss in the Lead Time community.

  • Co-Active Fundamentals

    Co-Active Fundamentals

    In the fall, I finally took the Co-Active Fundamentals program that I had been wanting to take for some time. Once the courses went online, it was easy to sign up for one and I did so pretty much immediately.

    It was a pretty full on four days, 10-3 or 4, with minimal breaks. All over Zoom, which I find quite exhausting. At first I wasn’t sure about it, but by the end I was completely sold – it was totally worth it, I got so much out of it, and finished feeling energised. Because of the intensity and focus, it’s very hard to get to know the other people in the cohort, and that was the main thing that I felt was missing. At the end, we frantically created a group chat – imagine if we’d done that day 1!

    What drove it?

    Firstly, I’ve been working with a coach (Dani) since 2016, and it’s been a helpful source of continuity through various changes, and especially helpful when I’ve been in positions where I didn’t really have a manager (such as reporting to the CEO). Generally, I’ve found it really helpful to have someone focused on helping me be the best Cate. All of this to say – I really see the value of coaching, and wanted to understand it better.

    Secondly, I had picked up enough through osmosis to do a reasonable job coaching others, but I felt like a deeper understanding of it would particularly help me coach people to coach others.

    Thirdly, I’ve seen a lot of senior engineering leaders pick up coaching clients between roles or move out of engineering leadership into coaching, and I wanted to start seeing if that would be an option for me, and build up the qualifications for when (or if) I want them.

    What I got out of it

    • Generally it’s a transformative experience, and seeing the journey other people in my group went through was really powerful and encouraging.
    • I love the concept of “people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole”. I regularly use as a concept to share with someone how I’m approaching our interaction; it’s so powerful.
    • Similarly the idea of “designing the alliance” is so helpful, and I use it regularly.
    • It really expanded my range, and made me more willing to challenge people, pay more attention to my intuition, use inquery, and reflect more candidly back to people what I was observing in our conversations.
    • A big part of coaching is non-judgemental listening, which is a skill that anyone can (and usually should) improve, but I find as much as anything a mindset. The deliberate practice of that, observation of it in practice, and deconstruction of it helped me become a better, more present listener.
    • One of the biggest differences between coaching and management for me was the distinction of focus on the journey (coach) / focus on the outcome (manager). I think this practice, along with the way we do “management” at DuckDuckGo has helped me engage more with the journey of my directs.
    • One of the exercises was everyone was given a “being tag”, from their classmates view of them. Mine was “flower power girl”, which was hilarious, but really leaning into it was a really rich and illuminating experience.
    • As part of this I coached a practice client, which was great, and confirmed I want to do more of it. I also picked up another “practice client” at work, which has been really fun.

    What’s next?

    Currently, I’m working on the 6 week PQ program with my coach. I’m finding it really helpful personally, and it’s another lens on what coaching can do for people, that makes me even more excited about it.

    I have four more courses (Fulfilment, Balance Process, and Synergy) to go until I complete my coaching certification, and I’m booked into them over the course of 2021. Part of this requires me to take on some clients, so I need to figure out my schedule to take all of that on!