For Mavenlink’s engineering team, career development means engaged coaching and frequent feedback.
Engineering teams thrive or struggle based on how well they develop their people. For organizations that do it well, rewards include strong morale, employee retention, and development teams that keep getting better.
At Mavenlink, our coaching program anchors our approach to career development. Every engineer has a coach responsible for guiding their career and shaping their Mavenlink experience.
We sat down recently with three participants in our coaching program to talk about how it works. Engineering Director Paulette Luftig has been an architect and a steward of the program since its inception. Engineers Aysha Williams and Gary McKellar have worked together for two years, with Gary as Aysha’s coach — a relationship they’ve both learned from.
Paulette, Aysha and Gary share their insights into how coaching and feedback can nurture growth and continued learning.
JB: Aysha, Paulette, Gary — thanks for joining. We’re here to talk today about how our coaching program provides support and career guidance for our engineers. Why don’t you tell us about the coaching program — what our goals for it, and how does it work?
Paulette: Yeah, I’m happy to tell you about that. Our coaching team is made up of engineering leaders, typically engineers who’ve demonstrated outstanding commitment and mastery of their role. These coaches work from a shared set of values, such as growth mindset, empathy, courage, collaboration, feedback. They’re assigned coachees, as new people are hired for our team. We pair people up based on a combination of experience and interests. Coaches help ensure that the employee and the company have a really successful relationship.
We want to onboard new hires effectively, and provide every employee with a trusted ally and advocate at work. And we want to make sure that we’re keeping our leadership team informed of any workload issues that the coachee might be experiencing, and we want to make sure we have a really strong culture of feedback. Lastly, I would say that the coachees help us stay aware of emerging leaders in our engineering group.
“I feel like the culture at Mavenlink is just to be vulnerable in general. When I first got here, I learned that everyone was really open and honest about the work they were doing. So for instance, it’s really common for people to say, ‘I don’t understand this piece of code,’ and to be really vulnerable about that.”
Coaches and coachees typically meet about once a week, sometimes every other week, depending. And the coach is tasked with ensuring that those meetings are productive and valuable. So that means that they attend the meetings prepared to ask questions, to help the coachee build awareness of how they’re doing in their work, and oftentimes in other areas of their life, and to work on goals together that maybe the coachee has identified. Overall, we want to support the coachees in their career at Mavenlink, but also well beyond Mavenlink. We want everyone who works here to think of Mavenlink as a real support to their career overall.
JB: Great. So who are the coaches? Are they other engineers? Are they engineering leaders? Is it a combination?
Paulette: So our coaches are definitely engineers, and they’ve shown exceptional capability in their current role. They have a high level of commitment to their work, and they’ve done really well as engineers.
JB: Aysha, you joined a few years ago, with roughly six years of experience. At Mavenlink, you had to learn a new technology stack, and a brand new culture. You’ve been working with Gary as your coach. How has that relationship supported your experience of Mavenlink, and your growth during your time here?
Aysha: It’s been super valuable. I actually wasn’t quite sure what a coach was when I first joined Mavenlink, the coaching program was a concept I hadn’t experienced before, but once I got here and got to meet with Gary, I really appreciated it. Our 1:1s are productive and meaningful. We talk about how I’m doing at Mavenlink, and we discuss where I’m going to go career-wise, which I found super valuable, and also we dive into, how do I want to get there? So I like having a plan and going through that plan and making sure it aligns with what I’m looking forward to at Mavenlink and in my career.
JB: Thanks, that sounds great. Paulette, and Gary, you’ve both been engineers then coaches at the same time, how has being a coach influenced your work as engineers?
Gary: I think coaching really enriches being an engineer. It helps with seeing roles that you can find on your team. It helps enrich the culture. It helps enrich your role on your team and your perspective with making sure that you increase collaboration within your team all the time. Coaching just gives you a new perspective on how to interact and collaborate with your other team members.
“We expect our coaches to know how to create psychological safety, to really value growth mindset, to know how to listen really well to their coachees.”
Paulette: I would add to that, that I think that being on both sides of that relationship has helped me trust my colleagues a lot, and made me feel like I’m a part of a family where we take being a part of a team very seriously. I’ve learned to lean a lot on my team and been able to provide a lot of support to my team. I feel like we act more like a family — where one person might need to develop one area, somebody else can help fill that gap and then support and encourage their growth, and then vice versa. It’s been a really powerful experience.
JB: Paulette, you’ve been a guiding influence on our coaching program since its inception, with your prior coaching experience that you brought into Mavenlink. About a year ago, you stepped in to formally lead the program. What are some ways you’ve evolved our coaching practice to make it even stronger?
Paulette: Oh, I’d say there are three or four ways I’ve done that. One is setting up onboarding for coaches and some general training. We expect our coaches to know how to create psychological safety, to really value growth mindset, to know how to listen really well to their coachees. We ask that they practice being present, and know how to be present during one on ones, things like this, know how to participate in difficult conversations. We want them to have a lot of integrity, so they know how to keep their word with things that they’re going to do, to actually follow through.
One of the ways we develop our skills as coaches is to present and discuss coaching-related topics at our coaches’ meetings. We work through them together as a group and learn new ideas. And then after that, we practice what we’ve learned. So a huge component, now, of our coaching program is to practice. That might be a meeting where we do active listening. We practice with one another, and coach one another on how to be better active listeners, or it might mean that we practice difficult conversations, so run scenarios where we’re having to work through challenging problems with our coachees.
And lastly, another way I’ve helped develop the program is by building a culture of feedback at the company. Every month, coaches go out and get feedback for their coachees, from their colleagues — things like how they’re doing, opportunities to share praise, or spot opportunities for growth. And then we deliver that feedback to our coachees on a monthly basis.
We also have our coaches go and ask their coachees for feedback. So it’s a way of keeping our our coaches accountable to continue to develop themselves. And then lastly, an initiative that we just kicked off, and seems to be going quite well, is having our coachees go out and ask their peers for feedback directly. What’s unique about this practice is the coachees get to define what, what kinds of questions, or what kind of feedback they’re looking for. So our coaches help their coachees come up with questions, that they can then ask specific people on their teams, with the goal of getting feedback that can help them grow in their careers in ways that really matter to them.
JB: Those improvements have made a huge impact. You mentioned some of the practice exercises you’ve led the coaching group through. Gary, do you remember any of those exercises and were there any that you felt were particularly enlightening or helpful?
Gary: Yeah, I really enjoyed some of the exercises we did around active listening and difficult conversations. It was really good practice to be able to pair off with another coach and, not necessarily role play, but we were able to actually get into some difficult conversations, and practice some active listening and reflection, and I think it really helped me understand how active listening can play a positive role in having difficult conversations. I think that that was, I felt, a big improvement after we were able to practice things like that.
JB: Great. And clearly, from listening to you, Paulette, feedback is a core foundation to our approach for coaching, and you’ve found some success in getting the peer to peer feedback process going, which is something that I think a lot of teams and companies strive for, but sometimes never quite make it there.
Aysha, you’ve been a participant in that process recently, giving and receiving feedback between you and your teammates, people you’re working with. How did it feel to start sharing and receiving that feedback? And what would you recommend to other people who are starting to develop their own feedback skills?
Aysha: When Gary first was introduced the peer feedback idea, it was all so very intimidating, but once I started talking with him about how to approach it, and we had a checklist of things to do, it became less daunting. We just went through what sort of questions, what type of feedback I wanted to get, what areas did I want to get feedback on. And then I went back and did some brainstorming, and came up with some questions that were around that area. So for instance, I went back and started thinking of questions about how to improve my programming skills. And so I wanted to ask my peers about that.
“Every month, coaches go out and get feedback for their coachees, from their colleagues — things like how they’re doing, opportunities to share praise, or spot opportunities for growth.”
And then, so that part got easier. And we kept refining the questions that I was going to ask. And then we talked about who I wanted to get feedback from. And so I was like, “Okay, again, intimidating,” I didn’t want to reach out and, I guess, be vulnerable. So that’s … it could be a little hard to do that, but I finally picked someone that I’d worked with recently, and then that actually got easier once I started thinking about, who have I been working with, this week or last week? And then finally I was able to talk to them and say, “Hey, is it okay if I scheduled some time for us to talk about this?”
As the process went on, it became less and less intimidating and easier to be vulnerable. Once you get that first meeting set up, it’s really easy to say, “Hey, I want feedback on this.” And then be open to just all sorts of feedback, whether it’s positive or negative or it’s really constructive. So yeah, I would say the peer led feedback has been beneficial, and also helps develop those skills where you can just go out and ask your colleague directly, “Hey, I want your honest opinion on this.”
JB: Cool, glad it’s been beneficial. You mentioned being open to vulnerability a couple of times. I imagine that for that to be effective, you’ve got to be in a trusting and trustful environment. What are some of the ways that you and your teammates have established that kind of trust, where you can be vulnerable and open to giving and receiving feedback?
Aysha: I think pair programming helps a lot, because we work directly with each other every day. And on my team, we actually do a lot of self-organizing work. So we pick the track that we want to work on and end up either pairing or mobbing on it. And I think when you work with your team directly, throughout the entire day, it makes it a lot easier to approach them, and be approachable.
I feel like the culture at Mavenlink is just to be vulnerable in general. When I first got here, I learned that everyone was really open and honest about the work they were doing. So for instance, it’s really common for people to say, “I don’t understand this piece of code,” and to be really vulnerable about that. And it’s like, “Oh, me either. I’m not the only one.” And this person could be someone that’s worked at Mavenlink for a number of years, or even worked in Ruby code, which I hadn’t worked in before, and still be really open about, “Let’s go through this code and figure it out. Let’s ask questions, let’s get help.” And so I think just the culture at Mavenlink has always been to be open and honest and vulnerable. So I feel like peer-led feedback just, I guess, it feeds really well into that system, being vulnerable.
JB: And I think, part of the budding success of the peer-led feedback is some of the groundwork Paulette laid, in terms of guiding our team through how to give and receive feedback effectively. Gary, Aysha, did you pick up any tips through that process that have helped you succeed with it so far?
Gary: For sure. We talked about coming up with questions that target something specific that you want to find out about yourself, or about the way you work. That really helped make conversations valuable, and it gave us a good focus for discussing how our conversations might go. The way that the peer-led feedback was put together really helped with that. It was really deliberate in making sure that we could get value from it. We could go to our coachees and help our coachees get value from this process, and hopefully use peer-led feedback as a common practice throughout the R&D organization.
Aysha: I talked to Gary about this book that I was reading — it’s called Disrupt Yourself, and I think the author is Whitney Johnson. She talks about focusing on your strengths, and giving more attention to your strengths versus weaknesses, and applying your strengths in different areas of your career and your life. And so I started with that, because that was something that I was really interested in. I looked at where my strengths were, and I realized I wanted to understand whether the people I work with also see those strengths, and whether they had suggestions for growing in those areas.
“Coaching just gives you a new perspective on how to interact and collaborate with your other team members.”
For example, I felt like I was pretty good at pair programming, and I wanted to make sure that I was still on track with that. I also had a list of other areas that I really wanted to make sure I could further myself in. So, my tips would be to find your strengths, your areas that you are really good at, and then develop questions around those, and then slowly decide which ones you want to ask. I think I had several questions, but I didn’t want it to be overwhelming. So I narrowed down that list to, I think, two or three.
Paulette: One of the ways we made the program successful is by making it clear what steps to take next. Aysha mentioned that we had checklists — we use those checklists to make it easier for people to step into this really challenging experience of starting to give and receive feedback. You were either asked to provide feedback, or asked to give it, so whatever side of the equation you were on, there might’ve been a new challenge there for you. Hopefully our coaching team made it really easy, by working with their coachees, to follow through on these checklists. And we had a checklist for coaches, and we had a checklist for coachees.
We’re creating an opportunity to practice feedback. All of our employees want feedback more on a regular basis. So one of the ways we’re doing that and building the culture is to steep ourselves in practice. Every one of us is getting the feedback that we’re asking for, and we’re also practicing this really hard skill, of knowing how to deliver and how to receive feedback. One of our core coaching values is distributing leadership and responsibility, and building practice into our feedback process helps us get there.
It also helps all of us take responsibility for the things that we hope for, and for our own development.
Aysha: Before we were participating in peer-led feedback, we just had our coaches get feedback from our colleagues, and then our coaches would come back to us and talk to us about the feedback. I just thought that was great, because my previous experience with feedback was always this survey that you did at the end of the year, or something like that. At Mavenlink, it’s more continuous, so you receive feedback on something more recent and more relevant. When I started getting feedback at Mavenlink, I was like, “Oh, this is super valuable.” Also, having someone else’s coach reach out to me to collect feedback, that surprised me, but I also thought that was super valuable. And I just really like the program. I think it’s great.
JB: Great, good to hear. Thanks again to all of you for for joining, really appreciate it.
Aysha: Thank you, JB.
