How I Supercharged My Career Growth in About 18 Months: Transitioning from Player to Coach
Everyone has a unique story, and that makes it tough to define what is “the” path to becoming a leader. What I can do is tell you my story, and tell you my personal philosophy which helped transformed me from individual contributor to engineering manager.
Early Days
Like many of us in software, I had a roundabout journey. I failed out of college as a freshman in 2000. That was fine, I went back to my high school gig, plating fajitas at a lousy Mexican chain restaurant. I began taking the work seriously and got a degree in Culinary Arts, then worked my way up to sous chef at one of the most prestigious restaurants in Pittsburgh. I loved leading crews but the demands of the job were too great. I bounced around a couple other cooking and kitchen manager jobs for 10 years, before getting fed up with having little and working lots.
I enrolled in college, signing up for information science rather than CS because of weird community college credit transfer rules. This was a fortunate mistake! Instead of just diving deep in to algorithm and data structure courses, I got to take a bunch of business courses where I learned about finance, economics, and most importantly, management.
One of my courses was about transformational changes at large corporations, and one that got me particularly excited was Carlos Ghosn saving Nissan through a cross-functional team approach. Books have been published on the subject and I encourage you to at least familiarize yourself with the story.
This course led me to the conclusion: “What is the point of me going to work if I’m not leading these huge changes?” I left college with a modest goal of becoming a C-level executive or maybe a CEO in 10 years. I would do this via promotions in IT and then I’d swap over to finance or something after getting a great reputation.
Hello World
I landed my first tech gig in ops at a big insurance company. I legitimately did not know what “operations” meant but the money was so much better than a cook’s salary so I said OK! Then I made spreadsheets for a few weeks.
I followed one of my personal rules, which is to speak up when I want something. I told my boss that I wasn’t digging the ops job and he helped me get on an engineering team in a few weeks. Two years of intense learning later and I was ready to level up and work at a software company. I’d made the realization that an insurance company is not going to give me the opportunities I need to be a successful professional according to the goals I’d set for myself. I was stuck in New Hampshire, so if I can’t get out of it, I get in to it. I decided I would transform this company with the practices and technologies I had learned during nights and weekends.
That was a huge mistake. My M.O. was to give tons of open feedback about my coworkers while offering opportunities for improving. This made me unpopular, likely due to my lack of mastery of delivering such feedback. I often got in to heated disagreements with my manager or projects’ stakeholders, thinking I was doing the right thing. I look back and still think maybe I was doing the right thing, but that doesn’t even matter.
New Opportunity
My wife got a job in Atlanta and I breathed a great sigh of relief that I could leave and live in a city with lots of opportunity. I sat down with my manager to submit my resignation and had the most important conversation of my life, I really mean that. He said, “Hey Joe, I know you don’t want to hear this from me,” since our relationship had completely deteriorated by now. “The only thing that matters, the only thing, is whether or not you get along with your team, and that the team is on the same page working towards the same goal. If you have that, the work just comes in and gets done.” I thanked him for what I thought was silly advice and left, I may have even jumped and clicked my heels on my last day two weeks later.
I’ll write more about my next year in the future, but the short version is: I realized my boss was right and that I needed to fully focus on the people around me. Pivoting my attitude enabled me to land a full-stack gig at SalesLoft.
4 Stages of Team Membership
My colleague Daniel Andrews has called the switch from engineer to manager “player-coach to coach-player.” I want to extend that metaphor to 3 transitions. Player -> player-coach, player-coach -> coach-player, and coach-player -> coach.
These roles manifest as different job titles in different organizations. ‘Team Lead,’ for example, may be player-coach or coach-player depending on your company.
Players are individual contributors. They take/choose assignments and execute on them. Players are fundamental pieces of a successful team. Executing thoroughly will set an example for adequate behavior and performance of their teammates.
Player-coaches continue to deliver on assignments while taking on additional responsibilities like mentoring or providing plans and estimates to their stakeholders. This is where it begins to be important for people to consciously set a great example for their peers.
Coach-players flip their concentration from player coaches. They are accountable for plans, estimates, and making sure work is assigned. They might lead meetings, or plan team events. One’s emphasis on setting a great example increases.
Coaches are accountable for the success of their teams and people. You will often be the HR administrator of people. You will make sure that your people are growing and that they understand how meaningful their contributions are to the success of your team and company. You have to resist the urge to get your hands in the details. Setting a great example, in my opinion, is the most important part of this job.
Before we dig in further, I want to emphasize that it is immensely important for you to communicate to your manager that you are ready and eager for this journey. You need to remind them of it, and understand what your skill gaps are so you can aggressively fill them.
Player to Player-Coach
To begin your transformational journey, become a great follower. This doesn’t mean to just do what you’re told. You need to anticipate the needs of your team, your company, and your boss and then work to meet and exceed them. You must make realistic commitments and deliver on them. How many great leaders do you know that shirk on responsibility or fail to do what they’ve committed to? I don’t know any that miss more than rarely.
You must deliver quickly, accurately, and consistently.
This is the least complicated transition: volunteer and push yourself. Ask your boss if there are things she does that you could help with. Take ownership of the hardest things your team is doing. Push yourself until you find your limit. When you find your limit, bring others in to help you succeed and heap praise on them. Make it known that they made it happen, not you. This seems unintuitive, I get that. Your boss will know that even though another person helped you, you drove the effort to get help and didn’t give up.
Look for opportunities to mentor less experienced folks. This doesn’t have to be official. You will work on your reputation and your skills of teaching and encouraging folks.
At SalesLoft I worked with my manager, Matt Sales, to take ownership of a significant project. I held meetings to determine product and technical approach, sat on a cross-functional business team representing engineering, and ensured my peers carried through on their commitments. Management’s confidence in me grew, and I continued to request more responsibilities from Matt, who helped me find them. Your manager may be thrilled if you offer some help. I also volunteered to mentor one of our support engineers at the first opportunity.
Player-Coach to Coach-Player
This is when the ‘how-to’ part of this essay breaks down. As you grow it’s really hard to talk about how to be successful. It is about embodying what you understand to be important to your self, company, and organization. People immediately look up to you, or better said look to you for behavioral cues. You need to be ‘on’ all the time when you’re at work. Not solving a problem is not an option. How you get it solved is up to you, sometimes what ‘solved’ means can be up to you. You need to start thinking about what people expect from your team, and you need to work on aligning those expectations with reality.
Here’s how it went for me. After proving I could do leadership tasks over a couple months, my manager effectively handed our team over to me. I even got a couple direct reports. I also led a department wide training session on effective communication in order to enhance my reputation as a professional who thinks about more that bits and bytes.
The engineering organization at SalesLoft fully supported my efforts to level up and we looked for opportunities to plug me in as a coach-player. I was unofficially given charge of my team. Around the same time the need for our next engineering manager arose, due to our department’s growth.
My manager was super-encouraging and suggested me for the job. The rest of the engineering managers at SalesLoft went to bat for me. This is no doubt due to my reputation of setting a great example of SalesLoft’s Core Values and Core Tenets of Engineering.
I became SalesLoft’s newest engineering manager, got some more direct reports, and was officially given ownership of my team.
Your First Coaching Gig
All right, I finally made it! I’m the boss and people are going to do things my way. Wait, what is my way? Oh, my team has a better way!
Ahhhh! I have no idea how to spend my time!
With some exceptions, any web search for ‘management books’ gives you 3 types. 1. Stories of folks who were successful that will apply to you in no way. 2. Generic advice about scheduling meetings and what a scrum is, and 3. Self-help. I say stick with self-help, honest.
I can’t emphasize how useful self-help books have been for me. When you’re a manager, someone has said you are what’s important. Not the code you produce, your bedside manner, or your eagerness to give honest feedback. It is about the weird, unique, specific collection of skills you bring to work.
To be a great coach, you need to understand that people admire you and that you’re already doing a lot of things right. Trust yourself and foster your own growth. Question your beliefs, ask questions to people you admire, and eagerly dismiss your assumptions. Think of the people you admire and find the gaps between your behavior and theirs. Address those gaps.
To be effective, I have a simple approach: Observe and do what’s right for the people and the company. Hear, see, and feel (emotionally) the people around you. Are you getting the impression that someone is blocked? Ask them. Was there a misinterpreted message that you think may have damaged a relationship? Ask them about it and encourage them to get back on the same page. How do you know what to do when you observe something? Ask yourself. That is your job. You are trusted to do what you know is right.
You’ll often be right, and you’ll often be wrong. Keep making decisions and growing these muscles. Make sure the people around you feel comfortable telling you about opportunities for your growth. Most importantly continue to behave like the people you look up to most.
Wrap
My 18 or so months at SalesLoft have enabled my growth like no experience in my life. I’m challenged by the greatness of my peers and everyone else in the organization. Every day I face a new problem that I am unprepared to solve. I lean on the experienced pros around me for support, and then trust myself to solve it.
I won’t be the last person to tell this kind of story at SalesLoft. Join us and get to the next level.
