The Life of Brian Corbin

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Hello, Engineering Managers - Coaching Your Team to Excellence - The Player Coach

Jun 03, 202415 min read

Abstract

As leaders, our responsibility extends beyond achieving targets; it includes nurturing a culture of excellence built upon trust, growth, and success. When a manager realizes their true role is not simply to “manage” but to “coach” their teams to reach their maximum potential, they will realize better outcomes for their teams and their customers. However, managers may face challenges with this approach. How can they act as a player coach to lead during resistance to change, conflicts within the team, to managing expectations effectively, make strategic decisions, or times when urgent situations arise?

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Part two of the series “Hello, Engineering Managers - Coaching Your Team to Excellence”

Previously, we discussed how the manager that realizes their role is not simply to command and control but to proactively coach their teams to reach their maximum potential, ultimately realizes better outcomes for their teams and their customers.

How, though, does the manager/coach handle situations that require the them to become a player, and not just any player but to put on the captains armband and directly drive the team to success?

I remember clearly, earlier in my career after I had spent some time in leadership roles having transitioned from technical leadership (senior player) into a management role (engineering manager), I was told by a manager I had great respect for that I was very organized, had great agile dashboards, and my teams were very well trained and drilled but that I had one pace.

In the moment that criticism stung–I mean, my teams were all those things positive things - self-organized, transparent, observable, high-performing, and happy so what exactly did it mean that I had ‘one pace’?

Ultimately, what it meant was that I had leaned a little too far into pure trust and allowing for creative freedoms that worked great when things were going well but needed another gear when things were not or the pace of business value creation needed to be accelerated.

To understand why, introspectively I recognized it was because of my own personal aversion to micro-management and values when I was primarily a sole contributor with a proud reputation for getting things done without intervention and quickly (perhaps obsessively). After all, didn’t someone smart once say:

Quote

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” - Steve Jobs

’I was part of the hiring team when they came in and the team are smart and well trained, let them cook!’ was the thought and ‘the results will speak for themselves.’ However, trust without sufficient context is blind trust, which is rarely warranted and is a stance that will make your higher management, production management, or client-facing business team nervous. Insufficient context can lead to insufficient control of outcomes, which could lead to missed deadlines, conflicts, lack of clarity within the team, or a perceived lack of leadership during crises.

Changing Pace

A change of pace may be needed when the manager/coach is needed to join the field of play1 or lean into command over oversight in order to lead during resistance to change, conflicts within the team, to managing expectations effectively, make strategic decisions, or when urgent situations arise.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

I always joke that the only constant in tech is change. Engineering teams often don’t mind change when they’re the instigators of it. When it’s thrust upon them: a new manager, a new programming language, a new software delivery model, cloud, a new messaging system, new data centers, new operating models, new colleagues, etc. It’s then that the resistance may come in.

On one occasion I took on two new teams during the pandemic. Both teams had been decimated of around half of their experienced and senior technical staff who had moved on and production had become unstable. Inevitably, I would meet some resistance as the new guy who doesn’t know our product. However, demonstrating empathy, due diligence, being frank about knowledge gaps and actively demonstrating the value I brought, spending time with the team in the trenches, and I was able to stop the rot, stabilize both teams and production and help to rebuild our relationship with our customers.

Key Points:

  • Clear communication and empathy: Communicate openly, listen actively, and empathize with team members’ concerns to build trust and understanding.
  • Being vulnerable and honest with your own concerns: Communicate openly, listen actively, and empathize with team members’ concerns to build trust and understanding.
  • Research, training, due diligence: Conduct thorough research, provide comprehensive information, offer and complete training to ensure understanding and confidence in the proposed changes.

Managing Team Conflicts

To borrow a phrase: engineering teams are not family, they are like sports teams2, but even the best teams are not immune to disagreement. Conflicts, like rotting apples, do not age well - it’s best to nip them in the bud (quash the beef) quickly. By addressing conflicts proactively and constructively, managers can strengthen team dynamics, foster trust and mutual respect, and ultimately enhance overall team performance. Other conflicts are not really conflicts in that sense at all – it may just be two teams running on two different delivery schedules and you just need to get on the same page manager to manager and agree to deliver business value ASAP for your stakeholders.

One situation arose where I had put a confident, impressively talented engineer in a scrum master role for his upward mobility which required facilitation of various meetings with some more tenured but less confident colleagues. His initial very direct style rubbed at least one of them up the wrong way which threatened the overall happiness and productivity of the team - both members were integral for the complex platform we were building. Pulling him aside, I explained the impact his approach had and together we applied the GROW (Goal, Reality, Options, Way Forward) model together. We came to the conclusion to rotate that role (sorry scrum guide3), as he didn’t exactly love it anyway but also it would allow him to observe variations and best practices when communicating with senior engineers, growing into the role. Conflict avoided!

Key Points:

  • Mediate quickly: Don’t let the rot set in - act quickly to mediate and stop the progression. Note, disagreement is not necessarily conflict - act if intensity, tone, impact are out of step with the culture of the team or organization.
  • Resolve in Collaboration: Don’t drop the coaching skills - using coaching methods such as GROW/STARI to help conflicting parties resolve issues fully after initially stepping in.
  • Apply EQ: Emotional intelligence is your (and others) ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others4 use this awareness to manage behavior and relationships and help others regulate theirs.

Managing Expectations Effectively

I cannot state in strong enough terms the importance in clarity in roles and responsibilities. Ambiguity5 is the enemy of flow and productivity. A manager must lead by setting clear expectations based on the expectations of their line of business and their team. Further, an engineering manager often does the bulk of the interaction with product managers or if they’re also a technical product manager, performs the bulk of the interaction with senior stakeholders and their expectations must also be managed effectively taking into account team, and line of business priorities.

I could use one from many examples of communicating the requirements for a role and speaking of pulling team members from the brink of leaving by giving them regular, honest, realistic, feedback to map a clear pathway to their goal of either better pay, a new role, or a promotion but that’s coaching excellence.

Iterating on the earlier example of managing teams during the pandemic, I had taken on teams low in morale, with gaps in experience of their products relative to the leavers and with high frustration coming from business stakeholders due to constant production incidents and missed deliveries over the last couple of quarters. In a business where production stability is paramount I emphasized directly to the business stakeholders the need to take a delivery/feature pause, so the team could up-skill, become agile, absorb knowledge, stabilize production, and gain confidence. It was a risk that took a lot of convincing that paid off. We managed to hit our targets whilst improving the product, the team, advancing our agility beyond our peers - winning an excellence award, and importantly improving the happiness of our stakeholders whilst reducing our production incidents down to zero over the next year.

Key Points:

  • Balance support with accountability: Lead by setting realistic but collaborative targets and hold your team and individuals accountable to deliver using SMART goals
  • Manage external expectations: Absorb and deflect unnecessary outside pressure on your team that distracts them from delivering on the ask, micro-manages each step, or reduces their productivity
  • Be agile, be transparent: Applying the pillars3 of transparency, inspection, adaptation throughout will build trust and avoid unrealistic expectations

Making Strategic Decisions

Strategic thinking is integral in effective management not just for product managers but for engineering managers too. It enables us to align our team’s efforts with broader organizational goals and objectives, anticipate future challenges, and identify opportunities for innovation and growth. By developing a strategic mindset, managers can make informed decisions about resource allocation, prioritize initiatives effectively, and navigate complex change to ensure long-term success for their products or projects.

A coach-first mentality may have you searching for consensus but often situations simply require a call to be made and work to start or stop.

One case I recall is when I had to devise a multi-year cloud strategy for a partially monolithic, partially micro-service-based trading platform. Initial estimates would require some 15-20 additional engineers to meet an ambitious 2-year plan, also some functional teams desired flexibility between an apparently easier migration to PaaS vs. our preferred containerization strategy which would allow greater future flexibility of internal/external CaaS/external kubernetes platforms. Ultimately, we didn’t get the full budget required due to market pressures and I made the call to go for the CaaS model. Soon the PaaS solution fell out of favor and was discontinued, so other teams who had migrated had to perform major changes whilst the services we had containerized could be more easily migrated from on-premise cloud to external cloud.

Key Points:

  • Research the market: Gather information about the market, including industry trends, competitor strategies, and stakeholder preferences.
  • Anticipate potential outcomes and risks: Assess the potential consequences and risks associated with each decision, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is good for this.
  • Elicit the perspectives of the team: Engage with your team to gather diverse viewpoints, ideas, and expertise, which can provide valuable insights and alternative perspectives.
  • Make an informed choice: Utilize the data, insights, and expertise gathered to make a well-considered decision that aligns with organizational goals and objectives.
  • Explain your reasoning: Finally, communicate the rationale behind the decision-making process transparently to team and stakeholders, ensuring clarity and understanding among all involved parties.

Leading in Urgent Situations

It’s a point of pride that much of my feedback from individuals in my teams recently was “calm under pressure” to go with strong technical knowledge and mentorship. Urgent situations don’t often arise but as I tend to say to my teams we’re often judged perhaps unfairly more often on the 5% of the time things go wrong rather than the 95% of the times things are going right. How we act as managers in those moments matters both to the team and the product stakeholders. The challenge in those situations is not to knock the confidence of the team but to enhance it, prioritizing business continuity, all the while ensuring all the right lessons are learnt.

I’ve always had great admiration for athletes and their ability remain calm under pressure. For example, if you watch a game of football with Lionel Messi surrounded by players he remains unfazed, unhurried, calm. That allows him to think clearly, rely on his trained talent, navigate through tricky situations and still have the presence of mind to pass the ball to a colleague when necessary, receive it back and hit the goal6 – all of this happens in mere moments. That’s not just an innate talent. It’s sharpened through practice and experience. If you’ve ever been a junior developer and your manager suddenly stood over whilst you were coding, then you’ve likely experienced a confounding loss of some of your abilities!

An example I remember both fondly and not so fondly was a normally stable service on one of our platforms falling down shortly after startup. This took out the whole ability for users to use the interface and to automatically manage financial risk at a time that couldn’t be worse around triple-witching7 and index rebalancing8 so just about everyone was nervous and we were being pulled into calls with 20+ executive stakeholders every hour - the pressure was intense. I bought time for the team to investigate privately (engineers don’t of investigate issues well under pressure with screen shares and everyone sharing their opinions: please don’t do this to your teams!) whilst fielding update request from all directions, all various attempts to remediate from code rollbacks, throwing more memory at it, etc. were simply failing and for long enough that it became seriously urgent as the team were at a loss for what was going wrong. It was time to roll up the sleeves and get on the pitch; we were working around the clock: after ordering a heap dump, and identifying some seriously outlying objects, I was able to narrow down the issue to a runaway external process from another team sending an exponentially growing queue of data to an unbounded queue in the system, analyzing leading both mitigation and remediation of the issue on both our and their servers. Case solved, crisis averted.

Key Points:

  • Prioritize: Quickly assess the situation and prioritize tasks based on urgency and impact gathering relevant information efficiently to make informed decisions whilst blocking out exta noise.
  • Consult: Seek input from team members and/or relevant stakeholders to gain perspectives and ensure buy-in clearly communicating goals and expectations to the team, providing them with a clear direction.
  • Open Communication: Maintain open and transparent communication channels to keep the stakeholders informed about the situation and any changes.
  • Adapt: Be flexible and agile, willing to adjust strategies based on new information or changing circumstances.
  • Provide Support and Optimism: Offer support and reassurance to team members, acknowledging their efforts and providing assistance when needed, encourage breaks where practical to avoid burnout and maintain productivity.
  • Lead by Example: Demonstrate resilience and composure in the face of challenges, serving as a role model for your team whilst sowing conditions that allow logical thinking to dominate emotional thinking.
  • Empower: Empower team members by delegating some tasks/updates and giving them ownership, fostering a sense of autonomy and responsibility, and allowing them to shine.

In the ever-shifting landscape of engineering management, the role of a manager extends beyond traditional oversight to encompass coaching for maximum team potential. We’ve explored some of the challenges managers face in leading through change, resolving conflicts, managing expectations, making strategic decisions, and navigating urgent situations. The essence of successful management lies in striking a balance between coaching and decisive action, fostering trust, resilience, and growth within the team.

As engineering managers, let’s embrace the unique role of manager/player-coach, recognizing the transformative potential it holds for our teams and organizations. Let’s commit to honing our coaching skills as much as we do our technical skills, cultivating empathy, and fostering open communication to guide our teams through challenges and toward excellence. By embracing this holistic approach, we can empower our teams to thrive in the face of adversity, drive innovation, and achieve collective success.

Next Steps

  • Share your own favorite management experiences or recommendations.
  • Follow my blog (or digital garden) for future updates on my engineering exploits and professional / personal development tips.
  • Connect on social media channels.

Footnotes

  1. Speaking of sports analogies I always used to believe the ‘player coach’ model in football (soccer) was all about former players who just ‘couldn’t let go’ or didn’t trust their team to get the job done. However, almost invariably they only ever put themselves on the pitch when the win / an important target was on the line. Similarly, in a product-led organization the customer/client is key and in a pinch / under pressure what’s best for the team becomes what is best for the customer, which is very likely you: the manager. ↩

  2. Pro Sports Team, Not a Family | Reed Hastings, (Jun. 10, 2022). Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b7Fw7BGX6Q. [Accessed: Jun. 04, 2024] ↩

  3. “Scrum Guide | Scrum Guides.” Available: https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-master. [Accessed: Jun. 04, 2024] ↩ ↩2

  4. T. Bradberry, J. Greaves, and P. Lencioni, Emotional intelligence 2.0. San Diego, California: TalentSmart, 2009. ↩

  5. In the altered for effect words of yoda: ambiguity leads to misunderstanding, misunderstanding leads to conflict, conflict leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. ↩

  6. I find this seriously impressive. Try a google image search for “Messi surrounded by players”and the number of results returned is staggering! ↩

  7. “Triple Witching: Definition and Impact on Trading in Final Hour.” Available: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/triplewitchinghour.asp. [Accessed: Jun. 05, 2024] ↩

  8. “Index Rebalancing: What Every Investor Should Know,” Investopedia. Available: https://www.investopedia.com/index-rebalancing-7972596. [Accessed: Jun. 05, 2024] ↩

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