Imagine yourself five years from now. You're completely happy. You're completely fulfilled in your job. What are you spending your day doing? So not what is your job? What's your job title? But literally what is the day-to-day activity? You get up at nine o'clock, you walk into a meeting, what are you doing in that meeting? And once I had all of that in sort of like a three-paragraph form, I actually started to write my ideal job description.
Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the Engineering Leadership Community. I'm Jerry Lee, founder of ELC, and I'm Patrick Gallagher, and we're your host. Our show shares the most critical perspectives habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.
In this episode, we discuss different principles and practices to help you become a great coach with Jill Wetzler. And we're also joined by special guest co-host, long-time community member and friend, Ali Litman, VP of Software Engineering at Modern Health. As an executive coach and former VP of Engineering, Jill shares the impact the first coaching workshop she attended, had on her as an engineering leader.
And we also cover the frameworks she uses to create a mindset of possibility, foster positive relationships, cultivate trust, navigate threats, and help people think about the future. Plus, we discuss tools for implementing a peer coaching structure in your organization, and how to make the most of peer group discussions.
Let me introduce you to Jill. Jill Wetzler is a leadership coach, consultant, and former VP of Engineering with more than 15 years of experience leading engineering teams. At some of Silicon Valley's fastest growing companies, she works with organizations who want to strengthen and uplevel their management teams.
And she coaches leaders at all levels, to help them advance their skills and find fulfillment at work and in life. Jill is built in scaled engineering orgs at companies like Salesforce, Twitter, Lyft, and Pilot through periods of high growth. Enjoy our conversation with Jill Wetzler. I think first off, just wanted to say, Ali, thank you for joining us. Ali Litman is back here co-hosting our conversation today. Ali, how are you doing? Welcome back.
Thank you for being here with you. Excited for the chat today. Fantastic. And Jill, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today? It's a Monday. We're kicking off Monday morning together. What's going on? Thank you for having me. I feel great today. Yeah. Just had a nice relaxing weekend and got to rest up a little bit, which was nice.
I think what's a bit was cool is we were talking, doing some introductions offline. There's a couple of themes that came up. All three of us shared something that was very personal in terms of our parents and our relationship with our parents together. And our like our family like and grandparents, and I thought that was really cool. And then the other theme is the impact of like continuing exposure to art and like meaningful gatherings in those types of ways.
And I thought that was also kind of cool. So it seems like you do think intentionally about how you come together with people in a way that helps like restore you on the weekends. I say we all need to have creative outlets that we don't force ourselves to monetize.
I dig that. I dig that to set up the conversation for us three today. I think for a lot of people listening, they may know that coaching is a extremely critical skill that engineering leaders need to know to better empower their teams. It's like the key to scaling your influence and impact. And I know for you, Jill coaching has had a massive impact not just on your ability as an engineering leader, but also just on your the broader personal mission that you have.
And so the first question speaking about coaching is I would love to first talk about the story of the first coaching workshop that you ever attended and the impact that that had on you as an engineering leader jump into that coaching workshop.
So I would say that I didn't know anything about coaching when I first walked into a coaching skills workshop. I had wanted a coach for a long time. I didn't even really understand what that meant. I don't think that I had even seen a therapist at the time that I took my coaching my first coaching skills workshop.
But I took a workshop from a company called Life Labs Learning. I think actually a lot of people are familiar with life labs at this point. But when I took this workshop, it was still kind of in the early days. I think the CEO and founder actually delivered this workshop for us. It was all about active listening and asking good questions.
I think to some extent as managers, we know that this is our job to listen and ask good questions. But how do you actually build that skill? What does that look like? And it was a short workshop and involved a lot of awkward practice with each other. And Life Labs is all about how do you kind of take one small adjustment that you can make to your practice and get sort of the largest return as a result.
We focused a lot on how to ask really, really good catalytic questions that bring about insight and kind of innovation in your teammates. And they gave us this assignment to in your next one on one in your next meeting. Before you want to give somebody advice, before you want to tell them what you think they should do, just ask a really, really good question. And I swear I walked into a one on one with one of my engineers and he asked me advice. He asked me how I would do something.
And I turned the question back around on him and I said, well, what do you think we should do? And I swear I saw this moment in his face of like surprise. And then I saw the gears turned in his head and then he said, wow. And then he shared what he thought that we should do. And it was a very light bulb moment.
I think probably for both of us, but really for me that told me I wasn't spending enough time asking questions. I think I felt you feel kind of good when people come and ask you for advice and when you think you have the answers. But the reality is we don't have all the answers. And sometimes the people on our team have better answers than we do.
And I think it can be really empowering to put that in the hands of our director ports and ask them what they think they should do, what they think we should do. And then we can kind of build on it from there. So that was really a big turning point for me was just realizing the power of a very good open-ended question. And sometimes that question is as simple as well. What do you think we should do?
I have some experience with taking some coaching training as well. I have been trained in imposter syndrome coaching and also have had life coaching myself. What was extremely interesting when I went through some of those courses was how generally applicable a lot of the training was. And it really wasn't specialized on like here's how you coach and give advice on a certain topic, but rather how you how you really understand someone and understand really what problem they're trying to solve.
So I'm curious in some of that early training because it sounds like it was very focused on how you coach in a professional setting. What were some focuses of the questions that they were coaching you on how to how to ask to better coach someone that you might be leading. So were you trying to understand what they valued or you trying to understand what their core goals were things like that because in my experience that's really a lot of the focus.
But there's in the education what sorts of topic areas were they guiding you to investigate in your one-in-ones. Yeah. In that sort of short workshop it really was just getting used to asking open-ended questions. So not asking leading questions, not asking sort of multiple choice questions like would you do X, Y or Z. But more trying to tap into like possibility. I got a certification last year from the Neuroleadership Institute. That's where I did my coaching courses.
And there I would say we got a lot more into the different types of questioning that you can ask people that sort of get your brain into the right state to be innovative, to tap into the insights. And so a lot of the questions that we looked at were like emotional regulation strategies. So asking people to really tap into how they feel about a situation and then how can you get them to re-appraise it. Because a lot of times we're seeing a coach because we're very frustrated about something.
So how do we get ourselves out of that negative mindset and maybe create a little bit of distance from the problem. You know one of the questions that I like to ask people is like what advice would you give to somebody who's in your situation. And even just that simple question can take somebody out of their maybe like stuck mindset and realize that actually they would have very concrete advice for somebody who is going through the same thing. There's a lot of like vision questions.
I think it's really important to get people into a mindset of like possibility and success, like getting people into a success mindset literally. Because a study that was done, I would have to look up and see who exactly did the study. But there was a study that was done where they took these two groups of people. You know, they had one group that was coached on sort of their future possibilities. What's their vision? What are their goals?
And then they had this other group that was coached on their obstacles, their frustrations, what was holding them back. And then they actually hooked them up to like brain scanners. And they found that the people who were coached on their obstacles and their challenges tended to have a stress response in their brain and actually viewed their coaches as abrasive versus the people that were in this more like forward looking success mindset.
And then they tended to view their coaches as very caring and empathetic, very trustworthy. They showed brain activity that correlated with innovation and motivation. And so I think that was like, you know, another big aha moment for me was like, how do you get people out of this space of frustration and into a space where they're thinking about possibility. And they're thinking about what can happen if they remove the obstacles that are in their way.
It actually makes people feel a lot more motivated to solve their own problems. Can we talk about some of the practices there because in my own experience, I recently had like a conversation with a therapist and one of the things they were talking about was like when you do get into that space of frustration, the lizard part of your brain, the amygdala becomes like completely activated.
You can't think imaginatively. You can't think of solutions because you were thinking about survival. You're thinking about fight or flight. You're not really thinking you're automatically responding in fight or flight. And so that shift that you're talking about there, I think is so profound in terms of unlocking an idea for somebody in your team or helping them become more solution oriented or solving that specific problem.
But the approach to do that is so different. So when you're thinking about that shift, you're like, let's say like engineering leader is working with somebody on their team. And they're trying to coach them into something newer to solve a big problem or to implement a completely different strategy. Tell us more about your approach. Like shift people into possibility and to make that transition. Yeah, I think first of all, it's breaking people's problems down into manageable chunks.
How many times are you in a meeting with someone or how many times do you do this yourself because I do this myself? Where I go and I say, oh my gosh, I'm so stressed out. I have this problem. I have this other problem. I have this thing that's like kind of related to the other things. And I'm just completely spiraling out. And it's really hard to get somebody out of that spiral.
This is where like the active listening techniques really come into play is to be able to like let somebody get it all out and then say, okay, here are like three big problems that you mentioned. And did I get that right? So first let them actually tell you if you heard it correctly because sometimes we don't. And then let's take them one by one. So I think that helps make things a little bit more manageable.
I also think it just helps for people to feel heard sometimes and to hear their thoughts reflected back at them. And then once you take each of those problems one by one, there are a few different approaches you can take. First of all, there are a couple of different threat models that are out there. The one that the Neural Leadership Institute talks about is called the scarf model scarf stands for like status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness.
Basically, like every time our amygdala has a threat, it relates to kind of one of these areas. And there's another model out there that Laura Hogan always talks about. I think it's Paloma Medina. It's called the biceps model. It's like belonging, improvement, choice, etc. And so when there's let's say a reorg coming, what is actually being threatened.
And so I think having these models can be really interesting in terms of like breaking somebody out of that threat response, even literally giving somebody that like, here's the model. Tell me the thing that's being threatened in you right now can can sort of break you out of that and help you think about things a little bit more objectively. But then also asking me, I love the question of just, okay, let's think about this like three months from now.
Your problem is completely solved. Let's just pretend we've solved it. What's true about you? And I think it can get people into a place of like feeling the feelings that they want to feel, the certainty that they want to feel, the autonomy that they want to feel. And then thinking about like, okay, how do we get to that place?
So that you're not just dwelling on the challenges in front of you and the obstacles in front of you, but you're actually thinking about what is life going to be like once I've solved this can be a lot more motivating.
And I want to comment on how interesting that was you presented a lot of, you know, tactical frameworks, but at the end of the day, right, there's a component of, yes, solving the problem moving it forward, but also really how the individual feels about the problem is one of the biggest parts that you're trying to help them navigate.
That also helps drive how they might solution. Those two things together as a core part of how you coach and proceed with problem solving, I think is really interesting. So I'm just going to talk about the problem. And I'm going to talk about the problem that I'm experiencing in my life and I'm like, oh, clarity. Okay, this is where I'm experiencing the threat and that awareness helps sort of at least create a set. It removes a lot of like the ambiguity that can also be another source of stress.
And then thinking about three months in the future, like I do start to feel some of the emotions associated with like that thing being solved. And I feel a little bit calmer. I think that's a very, very, very important thing to see in my career an example of like walking somebody through this model and seeing that switch happen where they're able to go from maybe being stuck or spiraling to a space of possibility and to be able to see the pathway forward.
Yeah, I mean, I think that fairness is a thing that has come up a lot in my conversations with people. And I think that this awareness tends to be threatened when we're thinking about career advancement and promotions. I think our fairness gets threatened when we are in spaces where we're thinking about inclusion and diversity and things related to that topic. I'm not going to get maybe too specific about people's examples because I want to be careful about confidentiality.
And I think about fairness, I think we do a lot of like comparing to people around us, even for myself, maybe I'll just talk about myself and thinking about my career trajectory, which really has, I should like express a lot of gratitude for the career trajectory that I've had.
Find it difficult to not compare myself to the people around me and especially the men around me, who sometimes I've seen their careers take off a lot faster than mine. Sometimes I've seen people that I've mentored get VP positions before I did. And that triggered a lot of my sort of like fairness threat in my own practice of working with a coach, really thinking about what is important to me, what do I value?
And like fairness is important to me, but at the end of the day, other people's career paths are not necessarily the paths that I would choose for myself. I just feel triggered in my brain when I see things happening to other people that are not happening to me.
And so it really took like an assessment of where do I want to be spending my time and if I take where I want to be spending my time and put that into an actual like description of what I think my job should be based on the things that I like doing, you know, it turns out that my career path looks very different from the folks around me.
And so I think, you know, coaching has this great ability to get us out of our heads and to stop comparing ourselves to other people and really just tap into what we want. Maybe a relevant story here is when I was at lift, I was working with a coach and she asked me the dreaded question that sometimes we ask people is like, where do you see yourself in five years?
And who knows that I answered that question. But she told me like, imagine yourself five years from now, you're completely happy, you're completely fulfilled in your job, what are you spending your day doing? So not what is your job, what's your job title? But literally what is the day to day activity? You get up at nine o'clock, you walk into a meeting, what are you doing in that meeting?
And I did, I took that kind of prompt and I did some like free writing. I had a flight that I was on. I just like opened up notepad and just started writing. That was kind of the catalyst to me thinking like, oh, maybe I actually want her job. Maybe I want to be a coach because I started to look at all of the things that I wanted to do.
I really enjoyed spending time in my one on ones helping people. I really enjoyed putting programming together that made managers love their jobs, be better at managing and made their direct reports happier and more successful. That was like really what was driving me to go into the office every day. And once I had all of that in sort of like a three paragraph form, I actually started to write my ideal job description.
So that sort of did come out of that activity. And yeah, I wound up like creating a job for myself at lift for the last year that I was there that was focused on really leadership development, transitioning people into management. And I worked really closely with our HR team and our learning and development team to develop programming that would essentially just make managers better at their job and help usher people from leadership positions into pure management positions.
And that was kind of the first step that eventually led me to the job that I have today, which is really specifically coaching and being in business for myself. But yeah, I think that was really, really powerful. And that's where I think getting clarity about what is important to you and not like what does the standard career path look like for people can be essentially life changing.
I'm just I'm just reflecting I just started working with an executive coach probably about two months ago. And the first activity that they had me do was start to free right. And specifically is focusing on like more of the emotional regulation elements that you were talking about earlier about like building awareness and building detachment from the emotions that you're experiencing the problem.
So you could start to look at it differently. And then with what you're talking about here with this activity of like free writing and identifying where do you love to spend your time. I think it's such a powerful question. And I think that's where a lot of people can get tripped up as you get so busy executing that you don't start to think about where do you want to spend your time and what might that open up for you in the future.
And then I think the risk you shared of the comparison bias that can happen when you start to think about like you know how are other people doing as compared to where I'm at. And maybe it's a different like they get a sense of value from a different way that they spend their time. And so you bit it can be easy to start to perceive that as a threat that you're saying I think is so powerful.
Okay, so I've I've three directions we can go alley and I want I want to I want to get your input on what you think it be cool. So there's a couple things we can dig into here with this lift story. So I think that especially when it comes to the impact on emerging leaders and some of the folks that Jill's working with. I think there's still a lot to dig into about some of the powerful questions that Jill brought up and then there's a couple other frameworks that we can dive into.
What do you want to go? What what do you think in alley? I think it'd be cool to learn more about like navigating this with lift. It's it's really cool that you took that exercise. Jill and then applied it immediately to your environment. I think what's interesting about like the fairness story as well is that you're talking about how do you perceive your situation?
What what do you actually what do you actually try to accomplish? But then there's all these other external factors that you can't perfectly control right like fairness is is a judgment of external factors and your own interpretation. And so you then went and with lift you created this job for yourself. You could have also said, oh gosh, this doesn't exist for me here. This isn't my exact job description today.
Let me go do something completely different or maybe I just have to mold myself to what my current role is. You know, you could have gone a few different paths. So I'd like to learn more about how you actually went and said, okay, I've learned these things about myself. I've asked these tough questions and I have some of these assets at my disposal that I could maybe leverage to pursue my goals and really and you know,
give myself the energy I'm looking for whatever other emotion you're looking for. So I guess like how did you navigate, you know, making that decision to define a new role for yourself within your current company versus going one of those other paths of maybe breaking out on your own immediately or just evolving to meet your current role at lift.
Yeah, I think that's a great summary of what my options were. And I think I was really lucky at lift that I had the sort of support from my boss, the support from the founders, the support from the HR team to kind of take a chance on this. And it's a role that I only did for a year. I think we could like argue how successful it was, but it was a great learning experience for me. I wound up hiring a replacement somebody to take over my team, his name was Vic.
And I was very lucky that Vic was very good and that the team loved him because it allowed me to kind of separate myself from the Oregon really focus on what my new role was and even having to like define what it was on the fly.
I think there was a question of can I do all of these things that I want to do within my existing role. And I think the answer to that was yes, because eventually after I mean we could talk about what happened after lift, but I left lift and before I even decided to start my own business, I took a role leading the engineering team at pilot, which for those who don't know it's a fintech startup.
And I got to do a lot of the things that I wanted to do at lift at pilot. I got to start a peer coaching circle for managers. I got to be very, very involved in the sort of early days of HR programming and HR processes at pilot. So I think there are ways that you can sort of think about all the things you want to do and then figure out like how do I create a scenario where within the constraints of my current job, I get to do the things that really fill me up.
And then hopefully I can like hire people to do the things that I don't love to do, but hopefully they love to do it. They're very good at it. So there were conversations around that, but like I said, I think at lift, I was pretty blessed to be able to kind of play around with what this role would look like. And I had really great partners on the HR side and on the learning and development side.
So I spent a lot of time working on programming for managers, specifically in the technical organizations. So within engineering, product design, TPM, etc. We did things like develop what our management principles were. So let's have a standard definition of what a manager is at lift, what makes them a good manager. And then let's run an initial evaluation to just to see where our managers are. We're not going to make it part of their performance reviews.
We just want to get a baseline. And then that can kind of tell us where we want to focus some of our efforts. So I did some workshop facilitation there. I worked on kind of a lot of iterations of HR processes, career ladders, promotion processes, calibrations, compensation practices, etc.
I worked a lot on diversity and inclusion programming as well. That's kind of been a hallmark of my career. And then I did a lot of really weird like one off advocacy. I just had, I'd been around at lift for a long time. It was very vocal about management, about diversity. I kind of became a person that people would escalate to. If they were a little afraid to go to HR, they thought maybe this isn't like an HR thing. They would come talk to me.
And then I would try to do some coaching, but I also had really good relationships with a lot of managers across the Oregon. So I would kind of tread carefully, but try to mediate situations as I could.
And I, of course, I would always bring HR along and make sure that they were informed. And I would say that like my biggest takeaway, if we want to like get into what I think is really useful for managers to understand is that when we become managers, I think a lot of times we don't shift our thinking about who our team is.
So let's say we're like an engineer on a team and now we get either in some organizations promoted and another organizations transitioned into a management role. We think about the engineers on our team as our team. We think about the product manager and the designer on our team as our team.
And that actually can be super isolating because now you're in a new role with new responsibilities and you know, maybe you talk to the managers that also report to your boss, maybe like maybe those become your mentors, but how often do we really expand our view of our community and invest in relationships with other managers across the organization or even across functions.
One thing that I just kept seeing over and over again, anytime we were doing programming around calibrations or programming around promotion processes, it's that managers were not connected enough with each other and every organization is going to have managers who are really, really good at feedback or managers who are really good at navigating tough conversations and managers who are really good at navigating bias.
And so how do you find those people? How do you make those connections when you're struggling with one of those issues yourself? Because maybe it's something you haven't experienced before, maybe it's something you're not good at.
So a lot of our programming that we were coming up with at lift was specifically meant to connect managers with each other. We have this promotion sponsor program where if I'm an engineer and I think I'm ready to be promoted and my manager thinks I'm not kind of screwed. What do I do? And now I have tension with my manager because I think that they're being unfair to me. And so we gave people an avenue to sort of escalate these concerns.
And then we could give their manager another manager somewhere in the org, someone who's like a little more neutral, who maybe isn't that familiar with your team and with your product. So at least just talk this out to like talk to the IC to talk to the manager to hear both sides. Again, HR is like involved in this. But in a lot of cases, what we saw was not that this was like overturning a bunch of promotion decisions, but it was bringing clarity to the situation.
It was helping people who maybe felt like, okay, my manager is not advocating for me. They could walk out of this saying, okay, my manager is actually an advocate for me. They just didn't know how to like really communicate clearly to me where I stand and like what the next step is.
I think that really became like my aha moment was that we need to give managers more community and more people that they can talk to outside of their immediate sphere. And that's really what's going to help us up level our management team. And that's why I believe so much in the power of peer coaching groups because I can make PowerPoint presentations and tell people the basics of management all day every day.
But at the end of the day, your situations are very specific. And the ability for everybody to kind of get into a group and say like, I've experienced something similar. This is how I dealt with it.
And then this is why I would do it differently or why I think it worked. And then everybody can kind of come up with their own takeaways that apply to their own situation. That's why I think like manager communities are so powerful and kind of aligning on what you want from your managers, how you expect your managers to behave, what kind of values you want them to have.
Aligning on that early is really, really important. And then like giving them ways to talk to each other because otherwise we're just busy. We're not going to like create those opportunities for ourselves. I want to ask you a follow up question from one of the the challenges that you mentioned is that we don't shift our thinking about who our teams are. And you know, you asked the question of how often do we expand our view of people.
And I think what's so interesting is a lot of people probably feel the impact of that in terms of limit limitations in their career, or maybe their manager perceives them as a certain person. Or like, you know, you are you're my engineer or you're my engineering manager. But like I don't think of you as a director. I don't think of you as a VP looking at from both ways. Like how do you help somebody break out of that. So we're talking about the peer coaching as a structure to help do that.
But so for somebody maybe who is an engineering manager and their manager doesn't perceive them as like a director. How do they advocate a breakout of that sort of defined identity. And then on the other side, like as a that manager, what can you do to change or expand your perception to change how you view your teams.
Yeah, good question. And I just want to add one more thing to that, which is it kind of sucks to be an engineer and have a manager who's like not plugged in to the rest of the org. So it's really nice if you feel like your manager like deeply understands what you're working on and like can represent your work to other people. That's great. That's part of the job.
But if they're not plugged into the rest of the org, it's going to hurt you at some point too. So I do think that it is kind of the hallmark of becoming a manager, a good manager is like somebody who is able to expand their view beyond their team and beyond their function. In terms of how you do that, I think to some extent, it's like any kind of networking, you just have to do it. You have to get over the the awkwardness and do it.
You know, I would go to my manager and I would just say like who are the people that I should meet that are like outside of my org. That's like number one. And then you go meet with them and you know, just do it, do an intro and then ask them, who's another person that you think I should meet. So I tend to do that kind of chain of like asking people like give me somebody else to meet and I'll go meet with them. I also really like the team road show idea.
And at lifts, I ran the infrastructure engineering org, which it's very important for everybody to know what infrastructure is up to. And it's very important for us to know what the other teams are up to because they are our customers. So a thing that I would do that just gave me an excuse to meet other people was like we come up with our plans and then we go on a road show and we go into other organizations staff meetings with their all hands.
And we tell them these are the things that we're planning for next quarter. And we'd probably do this ahead of actually finalizing our plans. We'd also go to our customers and ask them what they need from us at pilot where I was leading the engineering team. I would go to the operations all hands and the sales and marketing all hands. And I would invite them to come to our all hands as well.
And I think that pilot I think because it was so early, we didn't have a great kind of structure around senior leadership meetings. There was like an executive leadership team meeting that happened on a regular basis. And then you know, other than that, it was kind of like as needed, we'll get all of the function leaders together.
And I was meeting with my operations counterpart regularly because that was very important. A lot of what we were building was specifically for operations. But we would have these conversations and we would say like I wonder what sales is actually thinking about.
And we started pulling the CRO and the CMO into our meetings as well. And we would just have this like very unstructured every two to three weeks 30 minute meeting where we would just say like here's what we're working on and all the time out of that would would turn into OK, two of us need to go off and talk.
And so it was I felt a little nervous about having an unstructured meeting with folks in the C suite. But it turns out that that actually was very important. A lot of important things would come out of that. And then over time we added a little more structure to it.
To some extent it's just like going and talking to people and making sure that you have put time in your calendar and you're not spending all of your time in one on ones because you know depending on how big your team is it's very easy to just look at your calendar overnight and now all of a sudden every day is just one on ones back to back. But to like make sure that you actually have built time in your calendar for speaking with your peers and other function leads.
Jill, I wanted to ask you and Ali, I want to make sure you if I'm tracking this right way, but I want to dive deeper into like the structure of these peer coaching groups. I think in the. And so Ali, are you is that that tracking with where you want to go? Yes.
So, so, so ELC has helped facilitate a lot of small peer group style conversations. Ali has helped facilitate some of those conversations I facilitated participated in a lot of those conversations. So we have a deep belief that these are powerful vehicles to help people unlock new ideas inside solutions and also to like to build relationships and have people that just get it.
So, for people who have never participated in those types of conversations or have never introduced those to their teams, like can you share a little bit more about what that peer coaching structure looks like within the context of the engineering teams that you've supported and maybe like what an MVP like first iteration of what this might look like for somebody trying to introduce this to their teams.
Yeah, absolutely. I was able to with the help of a lot of other people introduce manager circles at lift. It was kind of a mix of kind of my understanding of what manager circles at Facebook looked like and then the manager forum is what we called it at Twitter.
So, the idea being that you get a group of managers together, ideally it's a group that is very kind of mixed in experience level and ideally if you can do it, a durable group of people that you meet with regularly so that you can start to build some real vulnerability.
But that's also like that's a nice to have in my opinion. And then there's sort of a framework you can either decide on the topic ahead of time and say like, okay, we're going to talk about having tough feedback conversations in this circle. Or it can be something where you all just kind of go around and give some updates on like what's going on in your life, what's going on at work.
And then you see if a pattern emerges or if somebody has a really burning topic and you dig into that. So you have one person who's kind of pushing for like details on the situation. The whole group gets a chance to ask clarifying questions. And then there's a very specific protocol for how you talk to people. And the idea is that there is no advice allowed in these sessions.
There's no I would do this. It's the wood should could don't say wood should cut at all. But instead you go around and you have people talk about from their own experience. Hey, here's a here's a tough conversation that I had to have. And here's what I said. And here's why what I said didn't work. Or here's why what I said actually did work and had the outcome that I wanted. And I think that that way of speaking. First of all, it helps us lower our defenses.
Because when as soon as somebody says like, well, you should just try this. Then you feel like you have to explain like I have already thought about that. I already tried it. It didn't work or it doesn't apply to my situation. So I think it's really important to make sure that we're not triggering the defenses of people and allowing them to really own their problem, own the scenario and own the steps that they want to take.
And I guarantee everybody will come out, even if it's one person trying to have their problem solved, everybody in that group is going to come away with something. So at the end of my peer coaching sessions, I'll have everybody just say one takeaway that they got out of that conversation and usually will kind of take some notes and document the takeaways and then put them somewhere that people can access them in the future.
But I remember running one of these at pilot and pilot was really interesting because a lot of people who worked at pilot came from accounting firms and accounting backgrounds and accounting just works differently from, you know, what we might be used to in tech companies.
The promotion process is very different. It's kind of like you've been there for a couple years. So you get promoted one on ones are very different. So we have this just like manager circle, peer coaching group about how to hold one on ones. And everybody talked about the struggles they have in their one on ones, the approaches they take. And at the end, we did takeaways. And one person said, well, my takeaways that I have been running my one on ones wrong, the whole time that I've been here.
And so that was just like a big aha moment for us first that we never gave anybody any kind of structure or instruction on how to hold a one on one. But it was a really great moment where we all got to learn from each other and learn some good approaches that we could take back to our teams.
I'm a big fan of this conversation structure. I feel like just even saying that is understanding how powerful those are. And the practice of sharing the takeaway at the end provides so much closure and validation because like it is kind of hard to build a little bit that context and vulnerability.
But especially as like those types of groups get going and people share deeper challenges or more maybe emotional driven challenges like where does take something to share it to get that feedback of like everybody gained value from this.
And me sharing something from a vulnerable place was really valuable, not just for my own problem, but for everybody else's. I think it's such a powerful closing piece to give people call the action, build this into all of your teams is my is my takeaway like this should be a part of your management structure because of like what we were talking about earlier with expanding your view to different teams,
different parts of the org, but then also to in terms of your ability to build stronger relationships and solve specific problems. These are actually not that much of a lift to set up what I try to sell to people is not like I'm going to come in and facilitate every one of these peer coaching groups, but actually like I'm going to come in and set up a program that you can run.
And there are different approaches that you can take like if you if you want to put somebody in charge of this, then you can do a cohort model and you know make sure that you have durable cohorts who have who have these coaching program and then when somebody leaves you put somebody else back in them or you can run something that's a lot more lightweight, but you can set up these programs such that one really invigorated excited manager can run this themselves without it taking up a lot of their time.
So really the bulk of what you need is a topic survey, a quick primer on how to run these unnotes template and a feedback template and that is really all it comes down to and then you just put something on the schedule. And as you wrap up your peer coaching session, you put the next one on the calendar before people leave the room and they become very self sustaining over time as long as people are getting value out of them, they're going to keep coming to them.
Okay, so we've got some rapid fire questions, Jill, first one, what are you reading or listening to right now? So I made a commitment to myself this year that I'm going to read every single day and that I am going to read for fun so that I can get my attention span back into the place that it needs to be.
So I've been reading a lot of like memoirs and fiction and the book that I just finished that I can't stop thinking about is Violet Davis's memoir called Finding Me. It really resonated with me in a lot of ways. I mean, I think my childhood and my background and my job couldn't be any more different from Violet Davis's but I really took away a lot about how to find inner peace inner worth.
And how to how to lean into what fulfills, you know, your life and yeah, I think just makes you feel fulfilled. Well, any book that can give you the gift of inner peace and inner worth like that's an instant to add to my my reading list now. So that's what I'm after. Close that book and I just sat there in like thought for a while and it's still something that's coming up for me even a week later.
That's a capital G good book to have you sit and think after I love that. Okay, second question. What's a tool or methodology that's had a big impact on you? Is it okay to say coaching? Absolutely. Because coaching is really that has been the catalyst that led me to open my own practice, but I really think it's like asking good questions asking good questions has unlocked so many things in my life in my career in my personal life in my relationships with friends and family members.
It's just helped me be a lot more open and interested in other people's kind of viewpoints and values. So what is a trend you're seeing or following if that's interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet? This is a really interesting question and I don't know if this qualifies as a trend, but there have been a lot of layoffs in the industry.
The head count doesn't flow as freely as it used to and so what I'm seeing a lot of people struggle with right now is what does career growth look like for me in an organization that doesn't have wide open head count.
And it's happening a lot more. It's happening in the big companies where that kind of used to be a place that you could sort of skyrocket and grow your org. And so I really think that we have to think about what growth looks like for us, aside from title growth, aside from even compensation growth.
And how can we feel like we are in organizations where we're still getting skill growth, we're still preparing ourselves for what the next role looks like. And I think that's where a lot of that inner work comes in and not comparing ourselves to other people and not comparing ourselves by like org size, but actually thinking about what do I need and what works for me.
So I think that that's something that managers are struggling with themselves if they don't see that they have a clear path to director in the current organizations that they're in. And then also when they're talking to their director ports, like how do they have those career growth conversations. And so I think there needs to be a shift to talking about skills, what kind of skills do you want to invest in, what does the organization need, what does the business need.
And that's really where the growth is going to come from. And I think it's a healthy dose of reality for us as well. My mom worked in the government for decades. And if you think about how the government functions and really how a lot of businesses that are not the tech industry in Silicon Valley, like how they function.
And it's not just like if you have the skills and you can do the job, we're going to promote you. It's like, is there a job at this level that needs to be filled and then people can apply for it. So there's a little bit of like mindset shift that I think has to happen. And I do think, you know, the headcount's going to come back. The growth is going to come back.
And hopefully in a more sustainable way, hopefully we are going to, you know, really hold companies to responsible growth and working towards profitability. I think that's a very important thing for businesses. But I do think we're going to have to shift how we think about career growth in general. Absolutely. And I think from the coaching standpoint, both individuals, ICs and managers very much can benefit from coaching in this particular area because it's a complete shift.
And I think that's a really important thing about the growth of how many resources we have available to support people in their growth. So totally agree. And then one final rapid fire question for you. Is there a quote or a mantra you live by or a quote that's really resonating with you right now? Yes, I do have a quote. I have it on my website. This is also Laura Hogan at where with all runs a workshop where she helps people kind of develop their management philosophy.
Is a quote from Phil Jackson who coached the 92 bulls team Chicago Bulls and it is the strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team. And I think this quote is so deep. It resonates with me on so many different levels. I think it's about building teams that have a diversity of strengths. And we know that teams that have a diversity of strengths perform better.
It's also about teams being there to pick us up when we're not at our best or we have things going on in our lives. Like we've built a team that has a strong enough bench that can sort of cover for each other. So when I think about management, I really think about tapping into the unique brilliance, the unique genius, the unique skills that everybody on the team has.
How can we use those to our advantage? And how can we look at sort of the skills that are missing on the team and hire the right people for those a powerful quote and to think about so to synthesize the quote and the trends that you shared.
It's like in the future in a world when career growth will look different because of the demands of the market where you have to think about how to skills change or in this case, like how do you build great teams and the some of different skills come together to make the strength of the team.
The person that's going to make the difference is the great coach. And so I just want to say thank you, Jill, for helping and guide us through a couple different ways where folks can become better coaches and support the growth of their team. Allie, thank you for jumping in and co-hosting as well. The conversation was a ton of fun. Thank you both. Yeah, thank you, boss. This was great.
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