What I Coach
My Favorite Skills to Coach
Part of finding a great coach is understanding their areas of expertise and aligning those with what you want to improve on. I consider myself more of a “Renaissance Person” than a deep subject matter expert in any one specific area, but these are the things that I enjoy coaching folks on the most.
Technical Career Coaching
As a technical manager with dozens of direct reports and hiring and promotion responsibility, I can help you navigate your career within your technology-based organization.
Communication and Interpersonal Skills
I’ve developed relationships with dozens of stakeholders across legal, PR, marketing, biz-dev, and engineering. I’ve also had customer-facing roles as well. Let’s build up your skills communicating and selling your ideas to others.
Strategy and Goal Development
I’ve facilitated the goal development process for small teams within large organizations, and large teams in small organizations. Let me find a way to help you unlock your team’s strategy efficiently and create a system of accountability to see them get done.
For Engineering Professionals
As an individual contributor who has gone over to the “dark side” of management, I know what it takes to thrive in engineering and technical cultures on both sides of the fence. Let me help you accelerate your career in your technical role.
Effective Presentations
Whether it’s presenting your ideas to 1 or 1,000, my background in standup comedy and improv can help keep your audiences’ attention and sell your ideas.
Examples: Mock-presentation feedback, writing/editing help, meeting etiquette
Building Business Accumen
An individual with the ability to speak technically while thinking in “business” is a powerful and effective force on the job. Instead of spending two years in business school, let me show you how to extract the relevant business context out of your current organization and use it to thrive in your role.
Examples: Active listening practice, strategies for effective communication and learning, explaining strategy, learn the “language of business”
Career Development
Unless you already work in a large company with established career progression and promotion paths, building a roadmap to how you want your skills and career to develop can be challenging. Let’s uncover together how the resources in your current job can open up opportunities you can say “yes” to.
Examples: Navigating internal buy-in for promotion, skill-building and practice, opportunity evaluation, “managing upwards”
Junior to Mid Development
Maybe you have too many junior folks, or your HR department is understaffed (or nonexistent), and you’re starting to field more topics that would benefit from a coach. You want to focus on things that you’re measured on, but you still want your people to grow and improve. This is where I can help.
Examples: Skill-building, effective communication, presenting ideas, working well with others, promotion doc prep, team exercises.
New Manager Mentoring
You’ve just promoted/hired your first technical manager, but you’re finding it difficult to both mentor and manage them at the same time. Let me help them absorb the new skills they need to help them thrive in their new role.
Examples: Dealing with ambiguity, time prioritization strategies, delivering effective feedback, general people management
Effective Presentations
Whether it’s presenting your ideas to 1 or 1,000, my background in standup comedy and improv can help keep your audiences’ attention and sell your ideas.
Examples: Copy-editing, idea brainstorming, visual and oral presentation prep, mock presentations, effective use of humor
For Technical Leaders
When I first became a manager, I benefited greatly from having a “manager coach” for my first year in the new role. I’m here to offer this same, positive, supportive experience as you transition to your new role.
What a coaching session entails
I can do a longer or shorter session, but 45 mins is around the sweet spot I feel for most meetings. Strategy-building or presentation feedback may take longer.
In each session, you’ll bring a problem or situation you’d like to break down and work on solutions for. I’ll tie these back to lessons or skills that we’ve identified as part of our “coaching contract” early on in our relationship.
Here’s an example.
A client, who is working on advancing his career as at a mechanical engineer at a local tech firm, has been asked by an Account Manager to help them with client engagements. How should they react to this opportunity? In our coaching session we:
- Worked with the client to identify the stakeholders within the company and what their motivations might be.
- Generated possible responses to the request highlighting this candidates skills and enthusiasm for the expanded role.
- Pointed out that this wa a situation to go back to their manager to negotiate possible tradeoffs for taking on this new set of responsibilities on their schedule, thereby possibly removing something the no longer wanted to be responsible for (or do as often) from their day-to-day.
- As my client was a high performer already in their role, I offered the guidance on the slippery slope to becoming a “sales engineer,” a role the client did not want for themselves, and how to signal to stakeholders and their manager that they wanted something different for their career.
The above was done within a 45 min coaching session. What do you think we could do with yours?