Coaches as sources of truth
Why is it useful to have an external coach, whether leadership or technical or both? The obvious reason is that, as we grow in our careers and skillsets, we all need the perspective of people who have been where we aim to go. And if you don’t have someone “local” who can give you that, contracting out is the obvious alternative. That’s how I started off my coaching practice: advising founders of small startups who were new to engineering management and had nobody more senior in their immediate circles who could teach them the discipline.
But I’ve since come to appreciate how much external coaching can also help people embedded in larger companies with plenty of experienced folks around. The reason is that to succeed in any endeavor you need to get as clear a view as possible of what’s true, and organizational incentives distort truth propagation. Too often, the people who you most need to tell you the whole truth won’t do it, and only someone outside the organization has the right incentives to clear things up for you.
The easiest way to see this is to think about a manager’s position in an org hierarchy. The most important information-gathering relationships she has are those with her (direct) manager and (direct) reports. Yet she will frequently be frustrated by the lack of full candor from all those people: they will say just enough to make it apparent that there’s more they’re not saying, and the uncertainty that creates can be a major problem for her productivity and morale. The most common root cause, sadly, is that her colleagues believe full candor would be a career-limiting move.
On the one hand, our manager’s reports know that their future compensation and even future employment depend in large part on her favor. She can– and definitely should– try to make sure they feel as psychologically safe as possible to increase their candor, but nothing she can do will erase the fact of that power relationship. On the other hand, her own manager has career aspirations too. Achieving those requires projecting a certain image and also maintaining a certain shape and size of organization, since all large organizations have political dynamics and all have promotion criteria that reward particular appearances of leadership achievement.
In my role as an external coach, I can tell that manager important things she won’t hear from her colleagues because I’m independent of those pressures. I don’t report to her, nor she to me; I have no promotion I’m gunning for and no comp plan that depends on a performance rating. She’s paying me for my honest, unvarnished opinion and I have no reason not to give it.
The tradeoff is that I don’t have firsthand, specific experience of what’s actually going on in her company. But ideally I will have been not only where she is, but where her reports are and where her manager is too, so I have mental models drawn from my personal experience of how people in all those roles think. Those models, combined with her account in our coaching sessions of what she’s hearing from those people, can help me make pretty illuminating conjectures about what they’re probably thinking and why. And with that knowledge, we can work together on empathetic, reality-based strategies to overcome her challenges.
If you’d value a new level of honesty and forthrightness about what’s happening and why in your engineering organization, please schedule an intro chat with me at calendly.com/nweininger.
