After eliminating thousands of positions, including many roles for managers and senior-level staff, tech companies are counting on newly appointed tech and team leaders to fill the gaps by coaching their colleagues to higher levels of performance.
In fact, the concept of a player-coach, someone who serves as both a team leader and an individual contributor, has gained popularity in tech environments.
But how do you even begin to coach someone, let alone an entire team, when you’ve never done it before? Furthermore, how can you tailor your approach and training routines to fit colleagues with varying levels of experience, knowledge and output?
Fortunately, it’s not as difficult as it seems. Experienced coaches recommend focusing on the following techniques to incorporate performance coaching processes into your daily routine, team interactions and one-on-one discussions.
Create a Positive Coaching Environment
Listening and encouraging team members to suggest ideas for improving productivity is the first step to creating a positive and supportive coaching environment, as well as establishing rapport and trust with your co-workers.
When you are thrust into a coaching role, it helps to get everyone on the same page about your current initiatives and challenges, explained Josh Lunn, a senior embedded engineer and former director of engineering.
One way of doing this is to ask for feedback during sprint retrospectives, Lunn said. Acknowledge that you are all in this together; then, once you’ve identified areas where the team can improve, ask for ideas or suggestions on how you can help current team members become more proficient with certain skills or tasks and reach higher levels of efficiency.
“The more ideas you get on the table, the more buy-in you'll get from your team,” Lunn advised.
Holding a group session where everyone shares ideas reduces friction and helps to identify gaps, agreed Dr. Martina Carroll-Garrison, a.k.a. Dr. Tina, a work-life coach and self-proclaimed recovering engineer.
In order to coach individuals and teams to higher levels of performance, the first questions you have to answer are:
- What am I missing?
- What am I not seeing?
A great coach is aware of how they are being perceived and how people react to their ideas, so they not only give feedback, they are also open to input, Dr. Tina added.
Finally, to incentivize knowledge sharing and peer coaching, make sure that all or part of the performance bonuses you and your teammates receive are tied to team results. Another tip is to ask for a budget to establish rewards or events that recognize the team’s improvements, to help build motivation and energy toward a new standard.
Coach Individually and Collectively
Since a team is only as good as the sum of its parts, you also need to meet with individual team members to identify their strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to improve. However, since your main charter is overall improvement, make sure to link each team member’s learning and productivity goals to the team and the organization.
Coaches also need to ensure that they reach an agreement on the areas that need improving and that each contributor takes personal responsibility for elevating their performance. How do you do this?
Ask each team member to come back to you with an action plan for building their skills and reaching higher levels of efficiency and output. Then, consider asking team members to share their major goals with the team. By committing to a goal publicly, you’re more likely to get support and coaching from fellow team members and establish a culture of accountability.
Encourage Employees to Learn from Each Other
One of the biggest mistakes new player-coaches make is trying to do all of the work themselves. “If you keep having to intervene, you’ll kill your efficiency,” Lunn said. The only way to succeed as a team lead or player-coach is by empowering others to improve.
He recommends incorporating staff shout-outs into sprint retrospectives to assess the strengths of various team members and determine who might be able to upskill (or “coach up”) others.
The reality is that some people are better than others at each of the tasks that a development team needs to carry out during the sprint. Consider assigning some of the more complex tasks to junior engineers or developers and asking a more proficient team member to help them improve their performance.
“Check in, don’t step in,” Lunn cautioned. Less experienced team members can learn a lot by experiencing the struggle to master something new or challenging.
Use Different Roles for Different Goals
Dr. Tina uses the metaphor of wearing multiple hats to represent the challenges that inexperienced player-coaches face when they need to add coaching to their toolbox.
Each hat that you wear—such as mentoring, coaching, motivating and training—requires a different set of skills, concepts, behaviors and mindsets. It’s important to recognize each situation you face and be deliberate about switching your “hat” and skillset to improve the performance of entire teams.
For instance, coaching requires effective communication, empathy, active listening skills, open questioning and being non-judgmental (among other skills). If those skills are weak spots, the good news is that studies show that anyone can improve their coaching with only a few hours of training… but they do have to invest in learning how to coach in the first place.
Educating yourself on the various models, strategies, practices and skills associated with effective performance coaching can help you and your teammates reach their full potential.
