Engineering Leadership and Management
Leadership is an exploration of the unknown. Some days are filled with fantastic discoveries and others find you face to face with what feels like insurmountable obstacles. I’ve lived through a lot of those tough days, and I’d like to help you get through them.
I believe the path to high functioning organizations with a sustainable leadership model lies in strengthening your team’s management practice. This means investing in foundational skills, sharpening communication skills, building a First Team mentality, and creating frameworks to assist your team with difficult conversations and decisions.
Strengthening Your Team’s Management Practice
- Leadership Coaching: Is your current team the largest group of humans you’ve ever managed? Are you struggling with scaling yourself to meet the needs of your team or peers? Maybe you’re dealing with a tricky human problem, or just trying to gain some confidence in a time of uncertainty. I’ve experienced the journey of managing a team of 3 to an organization of 85+ and all the ups and downs that go along with it. I’d love to use those experiences to support you in navigating your growth and leadership development.
- Communication: Helping your team understand the urgency and importance of their work is key to keeping them motivated and aligned with the business. Whether it’s a company pivot, roadmap change, or reorg, I can help you craft inspiring narratives, develop solid talking points, and help you prepare for the inevitable questions that come with uncertainty and change.
- Fostering a First Team: When you bring your team together, are they all typing on their keyboards instead of engaging with their peers? Do you find that items on your team’s task list get kicked over week after week? Teamwork at the leadership level enables you to do hard things, but getting your leaders to work together isn’t always easy. During this multi-week engagement, I’ll embed with your engineering managers and leaders to understand the challenges preventing your leadership team from working as a cohesive unit, and help you develop a plan to create a First Team.
- Framework Development and Analysis: Good frameworks are powerful tools that reduce the cognitive load of getting things done. They enable you to channel the energies of your team into productive and pleasantly surprising ways. Does your team know when and how to introduce new technologies? Do your new managers know what a year in management looks like? From documenting your unwritten rules to setting up career ladders or interview processes, I can help you develop frameworks that normalize your preferred practices so your team can spend less time on minutia and can focus their energies on things that really matter.
Diversity and Inclusion
- Bootstrapping Inclusion: If you’re struggling with hiring members of underrepresented groups or just wondering how to get started, I can help. I’ve lead an organization that went from zero women/non-binary folks to mid 30% and have real world experience in developing and implementing strategies and programs to achieve more inclusive workplaces and equitable outcomes. From developing Diversity and Inclusion as a business value to allyship and benefits analysis, I can work with you to move beyond unconscious bias training and into an action plan that gets results.
- Diversity and Inclusion Specific Coaching and Advice: If you’re new to thinking about Diversity and Inclusion or just need help along the way, I can provide coaching and advice from my 6+ years of building diverse and inclusive teams. Whether it’s doing the difficult work of examining your own biases and how they affect your leadership, having someone to answer your uncomfortable questions, or just needing a sanity check, I have a wealth of experience to draw upon to help you.