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Coaching Yourself: Career Coaching Personas for Everyday Engineers, Part One - The Available Manager

Summary

This episode introduces the concept of self-coaching for engineers, challenging the common expectation that managers should be primary career coaches. The host explains that managers are often incentivized to retain employees and achieve company results rather than prioritize individual career growth. Therefore, engineers should cultivate multiple sources of coaching, including external career coaches and a proactive relationship with their manager.

The core idea is adopting a ‘coaching mindset’ by using intentional personas, similar to Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats.’ This involves stepping outside one’s natural perspective to gain clarity. The episode focuses on the first persona: the ‘Available Manager’ (or ‘Your Manager’s Better Half’). This persona is the opposite of the typical ‘Busy Manager’ and helps engineers prepare for effective conversations with their actual manager.

The ‘Available Manager’ persona involves asking yourself three key questions adapted from the book The Coaching Habit: ‘What’s on your mind?’, ‘And what else?’, and critically, ‘What can I do for you?‘. This final question forces you to consider what your actual manager realistically has the agency to change, moving from vague complaints or frustrations to specific, actionable requests. The goal is to recognize that your manager is just one lever for change among many, and to develop a more strategic approach to getting the support you need.

Recommendations

Books

  • The Coaching Habit — Referenced as the source for the seven coaching questions. The episode focuses on three of them: ‘What’s on your mind?’, ‘And what else?’, and ‘What can I do for you?’ for the self-coaching exercise.

Concepts

  • de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats — Presented as a analogous framework to the self-coaching mindset. It’s a method for adopting different perspectives (like the White Hat for objectivity) by intentionally ‘wearing’ different colored hats to separate ego from the thinking process.

Tools

  • Wix Studio — The episode’s sponsor. Described as a developer-first website builder with a node-based editor, VS Code-based IDE or local GitHub integration, AI code assistant, and auto-maintained infrastructure for easier full-stack JavaScript development.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — The flawed expectation of managers as primary career coaches — The episode opens by addressing the common hope that a good manager will act as a career coach. It immediately challenges this notion, explaining that managers are primarily incentivized to keep employees at the company and achieve specific results, not necessarily to foster individual career growth. This sets the stage for the need for alternative coaching sources.
  • 00:03:01 — Introducing the self-coaching mindset and its benefits — The host shifts focus from coaching others to coaching oneself. He proposes adopting coaching practices for self-reflection and preparation to interact with situations more effectively. This self-coaching habit is presented as useful not just for solving hard problems, but for gaining perspective in everyday situations, especially since a manager may not be available or incentivized to help with all topics.
  • 00:06:38 — The coaching mindset compared to de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats — The self-coaching concept is compared to Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ method. The idea is to intentionally adopt a specific mindset or perspective different from one’s ego or natural identity. By ‘wearing a different hat,’ you can mentally switch roles, reducing ego involvement and allowing for clearer, more objective thinking, which is the foundation for the self-coaching personas to be introduced.
  • 00:11:48 — Introducing the first self-coaching persona: The Available Manager — The host introduces the first specific persona: the ‘Available Manager’ (also called ‘Your Manager’s Better Half’). This persona is defined in contrast to the ‘Busy Manager,’ who wants prepared, specific requests. The Available Manager persona is used when you’re trying to work through a difficult issue and need to prepare for a conversation with your actual manager.
  • 00:13:42 — The three key questions from the Available Manager persona — The persona utilizes three questions borrowed from The Coaching Habit. First, ‘What’s on your mind?’ to identify immediate concerns. Second, ‘And what else?’ to uncover deeper, more impactful problems. Finally, the critical question: ‘What can I do for you?’ This forces you to consider what your actual manager realistically has the power and agency to change, moving from frustration to actionable requests.
  • 00:16:50 — Applying the persona to real scenarios like burnout — The host applies the persona to a concrete example: feeling burnt out due to relentless project deadlines. Instead of complaining about unmovable deadlines, the persona helps reframe the request. You might ask your manager for an extended weekend or for someone to help shoulder the delivery load—things they potentially can affect. The mindset shift helps recognize that managers can’t fix all problems but are one of several levers for change.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2024-11-04T08:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:19:44

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] One of the things we hope for in a good manager is someone who can help coach us

[00:00:21] in our careers, someone who can help us grow, who can help us achieve our goals.

[00:00:26] They can help us move from one position in the company to the next or maybe

[00:00:33] prepare us for a transition to another company altogether. And so often this is

[00:00:40] what we imagine our managers, you know, kind of their main role is. And this is

[00:00:46] flawed, unfortunately. And we actually discussed some of the reasons why this

[00:00:51] kind of thinking is flawed on a recent episode with Brian Pulliam. Brian is

[00:00:56] a career coach. In fact, I would call him my career coach. And the short version is

[00:01:01] that your manager, they are incentivized. They are incentivized to keep

[00:01:07] you at the company. They are not primarily incentivized to encourage your

[00:01:14] career growth. Instead, they are primarily incentivized to get certain

[00:01:19] results. In a well-managed company, those results are clearly understood. The

[00:01:25] outcomes are clearly understood and you set goals that help you kind of walk

[00:01:30] that pathway and keep you accountable to goals that the company cares about you

[00:01:35] hitting. But those goals don’t always necessarily mean career growth or career

[00:01:40] success for you. They don’t mean that you are walking the pathway towards what you

[00:01:45] ultimately want in your career. So I believe that having multiple sources of

[00:01:52] coaching is a useful, kind of a useful approach. So what do I mean by that?

[00:01:59] Well, it’s useful to have an external career coach for the reasons that we’ve

[00:02:05] talked about, specifically that they have, you know, their primary incentive is to

[00:02:10] help you. It’s also useful to develop that relationship with your manager, not

[00:02:16] necessarily because you’re going to get the, you know, best, most stellar coaching

[00:02:20] from your manager, but instead because that develops a professional relationship

[00:02:24] with your manager where they are more likely to help you. They’re more likely

[00:02:29] to help you if you are actively engaging in conversations about growth, actively

[00:02:34] engaging in conversations about what your goals are, what your personal

[00:02:37] aspirations are versus just waiting on them. If you’re just waiting on your

[00:02:43] manager to show up one day and start that conversation, you’re probably going

[00:02:47] to be unfortunately disappointed. But there’s this aspect of coaching or the

[00:02:54] coaching mindset that I believe is helpful for all engineers to learn. Now,

[00:03:01] am I saying that you need to learn how to coach other people? Maybe along the

[00:03:06] way you accidentally do pick up that skill that will be useful in your more

[00:03:10] senior roles. It might be useful if you transition into an engineering manager

[00:03:14] role, but instead, what I’m really wanting you to focus on is how you can

[00:03:21] adopt some of the same practices that a coach might adopt for yourself, for

[00:03:27] your self-reflection, for preparation, for identifying, you know, how can you

[00:03:32] interact with a given situation in a more effective manner? That’s what we’re

[00:03:36] talking about in this episode and probably in a couple of upcoming

[00:03:40] episodes of the show, this idea that you can adopt some of the practices of

[00:03:44] coaching and apply them back to yourself. Now, why would you want to do this?

[00:03:50] But we kind of already said in the beginning of the episode, the reason that

[00:03:53] you might care to do this is because your manager is probably not going to be

[00:03:59] A, available and B, incentivized to help you work through all of the, you know,

[00:04:05] the topics that you might work through using some of these kind of coaching

[00:04:09] techniques that we’re going to talk about. The second important factor here

[00:04:14] is that you don’t necessarily have to just engage in coaching, that this kind

[00:04:19] of self-coaching habit that we’re going to be talking about. You don’t have to

[00:04:23] engage in that only in order to solve a tactical problem that can’t be solved

[00:04:28] some other way. This kind of thinking can be useful in your day-to-day normal,

[00:04:35] you know, kind of everyday situations, stepping into, and we’re going to talk a

[00:04:39] little bit more about this in this episode, but stepping into this role and

[00:04:44] using it as kind of a thinking mode can be useful for gaining perspective in any

[00:04:51] situation, not necessarily just the really hard ones where you wish you could tap a

[00:04:54] coach in to help you out. So what does it mean to, to engage in self-coaching?

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[00:06:38] So what is the coaching mindset or this self-coaching that we’ve been talking

[00:06:45] about in this episode? Well, I’m going to compare this to something that we’ve

[00:06:52] talked about on the show before. It’s Debono’s six thinking hats. And the idea

[00:06:57] that Debono had was to intentionally adopt a mindset or a specific kind of

[00:07:04] frame or point of view and his specific frames and points of view.

[00:07:11] He represents them with six different colors. And there’s a seventh hat.

[00:07:14] We’ll talk about that in a second. The six colors are the white hat,

[00:07:18] which is neutral objectivity. You know, think about it like a blank sheet of

[00:07:22] paper. Neutral and objective, concerned with data, facts, figures, and

[00:07:26] information. We’re actually going to use this, something very similar to the white

[00:07:32] hat in our self-coaching. The other ones, and I’ll go through these quickly,

[00:07:36] there’s the red hat, which represents emotion, the yellow hat, which represents

[00:07:40] benefit or optimism, the green hat, which represents ideas.

[00:07:45] You can imagine this being kind of the innovative thinker or, you know,

[00:07:50] the creative thinker. The blue hat is planning or process control.

[00:07:58] And then the black hat is judgment or logical narrative or not logical

[00:08:03] negative, rather. And all of these have some potential benefit of using them.

[00:08:11] And the basic idea of Debono’s six hats is that when we are acting as ourselves,

[00:08:18] we get our ego wrapped up into the equation. And I’m going to use the same

[00:08:22] basis, the same argument for our self-coaching investments.

[00:08:28] So, you know, if you are given the opportunity or the license to wear one

[00:08:34] of these hats, your job has now changed. Instead of being, you know, your ego,

[00:08:40] your typical way of operating, maybe your identity is to be a creative person,

[00:08:46] or maybe your identity is to be the optimist, or maybe you have the identity

[00:08:53] of being the one who is very strategically minded and you are quick to

[00:09:00] find, you know, flaws or issues in a plan.

[00:09:04] But if you are given a hat that is different from your ego, then you have

[00:09:09] this kind of mental switch, right? This mental switch.

[00:09:13] I don’t really have any research to back this, but this is at least the concept

[00:09:19] that Debono suggests. The idea is that you are adopting this and you’re trying

[00:09:25] to play your part well now, right? The pride, you know, the psychological side

[00:09:31] of our pride has now changed to instead of being myself and portraying my ego

[00:09:38] and identity, you know, perfectly well, I instead want to do this task that’s

[00:09:44] been given to me. I want to wear this hat that’s been given to me and do that

[00:09:48] very well. So the person who is typically creative may easily or at least more

[00:09:55] easily slip into the logical negative, you know, seat. And someone who may be

[00:10:02] highly creative or ideas driven may slip into the objective seat. And these are

[00:10:08] very different functional roles than we might naturally play. And the seventh hat

[00:10:13] we mentioned, by the way, is the invested owner, right? This is the person who

[00:10:19] wants the best outcome. They are, you know, seeking objectivity but they’re doing so

[00:10:24] through a subjective lens. A slightly different kind of hat and not

[00:10:29] necessarily, you know, part of the original Debono’s six hats. But this hat

[00:10:35] can be useful because it’s kind of the executive hat. And in our kind of, you

[00:10:39] know, metaphorical model that we’re using that’s a shadow of this, we’re

[00:10:44] going to assume that the owner is kind of you. It’s your original ego. You’re the

[00:10:49] one that’s invested in the outcomes of your own self coaching. Okay, so the

[00:10:54] basic kind of format here is that you’ll have some perspective that you are

[00:10:59] intentionally adopting that is different than your own kind of natural

[00:11:03] perspective. Now, there’s no way that we can ever fully, you know, set aside our

[00:11:09] own perspectives. But this is in similar manner to Debono’s hats. You are stepping

[00:11:15] outside of what you would normally do. And we’ve talked about things like this

[00:11:20] on the show before where you adopt a different perspective. Where you adopt,

[00:11:25] you use kind of these mental tricks to adopt an outsider’s perspective, for

[00:11:29] example, to help you see things more clearly. And for the sake of this series

[00:11:36] or at least this episode and likely more episodes about this subject, we’re going

[00:11:42] to call these personas. These are kind of self coaching personas. So the

[00:11:48] first persona we’re going to talk about today is the available manager. The

[00:11:53] available manager. I fought myself over calling this your manager’s better half.

[00:11:59] So if you want to use that phrasing for your notes so it’s easier to

[00:12:04] remember, then use that. But the available manager. So what is this

[00:12:09] particular kind of coaching persona? Well, the opposite of this is the busy manager.

[00:12:14] The busy manager. What does a busy manager want you to do? The busy manager

[00:12:18] wants you to come prepared, come with specific requests. You’re not working

[00:12:24] through your thoughts with a busy manager or at least you’re not doing that in a

[00:12:29] way that is effective if, you know, if you’re engaging with this persona,

[00:12:35] right? Your manager is probably busy. This is just kind of a fact of life for

[00:12:41] the average manager. Now, it may be the case that you have a good coaching

[00:12:47] manager, but if you are like most people, especially if you yourself are a manager

[00:12:52] and your manager is somebody like a director or a higher level executive,

[00:12:56] they likely have a lot more going on and their engagement with you is going to be

[00:13:02] most effective if you can come with as specific of requests and recommendations

[00:13:08] as you possibly can. So in this case, this persona we’re going to point it at

[00:13:13] you’re trying to work through a difficult issue. Okay, that is what this

[00:13:19] persona is. And what you’re going to do with this persona, you’re going to adopt

[00:13:23] the mindset of a coach that is specifically trying to help a person work

[00:13:29] through their own problem. This is kind of meta here for a second. So again,

[00:13:33] imagine that you are treating yourself as if you’re in the other chair. And what

[00:13:39] you want to know, you start with a couple of questions and these are questions

[00:13:42] that we are kind of borrowing from the book, The Coaching Habit. Go and look

[00:13:47] that book up if you want to learn a little bit more about coaching more

[00:13:50] generally. The Coaching Habit has seven questions. We’re going to focus in on

[00:13:54] only a couple of those questions. Okay, the first is what’s on your mind?

[00:13:59] Alright, so imagine, you know, kind of evaluating what is it that is really

[00:14:04] sticking out to me? What is actually something that I’m concerned about? What

[00:14:08] do I really want to talk to my manager about? Okay, so you’re kind of having this

[00:14:13] back and forth conversation with yourself. So what is on your mind? You

[00:14:17] can do this in kind of a written format if it’s helpful. But, you know, answer

[00:14:21] this question, what’s on your mind? And then move forward with, and what else?

[00:14:27] Okay, this is another question from The Coaching Habit, and what else? And

[00:14:31] usually, the things that are on your mind, top of mind, are more tactical.

[00:14:38] Alright, they’re more immediately present or things that are happening

[00:14:43] today. And then the things that you answer with, and what else, are the

[00:14:46] deeper problems? Okay, and it’s up to you. Which one of these do you care

[00:14:50] about focusing in on? Usually, you know, very good coaches will focus in on

[00:14:55] the second ones because they’re more long-term, more impactful. But it’s

[00:15:02] totally up to you in this case. You may have a really tactical problem that you

[00:15:06] want to get some kind of resolution or help from your manager on. So answer

[00:15:12] this question, what else is on your mind? And then I want you to ask the

[00:15:16] question, what can I do for you? What can I do for you? And in this case, you

[00:15:23] are imagining that you have the power, the position, the sway, that you are

[00:15:30] essentially your own, whoever your actual manager is. What can I do for

[00:15:35] you? And the critical thing that I want you to capture from this particular

[00:15:39] persona is the idea that sometimes we go to our managers with requests or

[00:15:45] complaints that they themselves don’t have much agency to change. And so they

[00:15:52] have to figure out, okay, what is it about this that I can affect? If you do a

[00:15:58] little bit of work in advance to try to figure out, okay, what can my manager do

[00:16:03] for me? Not just what do I want them to do for me, but what can they do for me?

[00:16:10] Right? So that is the persona that you want to adopt. What can I do for you? And

[00:16:15] then answer that question thoughtfully. What can my manager actually do in this

[00:16:21] scenario to help me? Sometimes the answer turns out to be nothing. And sometimes

[00:16:27] then what we’re actually looking for is commiseration, to share our thoughts and

[00:16:33] feelings and to express something more like frustration rather than a request.

[00:16:40] So then perhaps the better thing to do instead of sharing a frustration that

[00:16:45] your manager doesn’t really have the agency to fix, is to consider what routes

[00:16:50] would help your frustration and determine whether your manager can

[00:16:55] actually affect those routes. So maybe you’re burnt out and you’re burnt out

[00:17:01] because this project has relentless deadlines. And maybe your manager can’t

[00:17:05] change those deadlines. That’s very possible and very common. But what you

[00:17:10] really need is a little bit of a break. Maybe you need someone else to

[00:17:16] come in and shoulder some of the delivery for this deadline. Or, you know,

[00:17:22] maybe all you really need is an extended weekend to shift some of your

[00:17:26] hours around. Try to determine what it is that you can ask your manager to do

[00:17:31] for you that they can turn around and actually affect change for you. What this

[00:17:36] will allow you to do, or kind of the mindset shift that I’m trying to

[00:17:40] encourage when you adopt this persona, is to recognize that your manager doesn’t

[00:17:47] fix all of your problems. They can’t even possibly fix all of your problems.

[00:17:52] And often we imagine that our managers have all of the keys to our career

[00:17:58] potential. They have the keys to our promotion, to our pay. Maybe they have the

[00:18:03] keys to all of our workload. They are the representative of our company to us. But

[00:18:10] the truth is so much different than that. Anyone who is a manager knows this is

[00:18:14] the case. And so by adopting the hat of being your manager, adopting the

[00:18:20] perception that you have the limitations they have, perhaps you can develop a more

[00:18:27] fully faceted strategy, that your manager is one of the many possible

[00:18:32] ways that you can affect the change that you’re trying to affect. Thank you so

[00:18:38] much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to today’s

[00:18:41] sponsor Wix. When you hear website builder, I want you to think new. They

[00:18:48] are no longer the antiquated tools that we remember just in our nightmares.

[00:18:53] Instead, Wix Studio’s developer-first ecosystem allows you to spend less time

[00:18:58] on tedious tasks and more on functionality and business logic that

[00:19:02] matters the most to you or your clients. Develop online in a VS code-based IDE or

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[00:19:14] Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship faster with

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[00:19:24] infrastructure for total peace of mind. Work in developer-first ecosystem at

[00:19:28] wixstudio.com. That’s w-i-x studio.com. Thanks so much for listening to this

[00:19:34] episode and until next time, enjoy your tea.

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