What if you could design your work relationships and your teams as effectively as you could design your software and your products? What might be possible?
Imagine you see a problem or opportunity on the team — you've discovered your chance to take initiative and shine! When you share your proposal, instead of encountering support, you get shut down. “You didn't think about this particular case,” a senior engineering leader tells you. Rather than hiding and giving up, you ask powerful questions to discover what's truly important for the project and also share what's important to you. You find shared alignment around the goals of the project and use that as a strong foundation to build on, feeling good that as long as you get what's important right, everyone will be onboard.
Or imagine you're working with a product manager who regularly leaves you out of project discussions. She tells you what engineering work needs to be done and sometimes even micromanages your work. You don't feel like a real partner on the project. Instead of resenting her behavior, you have a conversation to explicitly redesign your working relationship. You share what's important to you — playing a more active role in project decisions — and ask what's important to her. It turns she would actually really love your input and involvement. She had assumed incorrectly that you weren't interested in the meetings and had been working to shield your valuable engineering time. Together you identify what discussions you'd like to be part of and which ones you'd rather leave her to handle — and you both feel more excited about working together. Clearing the assumptions turns a wobbly relationship into a powerful alliance.
Or imagine you're meeting one-on-one with someone on your team or who reports to you. It'd be easy to just fall into a default pattern of sharing status updates. Instead, you use powerful questions to dig deep into where the person wants to grow in his career in next few years. With that newfound clarity, you explicitly design together how the team's projects can support those goals. You've been wanting to delegate some of the tasks that have been on your plate, and you're now able to reframe certain tasks and projects to him as opportunities for professional growth. You both leave the meeting feeling more supported and more aligned.
To design software and build products effectively, we explicitly define our goals, focus on what's important, and share our assumptions and our feedback. When we don't, our software solves the wrong problems or ends up being fragile.
The same holds true for our relationships at work. When we explicitly define our goals, identify what's important, and clear our assumptions, we design and build high-trust relationships that make everything else easier.
And as a leader, building high-trust relationships through powerful conversations is the most effective way to create meaningful work, achieve your mission, and produce exceptional work.
The workshop had a lot of valuable insights about effective communication and some tools specifically for getting to the root of what motivates people. Techniques like asking powerful questions have helped me in interpersonal relationships. I can imagine how it could add value to my team at work—I want all of them to take it! I would definitely recommend this workshop not only to current and aspiring engineering managers, but to anyone who wants to improve their everyday communication at work.
Edmond and Jean came across as well-planned, cohesive co-presenters. They both have the ability to break complex conversations to simple, first-principles based approach. It was an insightful day which provided the right amount of actionable tools for the attendees to build upon. I highly recommend them!
Earlier in our careers, we used to believe that just being great at our technical skills was good enough. We thought managers were people we just checked in with periodically and that it'd be nice if we could get some feedback from time to time. We thought that tech leads could just focus on the technical issues and that someone else would take care of the people-related issues—or better yet, maybe they'd just go away on their own!
But we've each been fortunate enough to have opportunities to work with exceptional leaders we fully trusted. And we've had people tell us that they would follow us wherever we went.
That trust was built, and when there's trust, hard things become easy.
You can give direct, candid feedback—even when it's negative—that actually leaves the other person feeling more supported and more excited to work with you.
You can stop wasting all your mental and emotional energy second guessing each other's motivations—and instead feel empowered to clear up any assumptions that you might have about them.
You can ask for 100% of what you want and need—and know that the other person will do the same—and then work creatively from that shared understanding to open up new possibilities.
You can empower people to close the gaps that you see—rather than feeling like you have to micro-manage and close them on your own.
With that level of trust, exceptional results become possible.
On some level, of course, we all know that trust is important. But we're all held back by one limiting belief.
And so we might hold weekly, hour-long one-on-one conversations—and yet still walk out of each one not feeling that the level of trust has increased. Building trust feels slow. Or we may even avoid having the conversations in the first place because it feels like too much work—there are features to build and products to ship.
In reality, trust comes from making implicit things explicit—and huge levels of trust can be built over even a 30-minute conversation.
Trust comes from asking powerful questions that get at what's actually important to the other person. It comes from clearing the stories and assumptions we make up that add friction and hold us back from what's actually true. It comes from delivering real and honest feedback that demonstrates you truly care about the other person's success.
This might seem like a mystical art—we used to think so too.
But in the past year, we've trained with the Coaches Training Institute to be leadership coaches, and we've coached people ranging from tech leads and managers to directors, VPs, and CTOs.
And we've discovered something important:
The keys to building strong relationships are both teachable and learnable.
Those keys have completely transformed how we and those we work with build teams and build products. And we want to share them with you.
You'll learn tools for how to have powerful conversations that deepen and build trust — whether it's with teammates, direct reports, or managers. Through a series of demos, exercises, and discussions, you'll leave feeling confident and empowered to turn any source of tension into an opportunity for deeper trust.
You'll learn:
* How to ask powerful questions that go deep quickly,
* How to listen for what the other person values,
* How to hear what's not being said,
* How to discover what's important to other stakeholders for the success of a project,
* How to coach other engineers,
* How to explicitly design your relationships as alliances,
* And more.
Limited spots available.
Edmond's Engineering Manager Workshop was phenomenal. Just phenomenal. Not one minute was wasted, and all the takeaways are being used in our company today. We spent time diving into coaching tactics and walked away with techniques that we could use in our daily routines. He started by demoing a sample 1:1 conversation with a colleague and nearly brought all of us to tears. Then, he guided us though having tough conversations with each other and gave us the tools to build upon the content of those conversations and what we heard. By the end of the workshop, we were closer as a team, more confident as a group, better listeners, and ready to have more meaningful conversations with our reports or with anyone who has a relationship with us.
Looking for the in-person version of this workshop? Join us on April 4th, 2018 in San Francisco!
Can't make this workshop but interested in future in-person or remote workshops? Let us know, and we'll keep you posted.
“I thought I already had good, creative ways for getting at the gist of discussions, but I learned from the workshop that there's so much more to be improved. One thing I've realized is, in navigating anything beyond mid-sized engineering orgs, there's friction because of people and communication. Even if I have the best idea, if people don't agree or if they're not convinced, they won't buy into it.
The workshop taught me powerful questions and tools to focus discussions to get more from the same amount of time and to get at the heart of what people really care about. I would strongly recommend the workshop to anyone who's interested in engineering leadership."
“Jean is incredibly insightful and supportive. When working through a personal growth edge, Jean asks questions that help me dig deep, uncover assumptions, and discover new perspectives. Jean has a special way of asking questions and probing so that I am more aware of my own strengths and ability to solve my own challenges. It’s a real pleasure to work with someone who doesn’t just guide you towards solutions but convinces you that you already have the confidence and self-compassion to succeed. Working with Jean has truly helped me level-up as a manager and be a better leader for my team!”
What does it mean for this to be an experiential workshop?
It means that you'll be actively engaged and participating to really deepen the learning from the workshop. This is not going to be a passive seminar where you're sitting back.
Is this workshop for me?
If you work with other people and can see how you might benefit from having stronger relationships with them, you should definitely consider this workshop. It doesn't matter whether you're leading formally or informally, whether you're managing people or not, or whether you have prior leadership experience. We'll provide a strong, shared foundation during the workshop and create a safe space for people of all levels to build their skills. Previous workshop attendees have ranged from individual contributors (engineers, data scientists, and PMs) to senior leaders (managers and directors).
How does this online workshop differ from the full-day, in-person version?
We've figured out how to transform the core parts of our in-person workshop experiences into equally powerful, online experiences. We've also condensed the material and removed some of the paired activities.
What do I need for the online workshop?
You'll need 3.5 hours of uninterrupted time in a quiet place, with a reliable Internet connection for video. Bring an open mind and a willingness to experiment and learn.
What if something comes up last-minute and I can't attend?
We'll be sad not to see you there, but you can give your ticket to another friend.
What are good strategies for convincing my manager to let me take this?
The most important thing is to ask. In fact, show them this page. One of our previous workshop participants wasn't a manager and thought that the workshop wasn't directly relevant to her work, but when she asked her manager, he just said, “Of course. Sign up right away.”
What if I can't make it to this workshop, but am interested in future workshops or courses?
Let us know, and we'll keep you posted about future opportunities.