Part XVIII in a multipart series, to start at the beginning, goto Part I.
2012 was the year that I really began working for the VP of Operations at TWLER, Judy D. In 2011, the Chief Architect for TWLER decided to leave as the investment in the rewrite of TWLER.com was cut in half, see Part VII for more on that episode. Over the course of 2011, I became the main point of contact for the team, but didn’t completely take over till later that year.
To this point in my career, I had been leading many large Enterprise Java programs, mainly as a consultant, and had just finished an MBA. I had about 18 months of pure engineering management at United Health Group, having a team of about 25 writing online wellness programs. However, that management position didn’t end well, and I learned much and more about politics at large companies.
I did not have an extensive track record of management, but because I had spearheaded the funding effort and defined the vision for the future Ecommerce platform, I became the manager of the team and was promoted to Director. Much of the work we did is detailed here, or will be detailed here in the future, today the discussion is about having a great manager as coach.
I’m going to say, as a manager, I was very rough. During my time at UHG, I had four managers in 18 months, so I received very little direction or coaching. As the lead Architect and Engineer on many programs, I was only interested in software competency and delivering systems. If you couldn’t help me do that, you were dead to me. I was rightly accused of being blunt, straightforward and lacking empathy at this point in my career. I didn’t really care, I knew how to hire great engineers, build teams where everyone had fun while delivering more than asked, and being a total pain-in-the-ass to whoever was lucky enough to manage me.
But Judy decided to invest her time and started giving me feedback on how I was acting and how I was being perceived. It was the first time in my career that someone had explained perception being reality, not logic and data. In meetings with the VPs and Senior Directors in IT, I would get worked up because they knew how to push my buttons. Once you’re in attack mode, you’ve lost the room; everyone thinks that if you can’t manage yourself here, you must not be a good manager overall. Judy helped me understand how to deflect criticisms and attacks on my project’s direction, by acknowledging the speakers point, and then presenting why I thought our direction would work. Never directly saying the other person was wrong, just that our current direction was working.
Learning the managerial arts of controlling meetings, protecting my reputation, and letting others be right (even when they were wrong), helped my project thrive by giving me the tools to fend off the IT team without offending them or giving them ammunition to take back to their leaders.
Judy always took the high road, she didn’t care if others were being assholes, it wasn’t an excuse to be an asshole too. She would always let me know she’s heard about my latest escapades at meetings across the company. She no longer wanted to hear negative news; she only wanted to hear how I was helping people, nothing else.
This process was long; Judy would debrief me after meetings and point out exactly where I lost the room and when I went off on a rant. But I was willing to listen, and I corrected my mistakes. Over time, it was as if I had been in management my entire career. I had learned to manage my reactions, while also managing the outcomes of the meetings and the perception of my team and myself.
I can’t thank Judy enough for the coaching effort she put in to teach me to be a Director at TWLER, and later a VP for Fortune 100 companies.
Goto Part XIX