Managing vs. Coaching: Not simply a title change
I’ve had a shitty manager before. Let’s call him ‘Adam’. Before my life in Data, I worked at an accounting firm and Adam reamed me out for sitting in the center location at a conference room table during a meeting with a client. He said, “That’s the ‘power position’ and you aren’t senior enough.” Later that month, during a one-on-one he said he noticed I always left at 530pm, as if I didn’t want to be there. (spoiler alert: I didn’t).
Now, ‘Adam’ might have actually been managing my time very well. He was managing my work output, managing my billable hours, and managing my communications with clients. He might have actually believed he was acting like a manager is supposed to, and perhaps I now feel a little sorry for him because that’s the world he learned to live in. Adam was a manager; not a coach.
What is a coach, anyway? When I first arrived at Canva as a ‘coach’, I was confused too. I remember asking my own coach when I first arrived, “So you’re my manager, right?” And he chuckled a bit and responded, “Well, around here we call it a ‘coach’.”
“What?! You’re in charge of me. I’m a big boy. You’re my manager, and I’m my team’s manager.”
I had no idea what a one-word change from ‘Manager’ to ‘Coach’ could actually do for me.
Over the next several months I very quickly realized my team was full of very talented individuals. These data analysts knew their stuff and were technically very competent, many times teaching me advanced SQL I had never used! (note: never let pride get in the way of learning) I was lucky enough to be working for Canva, an online graphic design platform, where 99% of the employees are self-driven. My team did not need a manager; but they did need a coach.
In the simplest terms, I see coaching self-motivated, intelligent analysts akin to placing wind-up cars on the ground, pointing them in the right direction, and quickly removing any obstacles in their path. Sometimes the cars need a bit of a nudge to stay on course, and sometimes you need to wind those cars up again… I better kill this metaphor before I get onto Tesla self-driving cars or something. The bottom line is that as a coach, I can be more successful guiding my team than managing it.
My learned examples of the difference between managing and coaching
As the months started to go by, I began to see the various data analysts on my team analyzing experiments differently. Some would communicate in personal Slack messages back and forth with different stakeholders and some would present findings in a weekly zoom meeting. Some of the analysts were seen as lowly ‘resources’ by stakeholders and were sent Jira tickets, assigning them analysis homework. However, others were deeply involved in the ideation and design of various experiments, at times driving and recommending new product changes!
Instead of deciding upon a solution and managing the situation, I asked the engineers and analyst in one cross-functional team how they thought the ‘process’ was working. As we looked through some experiments, we noticed some that the analyst had forgotten were even running! We had a good laugh (😅) and worked out a better process where engineers could close off their tickets, create new ones for the analyst, and the analyst would end up presenting results in a fortnightly show & tell (yes, we say ‘fortnightly’ in Australia 🇦🇺). The whole process was created by the analyst and the engineers, and gave them some ‘buy-in’ so that they were invested in it succeeding. In lieu of telling them how I thought things should be, I coached them into finding their own solution.
Dealing with ‘ad-hoc’ requests as a data analyst is a never ending battle. As you grow in your career, you’ll learn coping mechanisms for dealing with these, but as one of my newer analysts found, it was overwhelming. He was stressed and beginning to work into the evenings. This may be acceptable at an accounting firm, but at a tech company like Canva, this is not the lifestyle we want to promote. During a regular one-on-one, I prodded and pulled teeth to identify these stressors and recognized I had several options:
- Start working in sprints for his work
- Set up a schedule in his calendar to carve out time for insights vs ad-hocs
- Tell his stakeholders to talk to me (protecting him)
All of these immediate options would have managed the situation, but would not have coached him toward self-sustainment. I instead brought together his team lead and his stakeholders and made them aware of the issue. His team lead then suggested that prioritization of the analyst’s tickets could best be done weekly with his Product Manager. This solution provided many wins:
- Prioritization kept him focused on one ticket at a time
- The Product Manager had better visibility into the analyst’s work and request backlog, and thus learned to protect him as well
- The team lead developed a solution to a problem, enhancing his own growth and confidence as a coach
The above examples demonstrate how coaching promotes ownership. If you simply tell people what to do, they’ll lose track of the overall goal or mission. By coaching them, they begin to own the process and the ideas, and they will grow their own confidence and ability to take the initiative.
Enjoy success with the team
I’m far from the best coach in the world, but simply by changing the name of my role to ‘Coach’ instead of ‘Manager’, it has psychologically affected the way I operate. It’s brought our mix of data analysts together into a more tightly bound team, our wind-up cars all pointed in the same direction.
I’ve learned not to be an ‘Adam’. If my coachee want to sit at the center of the conference room table and run a meeting, that’s a ‘position of power’ I’m proud for them to own.
