Tag: management

Solution-Oriented Coaching, or the Lost Art of Effective Conversations

Solution-Oriented Coaching, or the Lost Art of Effective Conversations

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on August 23, 2023

After spending more than a decade in different managerial roles and learning various aspects of the job, I came to the conclusion that as a manager, conversations are the ultimate tools of the trade. They enable you to direct, motivate, and engage people, and to pull information from the environment.

I realized at some point that many managers, myself included, were too reliant on gut feelings during decision making, or were biased in searching for problems to solve in teams or in people—and therefore self-prophesying problems—which was not always constructive. I was able to track down this behavior to a simple lack of rigor and effectiveness when conducting conversations.

It’s amazing how many companies do not train their managers, or when they do, train them poorly on how to conduct a conversation effectively so that it will lead to results. So I started looking for better solutions to making my direct reports accountable for their work, giving direction and motivation, and supporting them along the way, specifically via conversations.

On that journey, I stumbled upon a therapy framework called Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, or SFBT for short, and it has changed the way I interact with people at work so much that I decided to write this article so I could share my experience.

This article is the culmination of my personal journey with SFBT over the past three years. It covers the basics of SFBT, how I’ve used it in the workplace, and the some limitations I’ve encountered. The article concludes with a long list of resources, many of which are free, to help you dive further into SFBT.

For the rest of this article, I will refer to SFBT applied to coaching and management as Solution-Focused Coaching, to make it clear that I do not want to go into the realm of therapy, given that I am neither trained or medically licensed for it, and that providing therapy is not my role as a peer or manager in a workplace environment.

Finally before jumping into the topic, I want to clarify that almost the entirety of the ideas presented in this article are not mine. They come from various therapists and clinicians who practiced and honed those techniques and shared about their findings in books and articles. I do not claim to take credit for any of those ideas, my main contribution here is that I am trying to bridge the usage of those techniques from a therapeutic setup into a workplace setup, and I am also sharing my personal experiences and findings in doing so.

The field of SFBT is gigantic, and in this article I will only be able to cover the surface. My goal is not that by the end you would be fully trained, but rather, that you would see the benefits for yourself to use those techniques, and that it would motivate you to spend more time on learning SFBT. So in short, this article is my attempt at selling you to the benefits of SFBT.

Learn Street Epistemology To Deal With Difficult People at Work

Learn Street Epistemology To Deal With Difficult People at Work

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on December 20, 2021

Dealing with a stubborn coworker is something most of us dread. “Oh man, I have to talk to that guy again, ugh…” you tell yourself, especially in cases where you don’t have much leverage on the situation or the person.

And sometimes, the person you deal with seems somewhat reasonable, but the two of you see things so differently that you can’t seem to reach any agreement or even start to understand why your respective conclusions are so far apart.

Imagine you’re at work and you’re facing some of the following conversations:

An engineer tells you he strongly believes that project X doesn’t make any sense, because technology W is not good enough for it.
A product manager tells you he is absolutely convinced that using a certain approach to roll out a new feature is doomed to failure.
An engineering manager who reports to you is saying that without any doubts, person P on her team is really not good enough and is underperforming.

Ever been in a situation like that? I bet you have.

And what do these situations have in common? They’re all opinions and beliefs that people are dumping on you without context or facts.

When faced by such a situation, it’s tempting to shove it into someone’s face that they’re wrong, and press it to the point that it’s painful for them. There’s a certain satisfaction that we all get from “being right.” I know it, because I’ve done this myself in the past, and I’m not proud of it.

That’s also what most people do: they just reply with whatever opinions they have in their own minds at that moment. And the hope is that after some time of throwing opinions at each other’s face, the argument is going to sort itself out and help the two parties come to an agreement, or at least, to an understanding.

But reality is often very different from that, and without a more structured and pragmatic approach to such conversations, you’ll end up making decisions based on social status, feelings, beliefs, and personal preferences, which is the total opposite of what you want to do if you wish to make rational decisions.

My intent with this article is to introduce you to a conversation technique called street epistemology.

Many introductions to street epistemology have been written, and my key contribution here is to localize the technique so you can learn to use it specifically in a work environment. In particular, it will do wonders with colleagues with whom you have little leverage, generally because they are above you in the org chart—like your manager or your manager’s manager—or because they sit in a sister organization in which you have little political weight.

In this article, I will first briefly cover some examples of epistemologies to give you more context, then I’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to use street epistemology in a workplace environment. Finally, I have added plenty of links and materials at the end of this article if you want to dive further into the topic.

How to Get Your Silent 1-on-1s Back on Track

How to Get Your Silent 1-on-1s Back on Track

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on September 9, 2021

During 1-on-1 meetings, I’ve often had a direct report who says “I have nothing to share” or “nothing from my side this week.”

When I was still an inexperienced manager, I would reply “okay great, let’s end the meeting and go back to work then!” However, after more years of running 1-on-1’s with dozens of different personalities, I’ve learned that ending the meeting is always the wrong thing to do.

Over time, I’ve developed a list of questions that I keep readily available in a corner of my mind in case those situations arise, as a way to unblock them and generate more insightful discussions. In this article, I’m sharing my approach.

The Most Important Step Of Every Great Conversation

The Most Important Step Of Every Great Conversation

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on September 1, 2021

If you’re like me, chances are you walked into many high-stakes conversations without even realizing what was at stake, and without having either a goal or a game plan on how to achieve that goal.

And then, you walked out without understanding what the heck just happened and why everything turned out so wrong.

Having good conversations is a skill. You need to keep track of all of your interlocutors’ signals including values, beliefs, arguments, body language, logical fallacies, and so on, while keeping track of your own presence and communication.

So if on top of that you realize mid-flight that you didn’t plan exactly what preferred outcome you wanted from the interaction, then it’s game over.

Entering a conversation with a goal can be the deal-breaker that will make the conversation a success for both parties, or a drag and the beginning of a conflict.

Most shortcomings can be avoided by preparing and practicing the art of conversation, and by taking care of the most important step of all.

Burnout Is Real, and It’s No Picnic

Burnout Is Real, and It’s No Picnic

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on July 28, 2021

Every knowledge worker will face burnout, or have coworkers who do. Here I share what I’ve learned about it as an engineering manager.

The Skills Map of Senior Tech Career Progression

The Skills Map of Senior Tech Career Progression

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on July 15, 2021

Peter Drucker—the founder of modern management—said in his 1999 article “Managing Oneself” that knowledge workers should plan their second career well ahead of time.

That’s admirable advice.

Except that for the rest of us, planning our first career is already a major life struggle.

And I can talk at length from my own experience. A little more than ten years ago, back when I was still a naive junior engineer, career progression was a very nebulous concept.

Now that I’m at a point where I’m managing other tech managers, I’ve gained enough perspective on the topic that I can share valuable insights that my younger self would have loved to hear and learn.

In a previous article, I covered why soft skills matter and how they can make your career stagnate if you don’t address them. I also shared what the next job roles are from the senior developer role.

I wanted to create a simple representation to enable anyone with a career in tech to grasp how career progression looks like and what it requires.

In the rest of this article, I’m presenting a skills map of career progression, starting all the way from the senior developer role. This map covers both the individual contributor and managerial career paths.

Remote Work Stole Our Foundation

Remote Work Stole Our Foundation

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on June 29, 2021

I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal remote work setup lately, and also about the organizational setup that my tech teams are using to work together.

When most of us still worked in collocated office spaces, there were many organizational features that we didn’t even realize were there and that we took for granted.

And it doesn’t matter that the pandemic started more than a year ago. It’s never too late to reflect on what can still be improved, and apply changes for the better.

I distilled it down to the following features.

Becoming a Manager of Managers

Becoming a Manager of Managers

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on June 24, 2021

After I shared my article about the next career moves as a senior developer, someone asked me the following question over the weekend:

“I’m a senior engineer who recently switched to leading a team of engineers. How do I grow in the managerial career path and become a manager of managers?”

It’s a great question, and not a trivial one. Becoming an engineering manager is often straightforward, but the next step, becoming a manager of managers, ends up being a career blocker for many.

If you’ve been wondering the same thing, then the first step is to look at your current workplace by addressing the following questions:

Did you see any colleagues becoming a manager of managers via an internal process over the past year?
What type of projects did these colleagues work on, with who, and in which department? Can this be reproduced?
Is your department or a nearby department growing, and will a position of manager of managers open soon?
Do you see yourself staying at your current company for the coming two to three years?

If you could answer YES to all of the above, it means there is a chance you could grow internally. From there, you have to start planning to position yourself so you get the job when it opens.

If you answered NO to any of the above, then you’re in the wrong company, and it’s time to plan a move. Selecting the right next job and company, so it’s aligned with your career aspirations, is going to be a crucial step.

In this article, I’ll be diving into both cases by providing a guide on how you can plan this career move, and if you’re lucky enough to get a shot at it, how to handle your transition into your new role.

In addition, as I’ve run dozens of leadership interviews and selection processes, and as a manager of managers myself, I’ll be sharing insider information on how managers will evaluate you and will decide whether you get the job or not.

Managing People: Avoid The Reputation Trap

Managing People: Avoid The Reputation Trap

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on February 9, 2021

As an engineering manager, I’ve been thinking how much sharing my opinion of someone’s performance and skills can influence others around me to think the same.

For example during the weekly meetings I have with my peers at work, if I praise or complain about a person in my area having some behavior, I will shift the perception my peers have of that person.

When you have to manage people, staying objective when assessing a person’s performance is always a challenge, no matter the experience or seniority. There are several traps to avoid, one of them is to rely on reputations too much because although reputations offer convenient mental shortcuts, they also bring their load of subjectivity.

So how exactly are reputations formed, how to verify if someone’s reputation is fair, and how to help bring someone’s reputation closer to what it is in reality?

Autonomous Peer Learning at Booking.com and How You Can Do it in Your Organization

Autonomous Peer Learning at Booking.com and How You Can Do it in Your Organization

Published by Emmanuel Goossaert on December 11, 2016

This article was originally published for Booking.com’s Technology blog on November 23rd, 2016.

Continuous learning on the job is hard. We all see things we want to improve, but maybe we’re missing a few skills to really make an impact. With most days filled with emails and meetings, there’s often not much time left for learning, no matter how much we want to develop our skills.

Although many organizations try to remedy this issue by employing external companies to handle training, they rarely follow-up to ensure such trainings are actually value for money. Not only that, employees are often left to figure out how their new skills can be applied to daily work, and sometimes they are even left wondering if the training taught them anything useful at all.

I work at Booking.com as an engineering manager, and in my job I wanted to learn about a topic for which there was no formal training. I ended up creating a study group that became the blueprint for autonomous peer learning in our Technology department. It’s an initiative that has been scaled to 50 Peer-to-Peer (or P2P) learning groups over the last 18 months.

The premise of P2P groups is that participants take the time to think about what they want to learn and why. This means their learning is tailored from the very beginning, ensuring that it is both relevant to their work and beneficial to their organization.