Host - Pat Sweet: This is the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet episode 42.

Host - Pat Sweet: Welcome to the engineering and leadership podcast. The show dedicated to helping engineers thrive today. I speak with master certified coach Joseph Seiler about his journey from being the president of his own engineering company, to becoming a master certified coach and how coaching can help both leaders and their teams.

Host - Pat Sweet: Hello everyone. And a welcome to the show. Yes, indeed. You heard it right. This is episode 42. And while it may not give all of the answers to life, the universe and everything, it'll give some, I promise it'll be an awful lot of fun too. I'm really glad to have you here with us today. Before we get into the good stuff I wanted to finally announce the winner of the contest to win a signed copy of leading from the jump seat by Peter Docker. Peter, of course, graciously joined us here on the podcast, a few episodes back and offered to send one loyal fan, a signed copy of his brand new book. And I'm pleased to announce Diego Cordura of Portugal. Congratulations, my friend, you are winning a signed copy of Peter Docker's book and by the time this airs, the book is likely already in the mail on the way to Portugal.

Host - Pat Sweet: Tiago is a friend of the show he's appeared before in the mailbag and is a a loyal longtime listener. So super, super happy that you're getting a copy of this book, Diego, for those of you who were not fortunate enough to win a copy, I still highly encourage you to go out and buy one for yourself. I'll be putting a link in the show notes to that, so you can check that out. It's a great book, a great read. So thank you once again, Mr. Docker, and thank you to you Tego for joining the contest. Next thing I wanted to mention is I'm planning as promised my next monthly webinar. It'll be held on Monday, November 22nd, but I need your help. I need to know what you would like to learn about. I've got a couple ideas, but I want to make sure that everything I'm doing is serving you.

Host - Pat Sweet: The people who are actually listening to this and showing up to the webinars. Last one was great. So I really want to keep this up. The three ideas that I have in mind are goal setting, running productive meetings and agile project management for the rest of us. And I've got a couple polls running both on Twitter and on LinkedIn. And I've already got a bunch of feedback from the community on the kinds of things that you want to hear about, which is awesome. And if you haven't yet seen that, I would love to hear from you. I'll put links to both the LinkedIn poll and the Twitter poll. In the show notes, you can go to engineering and leadership.com/episode 42 to to find those links. And I would love to hear from you. I'd love to know what you want to learn about. Goal-Setting running productive meetings or agile project management for non software folks for the rest of us who maybe are unfamiliar with the world of agile. All right, that's all for now. Let's move on to today's feature presentation.

Host - Pat Sweet: Joseph Siler has spent his career helping engineers do incredible work by empowering them and stepping back to let them just do what they do first as the president and CEO of his own company. And later as a master certified coach Joseph's experience provides incredible lessons learned for engineering managers of all stripes, most especially the value of coaching as an engineering manager, after earning his bachelor of engineering at the university of Alberta and his masters in engineering at Del tech, Joseph started and built six companies after selling his last business. He became an executive business coach today. He runs your natural edge success coaching, where he specializes in coaching the influencers in business, starting with the leader. He's a certified professional coactive coach and a master certified coach. Here's my conversation with Joseph, Mr. Joseph Seiler, welcome to the engineering and leadership podcast. Thank you so much for being with me today.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Pleasure.

Host - Pat Sweet: I'm very excited about this. This is a topic that I'm personally very passionate about is, is coaching and how coaching can play a role in an engineering leader in engineering managers everyday life to, to get this started. I want to go, I want to go back to before you were a coach before that, that was your, your number one profession to your time as a leader in engineering. Can you tell us a little bit about, about that background?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Well, I had to sort of sub careers before I became a full-time coach. And immediately prior to coaching, I was the owner president CEO of blah, blah, blah, of a design and engineering company. We design things, we built things. We installed things in harsh environments and we had over 40 people doing that. So it was a pretty exciting time because we rarely built two of anything. Our, our specialty was if you can buy it and we'll build it. So we, we built some very unusual pieces mostly for the scientific the Marine community. So Marine research institutes, Navy coast guard, those kinds of places they were always doing something unusual. So it was, it was very intriguing, very engaging and rewarding. When, you know, you kick something over to the side of the ship that you built and you're watching the screen and you're watching the screen and you're watching the screen and it's working, it's working

Host - Pat Sweet: Eureka, right?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: So it was, it was very satisfying in many ways and throwing things out of aircraft and, and over the sides of ships was one of the highlights. So yes, we did a lot of that, lots of stallions in our company and say, well, great to have lots of talent. Yes you do. But you know, stallions are every one of the ones to be the boss. So I had to to lead the stallions.

Host - Pat Sweet: So, so that's, that's really interesting is the, the, the tension that exists when you, when you hire and work with high performing individuals to try to get them working as a team, to click as a team. And, you know, it doesn't take long to look at, you know, sports is a great example. All-Star teams are very rarely, very good teams, a lot of talented individuals. How did you, how did you manage that? How did you manage your, your team of, of stallions, so to speak

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Well with joy, I guess, but ultimately acknowledge what we have a name, name, the name of the elephant in the room, let them know their stallions let them know that most stallion behavior as welcomed, and that's why they were hired. And also let them know that some stallion behavior like biting other people is not welcomed and guide. And we, we, we need to resist that. So letting them know being transparent being more we than, than us and them helping to be helping to be transparent. That's just a big plus.

Host - Pat Sweet: I remember we, we spoke a little bit a couple of weeks ago before, before the interview, and you shared a story about taking on a big chunk of work bid bidding on a big chunk of work. And, and actually when he, it almost, almost accidentally cut, can you tell us that, that story and how you, and how you manage that and engage the team?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Yes. the, the situation was that we wanted to a step increase in the size of our, of our company. And we were of a size in between one and 2 million where that's very hard to do there. There are books written about the, the impossible $1 billion company type of thing. And so the approach I decided on deliberately was to seek a contract so big that we couldn't possibly do it with our existing team. And I thought, well, I don't know. It's like that thing, you know, the dog chasing the car, once you catch the car, what does the dog do?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: So I went chasing the car and I, I managed to land the rather large contract. We were, you know, something over 1 million and the contract I landed was over half a million. So that was like a whoa big while. So we needed to organize the existing team in a way to to be smart and safe about implementing this, this new work and the contract I sought. There are two parameters that were important. One is we didn't have to have a new skill. We didn't have to have something new that we didn't know how to do. And that we could actually, if we just did more, if we had more of what we had, we could do it. So I managed to find this magical contract and got it. And then was kind of like, ye now what? Yeah, so I'm not, I'm the dog that caught the car.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: So we we, I assembled everybody under the age of the boardroom and I had the white board up front and all the people's names on one axis and all the contracts on the other access with this view, with this new one there. And I, I told them the good news, and then it says, now, now we're going to figure out how to do this. And I says, well, here's my idea. You're all fired. While the room went still for a moment, I says, what that means is all those responsibilities you had when you walked into this room, you don't have them anymore. The other side of the coin is somebody that's going to do them, and I'm willing to shuffle the deck completely and let you folks sort out a better way to allocate resources so we can do all those, all those tasks on one axis.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: So that charge on a whiteboard within minutes, the leadership of the new project had been claimed and leadership of the other major projects have also been claimed. So what was left was all the little smaller projects. So if it was 50,000 or more somebody had it and the 600 plus one, somebody had it. And the one who took it surprise me all, boy, y'all stepped into some, not you. Okay, let's, let's go for it. And the, the very cool thing, Patrick is that as he claimed that he had to go up to the board and put your name, as he claimed it, as he was walking back to his seat in the boardroom, he tagged two other people to work with him. He tagged a software guy and he tagged somebody who was good at sensors know technologies to do with sentencing. So he had his major software guy.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: He had his sensor guy and he himself was pretty good at the stuff that would glue it together. So then, then us, you know, from that the waterfall filled up the rest of the requirements for the job. And it was a bit of a frenzy in the room for not too long, within 15 minutes, all the boxes were filled with somebody. And it was kind of a, an atmosphere of fear in a way, but excitement and possibility and like, oh my God, we don't have time for let's go. And it was, it was a very, very positive uplifting experience for the whole building. They knew that they were trusted by me, and they knew that the magnitude of the responsibility, because of the style of leadership they had experienced so far. But, you know, if you were the team leader, you were the team leader, and they also knew the capability of their buses. So they could tap the right person and say, Hey, look, Patrick, I really need some help with this such and such a you're the, you're the man, have you got enough room? You're scheduled to do this. And I need it by January 30th. And they sorted it out. It was a very exciting experience. Lost my breath for a few moments there, but it worked. And I would say one of the pivotal moments in the growth of our company.

Host - Pat Sweet: So th this is a really, this is a fascinating story because you, you think about the challenges associated with rapid growth, no matter what stage you're in and, and, and the kind of indigestion an organization can get, you, you, you read stories about reorgs and how long and drawn out and painful they can be. And here you are, as the leader of, of of a tech company saying, you know what? I trust you guys to sort it out, go for it. It's, it's remarkable to me that, that there wasn't in-fighting, that it didn't take weeks that, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't that degrade into a Lord of the flies style, turf war. Like th this is, this is kind of the, the fear that is struck in me as an MBA grad that that's not supposed to work. How is it that that worked

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Well? I mean, they believed me for starters. I mean, it's not like I was, you know, incarnated in that woman. They had experiences of me, and they knew that I like to do these oddball things, because I had done things sort of like that before or nothing. This language here the people that stood up to take the project leadership positions the rest of the room had to kind of like nod and they knew it. So if Patrick stood up and took the $600,000 drop, there were three or four other stylings in the room who had to look at you and say, okay, Patrick, I will, I will help you with that. Right. And they did they, they knew what they could do. They knew better than anybody what's the guy in the next desk could handle and what he could. And when I say guy, I mean, guy or gal, or meet females involved too. So the internal workings of the group, they knew each other. And I think that's where, that's, what if you're saying for what worked, I'm just thinking of now is they knew each other. That's what works. And when they knew each other, I threw this big curve ball into the room. And I said, there it is for you folks go for it. And they did. And I swear it was 20 minutes. You know, the dust was settling already

Host - Pat Sweet: Was just remarkable. And I think that of the, of the big stories in your, your career as, as a, a president CEO, this one really highlights or, or, or maybe predicts where you would end up later in your career as, as a coach. And the link I see here is about really empowering the person or the people, the team to, to execute something they are capable of though. They might not realize it quite.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Okay. Yes, you're right. And what you said earlier too, is, is, is quite germane here that the, the whole business of what's expected, you know, using the MBA sort of expectation or plan book is control. And what I did is I said, there are no control, go hurry. And that was so invigorating for them because after all they were stallions, they are stylings. So when, when that happened and the energy went up, they looked at each other and says, is this for real, they nodded and said, it is going to get up to that whiteboard fast. And they did. And naturally what happens is the strongest leaders go first. They just naturally do. And then the ones who were watching, I mean, we're about to go reassess and some sit down and say, all, do all, do your, you know, your mechanical for it or something else there wasn't there, wasn't fighting over scraps. If you will, it just kind of fell into a natural order. And once you have the big pieces in place, the rest is easy.

Host - Pat Sweet: So we fast forward a little bit from, from that time. You, you, you eventually made the move out of out of industry, so to speak and, and into coaching. And I'd love to know what, what prompted that move and, and looking back, can you, can you connect the dots between where you were and where you are today?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: I think so. The company was sold to three employees. I was, I was 47. I didn't need to work. I had time on my hands, lots of energy. I wanted something fulfilling. So after not that many weeks, maybe, you know, seven or eight weeks, I started getting antsy in my own retirement and not really realizing it was a coaching question. I asked myself the question, what would I love to do enough that it would get me out of bed in the morning, every morning for the rest of my life. That's a big question, but I asked myself that question and the, the coaching thing came up very quickly and untimely. So from then on, it was a matter of, you know, now that my antennas were up, you know, when it's starting to get your issue, you're looking for a red car. I mean, you'll almost, before you finish blinking, there's one right in front of you, right. If you're not looking for a red card, there aren't eight. So anyway, I was looking for coaching. And before you knew it before I knew it opportunities presented themselves a training program presented itself. I just got introduced to coaches training Institute and took the the sort of sampler session that they have. It's a three-day weekend where you go in and check things out to, they give you training. I went, I went to that and I was hooked. I was, I drank the Kool-Aid.

Host - Pat Sweet: What about coaching made that, you know, the, the red car that you were looking for, what, what is it, do you think that that really attracted you to the whole idea in the first place?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: I've always been certainly in hindsight, also somewhat at that time the leader I've often been deferred to and asked to lead joining the church parish council before the end of the second meeting. I'm the chair for private Elena. I Tripoli Marine's ability, society, whatever, whatever I joined was it was pretty quick that I would find myself in a leadership position. I, I seem to be okay there. I'm not afraid of being a leader. And I just have such an absolute faith in humankind and people not everybody deserves that trust and faith, but 99% do. So I don't go around sniffing for the 1%. I concentrate on the 99. And guess what? It's like that red car you want to look for leadership and capacity and capability and human beings look around you. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. Just help the flower blue, right?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: We go. So I was fancy myself, a natural leader and have the habit of leadership. And it just seemed to me that I concentrated on the people. That's, that's what I did. I didn't concentrate on the technology and I have a master's degree, and I even earned a patent at one point, but that's, that's not, that was not what made the company go. It's the people you got 40 plus people. I could not do much to get things done. The other 44, other 43, they were the ones who did it. So I had to, in my mind, I had to nurture them and enable them and empower them and all those nice words that we see nowadays in the HR community. So I was saw myself as doing that, and I liked it cause I liked the exact. So when I heard about coaching and what it was and how it worked and had this weekend sample session, it was all about empowering the individuals from within and know, there's just, no, no, this is it.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: So I immediately signed up for all the training, which is a total of five three-day weekends. And as soon as I was allowed to, and then signed up for this thing called certification, which is a six months of practice on so many hours of coaching, supervision, testing and so on and so forth to get in the door, to get to this ACC level of coach. So I signed up for everything right away, as fast as I could, because I had, I had time, I had money, I had desire and one of them done in my way. So away I went and it was just, it was just, I just couldn't imagine doing anything else. So they say, what, what drew me to it is his name was, it was natural for me to go there and to formally acknowledge and grow, strengthen what I was normally doing anyway.

Host - Pat Sweet: So, so for the uninitiated w we've we've been using the word coaching and, and talking a lot about around what it is and what it does for, for someone who's maybe not super familiar with it. Well, how would you define coaching and, and maybe how would you distinguish it from consulting or therapy or any of these other professions that are kind of around it?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Very good question. Especially since the, the word coach evokes so many different possible definitions. So thanks for asking it. It's important. The kind of coach that we're talking about here is the one who is helping the person they're coaching the coachee, helping them to, to get a good grip on where they are. So being honest with where they are, get a clear picture of where they want to go. So the future plan and to help them find the resolve and the, the, the willingness to stay with it, to go and get what they know will fulfill them to contrast that with say therapy. For example, therapy is backward looking and looking for root cause. And there are many situations where that is exactly what needs to happen. Coaching is for where you are now going forward therapy is where you, where you are, how you got there.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: The sports coach the sports coats brings the rules. The sports coach tells you what's, what's not happening with your, with your, with your arm or your leg or, or with your showing or with some technique stuff. And the sports coach is really concerned about winning the game. Yes, in large part, by helping you be better, but it's the game sports coach spoke stone. The kind of coach that I am is focused on your, your greater future, greater success creator. This is a strange word for business, your happiness. We concentrate on happiness. And when a person is more clear, they make better decisions faster than getting become more successful. And guess what happier. So that's what we're about the coaching professionals about.

Host - Pat Sweet: So, so why, I guess two questions about what you just said, why is it that happiness is, is so important to business success? And, and why is it such a funny thing for us to talk about? What, why don't we both laugh at the idea that we would talk about happiness in a business context?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Well, let's, let's answer that backwards. It's talking about the happiness thing happened as this was to woo, to be business. Like there's not a section for happiness in the business plan. The MBA does not study happiness, the map, you know, the masters of commerce degree, the the Harvard graduate happiness is not on the list. And yet ask yourself, look around you. Would you rather hire two twins? Right. Identical ones, happy. What's not which one's going to be more productive. No question. Yeah. Hands down. The happy one is the one that you want. No question about it. It's a strange thing to pursue in accordance with the business plan that the bank wants. But the bank will be very pleased to see that you have a personnel development program in your company. And that is part of your culture to help people deep to increase your self-awareness and their fulfillment. And yes, they're not going to the banker will nod and say, yeah, we could use some of that around here because the bank is a company to their organization. And that being will know, they will understand because they're humans. What we're talking about,

Host - Pat Sweet: The, the one other place that comes to mind where I think they would, they would get it as a Gallop and Gallop releases, you know, their, their employee engagement surveys and their, their, their strengths finder tool. And they, they seem to, they seem to get it that the value of, of an engaged employee and, and an engaged employee is, is, is a happy employee and vice versa, I think, yes, some are really, really glad that you that you touch on that. One of the things I wanted to, to ask you about when it came to coaching is, is this idea that managers in engineering are more and more often, it seems encouraged to, to wear the coaching hat at times with their staff. And I, I'd be curious to know what you, what you think of that. And if you had any concrete, concrete ideas, concrete tactics, or tips that you might share with engineering leaders on, on how to actually do that in the run of a day or the run of a week.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Hmm. That's a, that's a complex many, many faceted question. And it is, it is the center of the engineering leaders world, the engineering company, and the engineering team need to get things done. They design and build things to have a result that's tangible and to just feel good is not tangible. So they need something that can be measured, smart goals. The M in smart cause measurable, you must have measurable. So the thing to do is to help people to get connected to what the heck are you doing here? And what is it about the way you're doing it? It's going to get you to the result faster, better, easier, more reliably, et cetera, et cetera. Find that the simplest, the simplest help, the person who's doing engineering work can, can give themselves when they come to a, make a decision when the come to a thing that needs to be done or changed, there's a conversation is going in the head because they're there, they're challenged.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: This is there's this problem. This invitation to solve my recommendation is as you hear the questions forming in your mind, constantly check on, who wants to know who is asking that question? Here's the question. The forms in the mind might be a little naysayer that we all have in our head, not helpful, might be the manager and who manages this person when they're in a cranky mood and they, and they're looking for blood. So I might be forming a defense rather than answering the question. I'm forming a defense against Charlie who was asking this question, who wants to know if that nut on the end of that bolt is the right one who is asking, because if it's the engineer who is the Dutch designer and builders who was asking proceed, there's one of these other guys just hang on for a bit, got back up and other, tell them to go pound sand, or ask another question.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: The asker of the question in the mind is the source of the goodness of the question, then how helpful it is. I'm going to make better design choices, decisions, and so on. When, when the engineer is the one who's asking the question in the mind, it's the one that's asking the question to mind is this yak, yak, yak, yak, this negative, negative voice that all of us carry. Like I said, that dude is not helpful. Don't even listen to them and you can have having heard him, Sam aside, let the other ones, let your engineering voice as the question. What would the engineer on this project need to know next? Ask that of yourself. Sound a little bit crazy. A little bit, California. Well, I don't care. Ask it any way. It'll work. You got to get that other stuff out of the way. Get back down to doing, doing the thing that you're trying to do the most effective way. Take an engineering porch. Dissected.

Host - Pat Sweet: It's interesting. You, you mentioned this and I'm going to, I'm going to invoke my daughter here. Once again on the podcast, my daughter, Charlotte is six and a not long ago. We watched one of the new Disney movies, Luca, and one of the, one of the great lines in the movie is a cylinder ICO Bruno. And it's, it's two young boys. And they're trying to decide whether or not they should careen down a cliff with this homemade scooter that they've put together. They're, they're inviting, they're inviting death is certain to go terribly, as boys tend to do. And the one boy is saying, well, let's go for it. And the other saying, I don't know. And the first boy says, well, that that's Bruno speaking. Don't listen to Bruno, see Lencho Bruno. Right. And then I throw out the movie that that's, the theme is like, don't listen to that voice. And, and I mentioned my daughter because it's, it's something that is incredibly useful in reminding her when she's afraid of something or nervous about something. I I'm asking that same question is that, is that Bruno? So, so it's interesting to hear you invoke a similar idea in a professional setting, because I know when I say Silencio, Bruno, it's, it's, it's funny, but, but there's a kernel of truth. There isn't there,

Guest - Joseph Seiler: When you've you've you hit the nail exactly. On the head. Don't ignore brutal. Completely. Just don't take them too seriously. Right. Right. We'll we'll want me to have an attack of seriousness over the smallest things. So Bruno says something say thank you and move on.

Host - Pat Sweet: Yeah, that's great. That's great. I really do appreciate that. W one of the things you've you've written about in in your blog is, is the the importance of, of values within a team and, and within the individual. And what are the interesting kind of causal chains that you paint is is that values drive behavior and then behaviors drive results. And I, I think this makes sense, but you go on to talk a little bit about some value traps and how people get stuck in what they think they should value or what they shouldn't value. And I, I thought one of the interesting examples is people don't think they should value control, even though a lot of us really do deep down. If we, if we, if we're honest with ourselves, given how, how tricky it is to establish values and, and, and the different traps you can fall into, what, what would you recommend for someone who has never really thought in concrete terms about what it is? They value themselves as a leader. Okay.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Yeah. Great question. Doing my own values assessment all by myself. That's, that's a really tough spiral to get out of because the only health I have, I'm doing it myself as the Sloan. Yacky actually guy who, like I say, it's not on my side. If you want to know how to do it, the, the entry door, two values clarification is what do I do? Not, what do I say, what do I do? What do I stand in line for? What do I pay extra for? What do I drive further for? What, what will I actually, you know speak out loudly or shut up for? It's the action. It's the action. What I do strongly do is usually to support a value. So value is clarification comes from noticing what I do strongly because the behavior, I don't think you get much pushback.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: If, if, if you wish make the statement is what you do as the biggest effect of all things on what you get, what I do affects what I get. And you can go around that loop forever. So you don't study, you get a D yes. I'll remember hands up. Okay. So I run around run. We go, problem with society is the teacher sends little Patrick home with this report card. And the D it says, Patrick has to improve that D and make it a, you know, shoot for a beer. And Hey, so what, what the moment does say, just, you got to stop getting DS. You've got to start getting these A's. Patrick has no idea what that means until we say, what did you believe? The told you it was okay to get a deep, what supported that deep? And I'm speaking from personal experience in grade nine, where I went to school, there were statewide exams, the same examiner for everybody in migrate. And the same day, the same hour, I had straight A's with a C in English. Why I went with a straight face to respond to you and say, I'm going to be an engineer. I don't need that stuff. Now you can go and read me a little women and do whatever you want. I need physics, math, chemistry. I'm going to, I'm going to be an engineer. I'm going to make stuff. And I believed, I absolutely believed I did not need English until I got to engineering school.

Host - Pat Sweet: That's a harsh realization for us all, I think. Yeah.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Yeah. I, I believe that I didn't need it. So I just, I feathered my, my efforts so I could get the C and get through, not fail. And later on I paid the price and I caught up when I had to read a book, I'd go to the library to find a skinny one with pictures so I could get away with it.

Host - Pat Sweet: But like you say, it's, it's, there's often a mismatch. When you, when you are looking to change results, if you don't look at the behavior, and then, and then even earlier in the stream, what beliefs you had, what values you had that drove that behavior. There's little hope of getting to a better outcome.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Well, it doesn't make sense. It does. It defies logic. It gets in the way of reason. The logical thing is I got this for a reason, but what is the reason? Well Hmm. I I'm going to be an engineer. I don't need, I don't need English.

Host - Pat Sweet: It's almost like, it's almost like you're recommending people do a five whys exercise, but rather than look at the equipment and its failure, look at, look at your own internal system.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Yeah. And create, create the coaching question. What do I believe so strongly that tells me I don't need English as a subject that I would need to get to see what, what is it that I believe that is telling me that's okay. Something, obviously I had the ability because I got A's and everything else.

Host - Pat Sweet: Yeah. I think I I'm I'm pausing here thinking to myself what you know, of the things that are going well or not going well in life. What, what beliefs are there that are either driving me towards success or in other cases, where am I blocking myself? This is very, very powerful.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: And you and you, the word toward there's very, very germane is very important because we, we incrementally move towards, we don't suddenly become, we don't jump. We move toward. And that's that's also something we're not taught society. Doesn't say that society is change. Do it now.

Host - Pat Sweet: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm hoping that by this point in the conversation, many engineering leaders are thinking to themselves that, yeah, I ought to have some coaching tools in my belt. If someone wanted to maybe not necessarily go to the extent you have but wanted to want to dig into this a little bit more and, and, and build some coaching skills. What, what, what might you recommend? How could someone kinda at least make themselves more aware of, of what coaching can do?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Yeah, that's a little bit tricky because everybody has their own learning style and their own speed and so on and so forth. Some people can pick up a book and get it. All other people can compose to it without an experiential experience in a room with others. So in a general way I think seek examples where coaching has happened. So get enough of a definition so you can recognize it when it's happened. And the, the leading question or the open questions, a good example of that. Why did you do that is different than saying, what is it that caused you to do that hot? So what is it that cause you to do that is asking about beliefs? Why did you do that? Is punishment, right?

Host - Pat Sweet: You know, you're in trouble. If you're on the receiving end of that question,

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Where do I, where do I plant the yard? You know? So just getting used to understanding the different position, not nothing has changed in the situation in front of you, but freeze training, freeze time, walk around the situation until you have a question that is helpful to show the person, what they believe is true. Even if you disagreed, just help them be more clear because they are more clear. They will automatically can't help it make a better decision for themselves later.

Host - Pat Sweet: See, I think this brings us full circle. Doesn't it? That this idea that if you empower people and you, you really can be a catalyst for that, they, people can make really great decisions and push things forward. And often the best way to, to help an individual or a team is to, to set the scene and get out of the way. Okay.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Get out of the ways of coaching skill. Yes, I agree. And as far as the empowering goes, just to get away from that, the overused word of empower, I'd say, mirror them, show them a mirror of themselves when they can see themselves and what they were doing, many of them will go what's that me help them to see themselves. What do you believe you just did by doing that or seeing that or whatever, what do you believe? What were you going for when you did that and help people to step back and look at themselves, not look other places for blaming or understood that, look at themselves and say, oh yeah, well, yeah, I see something now. Great. What do you see? And then, and then celebrate whatever they say, if you don't agree, celebrate it. Oh my God. That sounds fantastic. What was it like for you to discover that we go,

Host - Pat Sweet: Well, Joseph, this has been an awful lot fun and I my, my, my mind's racing in the back here, I'm sure you can tell there's a lot, a lot. I need to, to think through and process. I, I I'd like to ask if someone was interested in, in finding a coach of their own or, or working working with you, what, what would be the best next place for them to go or next step to, to take?

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Well, one of the nice things about coaching and the pandemic is that the pandemic has underlined how easy it is to find a coach anywhere in the world. So rather than restrict to, you know, the coaches within 10 blocks, you now have coaches within five times zones. And when you know, you can go anywhere internet of course, international coach Federation has a list of people who are there, thousands of people there. It depends on your style. Ask somebody who around here knows a coach, any good? Who else do you know? If you want to contact me, my website is your natural edge. God come, I'll help you. Maybe, maybe you'd like to work with me. Maybe not, but the whole business of coaching is an expanding field because it's so effective. The reason it's growing so fast is because it works because if it didn't work, it would've tried up a long time ago.

Guest - Joseph Seiler: It's not competing with with the other sort of helping skills. It's not counseling, it's not therapy. It's not mentoring. Mentoring is having a specific skillset in a specific area and helping you because you want that specific help. The coach doesn't have to be expert in your exact field. It's nice if you're in business to have somebody who knows a little business, it's good. Yeah, of course. But I'm out there. You know, your natural edge is, is, is what I sell. It's also happens to be the name of my company. And I help people find that itch as we've been discussing for the last 40 minutes. It's your edge. No mine. And we're, we're helping. I mean, I'm helping you to find it and show that mirror in front of you. So you can say, oh, that's me. All right, let's go, oh, it's beautiful stuff. I enjoyed it very much. Yeah.

Host - Pat Sweet: That, that much is that much is clear. You, you speak, you speak with passion for it. So I'll absolutely be putting that link in the show notes so people can visit the website for that. Mr. Joseph Seiler. Thank you very, very much for joining me tonight. It's been a pleasure

Guest - Joseph Seiler: Indeed.

Host - Pat Sweet: Thank you. Once again, Joseph Siler, a great chat, some really, really fun stories that he brought to the, the interview really, really great to, to hear, hear them draw from that experience. Hear him draw from that, that real life of leading engineers and being faced with tough decisions. Really cool to get that insight as always, I'd like to share a few things that really stood out to me when I, when I listened to this chat again, probably the most important thing that that came out. This is a great deal of power in allowing a team that's in performing mode. If you're familiar with Tuckman's forming storming, norming, performing framework for teams, for teams that are in the performing mode, they really can handle big challenges. They can handle things that they've not seen before. And you'll hear Joseph emphasize that the team really, they knew one another.

Host - Pat Sweet: So when he brought this challenge to the table in, in running a complete reorg of his business, the team was able to tackle it because they were in that performing phase. And I thought that was just brilliant on his part to hand such a big thing to his team. Most owners, most CEOs, most presidents would be reluctant to give that kind of power to a team, but Joseph recognized the moment and the team's capability to handle such a thing. So I thought that was great. What are the other things that stood out and I'd forgotten about this, that this whole conversation about Silencio Bruno and the importance of questioning the questions that arise in your mind and taking a moment when you're thinking something, when you're asking yourself something, asking yourself, where is this coming from? Or in other words, who is asking this, is this really me?

Host - Pat Sweet: Or is this kind of the, the naysayer or, or the, the, the doomsday character that we all we all have from time to time? Is it Bruno who is predicting a bad outcome and nudging you down a certain path, asking yourself who is asking this question? Who is it speaking to me right now is an incredibly powerful tool that pause to, to question whether or not you're headed down the right path in terms of your, your line of thinking and reasoning. And the final thing that I wanted to share was it came across as a bit of a silly example this this bit about coming home with a D on a report card and being told as a student get B's and A's instead, and, and how crazy this is. It occurred to me after the fact how often we do this as engineers and, and particularly engineering managers.

Host - Pat Sweet: We, we look at the metrics and we manage the metrics. We see a dot on a graph that is in the wrong spot. And we say, we've got to move that dot. And it's very tempting to focus our time and attention on the dot on the graph of the size of the bar in the chart. And then we're managing the metrics as opposed to managing the work or the product or whatever it is that is underlying the metrics. And that's incredibly dangerous because when you manage metrics, you lose sight of what's actually being measured and you can fix a metric without actually fixing the problem if you're not careful. So I really appreciated what Joseph was saying. When he, when he elicited that, that report card analogy, it didn't occur to me in the moment, but listening back to it, it, it, it really did stand out as something that we do do in our professional lives. And, and maybe we don't do it, but certainly we're subjected to it. So it's important to recognize those moments when the score or the metric is being managed, as opposed to the thing that that metric or score is, is trying to eliminate or tell us about. So thank you once again, Joseph, I will absolutely put all the links for the items mentioned in the show notes, engineering and leadership.com/episode 42. Again, I really hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I was absolute blast. Next up, we've got the engineering and leadership mailbag.

Host - Pat Sweet: Well, my friends, you know how this works, this is the part of the show where I read your messages and answer your questions. I promise to read everything you send me. And I promise to read my favorites right here on the podcast. Jasmine Shaw on Twitter, who is at Jasmine Shaw, commented on a book that I shared. I came across a book that it's not yet released. It's being written right now by an engineer named Tonya Riley called the staff engineers path, which is really interesting. What Tanya realized was that there's all these books out there for engineers who want to get into management and leadership and to guide them through that. And what Tanya recognized is the importance of engineers who don't want to get into management. Don't want to get into leadership that they need a path to. They need some way to progress and remain in the roles as high level individual contributors.

Host - Pat Sweet: We need people who stay in engineering, doing technical work. This is incredibly important. I know I've talked about it on the show before. It's very, very important not to take great engineers who want to stay in the hard technical work, take them out of that and make them managers just because they're the top performing engineers. That's not a great way to find managers, and it's a great way to really hurt teams. So I'm really excited about this book that Tanya is writing. Anyway, Jasmine commented on this saying, this is really exciting to see the engineer who doesn't really want to be a manager, but ends up as a manager trend is almost endemic. And my company, we're looking at carving out a fellowship slash technical leadership career track to ensure that folks see there is an alternative. So Jasmine, very excited for you and the organization you are working with right now.

Host - Pat Sweet: I think that's a brilliant idea. So I, I appreciate your insight. I'll be putting a link both to that conversation and to Tonya Riley's book. So you can check that out in the show notes next, we had a [inaudible] who's a friend of the show you've probably heard of a Dita before. he has an interesting question about when managers should step in to help their teams. Th this was in response to a post that I had made about the importance of managers, stepping back the importance of, of managers, allowing their teams to work through problems and not just feeding them solutions for the sake of frankly pragmatism. You can't solve every problem as a single person, but also as a tool for growth. And then just this generated a lot of conversation on LinkedIn, but the DJ had had an interesting question.

Host - Pat Sweet: He said, okay, but when should a manager step in? And like so many other things, it's a judgment call. And there will be times where it's all hands on deck. There's, you know, a once in a blue moon occurrence or emergency or situation where yeah, the right thing to do is to be the extra coder or to be the extra drafter or to be putting the slide decks together at midnight. That that will happen. The, the risk though, is when that becomes a recurring thing, when that's the norm, when it's not an emergency or once in a blue moon. And if you find yourself getting sucked into this kind of thing as a leader, that's a problem. And you need to, you need to kind of pull yourself back from that and think about, okay, what, what things are recurring? What, what is triggering these situations?

Host - Pat Sweet: Is there a system I can put in place to avoid the emergency? Or is there a system I can put in place to anticipate and deal with the emergency without my being sucked in at all times? But, but like so many other things, a DTA, it's a, it's a judgment call and it's a tricky one to make, and sometimes you get it right. And sometimes you get it wrong, but again, it's something that you'll learn, you'll learn over time. So I really do. I really do appreciate the question. Thanks once again, to all those who reached out, if you would like to chat or leave comment and be featured here on the show, please do find me on LinkedIn or leave a comment in the episode, show notes.

Host - Pat Sweet: That's all the time we have for the show today, but I promise to be back very soon with our next episode. If you enjoyed the show, please hit the subscribe button. And if you could leave an honest review and let me know what you thought was most interesting from today's episode, this will help me make the show better and it'll help others find the show as well. Don't forget. I would love to know what you would like to learn about in our next monthly webinar. I'll be putting a link to the LinkedIn and Twitter polls in the show notes. So do check that out when you get a chance and let me know what you would like to hear about for more information and links to the resources mentioned today. Just go to the show notes@engineeringandleadership.com slash episode 42 until next time, this is pat sweet reminding you that if you're going to be anything, be excellent.

Host - Pat Sweet: You've been listening to the engineering and leadership podcast with pat sweet. If you'd like to learn more, go to engineering and leadership.com where you'll find more free articles, podcasts, and downloads to help engineers thrive. That's engineering and leadership.com.