Becoming a great coach: Practices & principles to help you make a bigger impact on your teams w/ Jill Wetzler #157

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

In this episode, Jill Wetzler shares practices and principles to help you become a great coach! As an Executive Coach & former VP of Engineering, Jill shares how attending her first coaching workshop impacted her career trajectory and the frameworks she uses to help create a mindset of possibility, foster positive relationships, cultivate trust, navigate threats, and help people think about the future. She shares her own experiences working through these frameworks & how it helped guide her career decisions. Plus we discuss tools for implementing a peer coaching structure into your org & how to make the most of peer group discussions!

ABOUT JILL WETZLER

Jill Wetzler is a leadership coach, consultant, and former VP of Engineering with more than 15 years of experience leading engineering teams at some of Silicon Valley's fastest-growing companies. She works with organizations who want to strengthen and uplevel their management teams, and she coaches leaders at all levels to help them advance their skills and find fulfillment at work and in life. Jill has built and scaled engineering orgs at companies like Salesforce, Twitter, Lyft, and Pilot through periods of high growth. Find out more at www.jillwetzler.com

"Imagine yourself five years from now. You're completely happy, you're completely fulfilled in your job. What are you spending your day doing? So not what is your job? What's your job title? But literally, what is the day to day activity? You get up at nine o'clock, you walk into a meeting, what are you doing in that meeting? Once I had all of that in sort of like a three paragraph form, I actually started to write my ideal job description.”

- Jill Wetzler

SHOW NOTES:

• The story of Jill’s first coaching workshop & its impact on her as an eng leader (3:29)
• Questions & topics to focus on to be a better coach (6:27)
• Asking questions related to vision that inspire a possibility mindset (8:49)
• Frameworks for helping people shift into a creative brain space (10:26)
• How to navigate the topic of fairness & what elements threaten it (14:33)
• Identifying what you want your day-to-day to look like in the future (17:25)
• Jill’s decision to create her own role @ Lyft working w/ L&D (20:42)
• Her biggest takeaways & recommendations for managers (26:05)
• Tips for breaking out of your pre-established identity (30:10)
• Implementing a “team roadshow” practice in your org (32:06)
• Jill’s approach for introducing a peer coaching structure into their team (34:30)
• Talk from your own experience & avoid simply giving advice (36:39)
• Rapid fire questions (40:45)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Finding Me - Viola Davis’ story, in her own words, that spans her incredible, inspiring life, from her coming-of-age in Rhode Island to her present day.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/