Can you describe your coaching style when it comes to engineers and give an example of how you have applied it?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

My coaching style is structured and designed to match engineers interests and
preferences.
In our 1:1 we discuss interests and aspirations. From there we can work on
career progression, technical development, or learning more about project
management, company operations, etc

We analyze situation and have written plan. We take notes about projects where
we can try to apply new things and new responsibilities that the person can take
on. 
Engineer T was interested to deepen his skills in distributed computing. We
worked on a system that resembles Spark . When T shared that we was puzzled with
strange occasional performance, I decided to help him to be more comfortable,
independent using this system. I prepared by inspecting source code, and found
the root cause of his issue. In 1:1 I coached T that we have source code access
to the system and showed him how to find how the system works. Further I let T
to produce the fix for the issue and apply it to production. Finally I
encouraged T to make presentation and share with others how to use source code
to solve similar issues.

Result stretched far beyond fixing a complex bug. T became unafraid of
inspecting source code of a large distributed system. He would be able to do
that again if situation requires. T presented the issue, his approach and
methods to handle similar cases in large knowledge sharing meeting. T's image
improved in the team.

I would like to address other methods I use:
- Pair engineers with mentors and coaches
- Organize knowledge sharing sessions ( At my current company I organized 4
conference like knowledge sharing sessions, that resulted in our team presenting
in all hands meeting in the company)
- Facilitating attending and presenting at industry conerences (ie Databricks
DATA+AI, Amazon R:invent)
- Sharing my experience when applicable in 1:1
- Suggesting and making space for engineers to learn more through online classes

Anonymous · Answer

My philiophy around coaching style is it dependes on the situtaion - At xyz - I
had a situtation where in I had to resolve a conflit between my Sr. Dev and a
DBA, I took this as a mentoring moment and coached Sr. Dev to be more
collobrative and present the facts insted of being dismissive and taking a high
ground. 
At the same time my coaching style changes when I am dealing with a Junior Dev -
during the implementation phase I would probe and ask them to come up with a
better solution emporing them to be better developers

Can you describe your coaching style when it comes to engineers and give an example of how you have applied it?

Did you come across this question in an interview?

Answers

Unlock Community Insights

Unlock Community Insights

Also asked as

Try Our AI Interviewer

Our AI is trained on 10,000+ answers.Login to review your answer.

Can you describe your coaching style when it comes to engineers and give an example of how you have applied it?

Interview Answer Review Tool

Evaluation Metrics