1:1 Management Coaching

Especially in startups, managers can experience feelings of being on their own, having to figure out the ropes of people management alone, with nowhere to go for help and support.

The challenges can range across a broad spectrum:

  • Finding your leadership and management style as a freshly minted manager.
  • Navigating the challenges of a new management role and the challenges that come along with the changes it brings.
  • Having difficult conversations with people from your team (and other teams).
  • Looking for perspective and support in making difficult decisions.
  • Feeling overwhelmed and pulled into many directions, not feeling like you’re getting anything done.
  • Managing up and figuring out how to best work with a (new) boss.
  • Navigating the challenges of a growing team, managing engineers, and managing a team of teams.
  • Debug and fix issues in your team.

Whether you’re an engineer who recently took on a leadership role, a founder, a startup CTO, COO, or CEO, chances are that you’re experiencing at least a few of these challenges.

These can be hard topics to navigate, especially when you’re feeling without support in working through them.

I can help you discover what the best path forward is, whether that’s by coaching you or mentoring.

If you’re interested, please get in touch and we’ll set up a (free) introductory call.

Coaching vs. Mentoring

There are two ways to discover that path, either via coaching or mentoring. Where’s the difference?

When I’m coaching, I ask lots of questions that can help you discover what you already know. Coaching helps provide an outside impulse for you to put into words the thoughts that have been going through your head, which can be a powerful way of discovering the solution for a challenge.

When I’m mentoring, I speak from my own experience and how I have gone about a similar situation in the past. Sometimes it’s useful to get an outside perspective of how someone else went about a similar situation.

How does this work?

We either meet in person or via video call for an introduction call, where we’ll talk about your challenges and get a sense for each other.

Should you find you’re comfortable with the two of us working together, we’ll ideally meet for an hour every two weeks. Two weeks is a good time frame to process the previous session, implement the solutions that we’ve developed together and collect some initial feedback in preparation for the next one. That said, the schedule is flexible depending on what works best for you.

We can either talk through some of the longer term challenges or we can focus on a more recent challenges that you’ve experience or a challenge that’s just around the corner.

Who am I?

I am the former cofounder and CEO at Travis CI, where I started out as an engineer and grew into the role of CEO, experiencing all the challenges and struggles that come with the growth from an engineer and software-building founder to a manager to being a company leader.

In that role, I’ve also been coaching and mentoring the managers and leaders in our company to help them navigate the very challenges that I’ve outlined above.

More recently I’ve been working as an executive leadership coach, where I focus on helping managers, tech leads, CTOs, COOs, and founders.

Mentoring Engineering Departments and Leadership Teams

Some challenges that a startup faces span multiple teams or even multiple departments, for instance when it comes to communication, collaboration, processes, and feedback loops.

In these situations it can be helpful to discuss these topics and explore possible solutions as a group instead of in 1:1 coaching sessions.

These meetings tend to be longer as more people will be involved, but shouldn’t take more than two hours for each session. Leading up to these, there is the option to collect feedback and input from each person who would then be involved in the team discussions. This allows me to get a picture of where the challenges are and how we could go about solving them together.

Get in touch to discuss how we can best work together.