From Technical Excellence to Leadership: Understanding Yourself First

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today I have the privilege of sitting down with Frankie Berkoben. Frankie, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

Frankie Berkoben: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Shane. Hi. I am an executive coach and I work with mid to senior leaders in tech, especially in engineering product and design.

Why engineering leaders need coaching [01:02]

Shane Hastie: Why does an engineering leader need an executive coach?

Frankie Berkoben: Well, who doesn’t really? Well, executive coaching is about trusting yourself to build the systems that you need to operate to your highest potential. And we all live in systems that aren’t really designed for the human brain or they’re slightly clunky. I’m sure there’s a lot of technical debt, but also a lot of other things that don’t necessarily work for the humans, the people involved in them. And a lot of leadership development focuses on interactions with others.

Understanding intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics [01:40]

And from my point of view, what needs to happen is not just the interpersonal but the intrapersonal understanding and not overriding your needs, not being a bad boss to yourself, not perpetuating things that you’ve accumulated as ways of doing things that are best practices in general, but not best for you. And so executive coaching for engineering leaders and people who are working on really great stuff, but maybe need a little less friction in the doing of it, is about figuring out what works for you, building it, iterating on it, designing the next phase of it, advocating for what you need so that the stuff that you’re really excited about you have more of, and the stuff that drags you down, you have less of.

Practical advice for newly promoted technical leaders [02:32]

Shane Hastie: That sounds great in abstract. I’m a technologist, recently promoted. Now I have to manage a group of people, and I was a really good technologist and I’ve got no idea how to manage these people because they’re not technology. What do I do and how can you help me?

Frankie Berkoben: Well, you start with the data. You start with what you know and part of that, uncovering what you know but can’t articulate or have taken for granted. So a lot of this is what are your strengths? Yes, you can see patterns. You can read between the lines. You have this innate and intrinsic sense of this is how something works, but you can’t always convert that into words, but maybe it’s about sketches and things. So it’s understanding what you do best and what the role requires in general. And then what do other people need? What are their strengths that maybe complement yours? They may not be exact carbon copies. In fact, nobody’s a carbon copy of anybody else, but what are their strengths and how can you bring those out? And as you are building up a team, there’s different capabilities and competencies of different people in it.

Working with your strengths and understanding predictability [03:47]

And so understanding that diversity is normal and actually desirable because there are different roles and responsibilities within a team. And so figuring out how to reduce the friction in those interactions, but also doing it for yourself. What am I really good at and where do I need help? And not only what am I really good at, but what are the context-dependent scenarios where I may need more or less of something because we are not robots, which is often the frustrating thing for many of the engineers that I work with, is that who you are on a Monday morning is very different from who you are at the end of a Thursday. And your capacity for ambiguity for stronger emotions or pushback, all of these things, they vary and they can be predictable. So understanding your predictability means, okay, well if my best time for one-on-ones is not, when I’m in deep focus mode, I’m going to organize my schedule separately so I have back-to-back one-on-ones. I’m limiting context switching or task switching in that way. Maybe I’m going into too much detail here.

Shane Hastie: Detail is good. I think of the audience who we are talking to today. These are folks who are looking for good, solid concrete advice. So detail is good.

Frankie Berkoben: Well, fantastic. Great. Well, I invite anybody to contact me on LinkedIn if you want to have a detailed conversation. Yes, so part of this is what are you good at and why? And understanding that why, and applying a strengths-based approach to designing for more of those things. Or if there’s a certain collaboration style that you really like, you look for people with those sorts of collaboration style. If it’s a particular tool or something that you have acquired knowledge in and deep familiarity with, you can take more risks. So maybe if you are driving something which is higher visibility, trying to figure out ways where you can have more familiarity so that you don’t go fight or flight mode when you’re trying to drive something big, as I mentioned before, there’s the understanding your flow and your cadence and how that maps to your business responsibilities and your interpersonal responsibilities with your team.

Managing energy cycles and avoiding burnout patterns [06:12]

And some people have burnout cycles. Some people are really gung-ho when they start a role, but then over commit and then find themselves having to ramp back. So like, “Oh, what do you know about yourself that you might want to manage?” People who menstruate also have a cycle. You know you don’t want to make certain decisions at certain times of that cycle. So understanding that is definitely part of it as well as what do you wish you wear that is… No, let me think of how to put this. It’s an aspiration that isn’t accessible to you. I want to be the type of person that is on top of their backlog all the time because you don’t have a PM or something like that. But if you know that consistently, there’s just so much more coming in that spending all your time grooming your backlog means that you never get to what’s in flight at any one time.

So well, what’s realistic and what is it about being in charge of that backlog that is really important. It’s not about the thing itself. It’s not about the feature of that desire, but it’s about the root cause. So a lot of work in coaching is why is this important to you? What core value of yours does this touch on? Which inevitably leans into what you’re good at and what are the other ways you can meet this? So it’s not about this is what it looks like on the outside, but what does it feel like on the inside and what are the other 999 possibilities for meeting that internal need? Because often what we see in disagreements and friction and oh, well, sales says this, oh yes. But the C-suite says this is around how a goal is stated, even though there’s a shared why. So coming back to the why, I guess another part of this is not focusing on the what and the how so much as the who, like your values, somebody else’s strengths, the shared vision like community and the why.

Because with a why anything becomes possible and a shared why, a shared purpose, just opens up so many. I was about to use a jargon term of synergy, but it opens up so many possibilities and it feels more fun. And when people feel included and when they enjoy themselves and they see where you are coming from, the more likely it is that they will afford the social capital to you that you might need in order to take more risks down the line. You don’t have to be perfect in every interaction. There’s balancing short-term and long-term needs also there.

Applying iterative development to personal growth [08:59]

Shane Hastie: When we were chatting earlier, you used the term applying iterative development to personal development and growth. Our audience definitely understand the concept of iterative development in the product, of course, and in engineering. How do I do this for myself? What am I engineering?

Frankie Berkoben: Well, you’re engineering your life. You’re engineering a life that feels fulfilling, systems that support you and that sustain themselves without you having to constantly maintain them. There are several aspects of this. One is you are the user of your brain. You are the user of your life. In order to make things feel easier and eliminate friction, eliminate frustration, you have to work with yourself. And so part of that is what are your strengths and not diminishing them. Not saying, “Oh, but I was just lucky”. So it’s working with strengths, non-judgmental acceptance of this is something that I’m not inherently strong at. This is something where I have a lot of acquired wisdom, but I don’t necessarily want to be in that space. So it’s just as much about what it looks like on the outside as what it looks on the outside. So first, understand the user, and you can do that through journaling, through coaching, through polling your friends and colleagues doing your own 360 informally or informally.

Understanding your own operating system and executive functions [10:30]

But what is the actual truth of how you operate? And so, as a coach, I have a neurodiversity background. I have a specific expertise in ADHD. So we look at executive functions, how you plan, manage, remember, follow through on things, how you regulate your focus, how you regulate your emotions. And regulate doesn’t mean on and off, it doesn’t mean subjugate, but more modulate. So executive functions, processing modalities, learning styles. Do you talk to think? Do you prefer sketches? Are you someone who takes a while to mull things over before responding? All of these things a part of how do you operate? What is your operating system? Okay, so within that OS, there are systems and routines, subroutines for how to get things done. So making sure that those match. So that’s the first bit of it. And then the second is we are so prone to negativity and shoulds and internalizing how something should be, and seeing the gap between where we are and how things should be or where things are and how we think they should be.

Overcoming fear of failure in personal change [11:45]

And working with that is a huge unlock in terms of, okay, we’re not going to spend ages designing a perfect system without ever testing it. And we know this when it comes to products. You need to ship little features, you need to test them. You need to noodle around with them to be like, “Oh, that still didn’t work”, in order to keep on improving. But somehow when it comes to ourselves, when our own emotions, our identity or our values or needs are called into question we go into more of a it has to be right first time. And I’m so scared to test something that isn’t right. So there’s often a fear of failure when it comes to behaving differently or changing a belief or an idea about how something works, even if you know that it’s maladaptive. Some examples of that are for many of my clients who have executive functioning challenges, waiting until deadlines makes priorities clearer, so it’s easier to make decisions.

So of course, you’re going to push it to the deadline even though you know that it stresses you out. You don’t want to do it. You don’t do your best work, you do great work. But imagine if you had three hours more. And so well, what are those maladaptive things that you’ve learned that you want to unlearn? So those are aspects that you want to iteratively chip away at. And inevitably it surfaces assumptions about how you believe the world works, how you believe you work. Oh, I never knew that about myself. Oh, that is a thing I do. Whoa.

And it made total sense 10 years ago when I had that crappy boss. But now my team is fantastic. Why do I keep doing this thing? And it’s undermining my executive presence; it’s undermining my authority in decision-making. But a lot of these things are about psychological safety, internal psychological safety. So again, this is where the intrapersonal versus interpersonal comes in is how can you make it safer for yourself to try small shippable, minimum viable steps of changes that you want to make and see what comes from them. So separating out the planning from the doing from the reflecting on those things to pressure test when my assumption is right, is this the right direction to take all those things before you build up a fantastically complex system that you never ever use? Which is another pitfall.

Strategies for introverted technologists in collaborative environments [14:23]

Shane Hastie: Technology professionals are stereotyped as introverts and not being comfortable in that collaborative social environment. Stereotypes exist for a reason. And of course we span these, but if I am working in this team and I’m not necessarily that comfortable with the collaborative aspects, dealing with non-technical folks, what do I need to do with myself to become more effective if that is part of the role that I am.

Frankie Berkoben: Well, what are you good at? Oh, I’m fine in one-on-one situations. Cool, all right. You start building those relationships and trust in one-on-one settings. I do better with specific outlines and plans and an agenda. I don’t really like small talk. Okay, well, you advocate for that. You say, “I find small talk difficult” rather than “I don’t do small talk”. So there are ways to phrase it that is about this is a need and a discomfort, or please help me. People love to help. That’s the thing is that if people are like, “Oh, I’m doing you a kindness”, as opposed to, “Whoa, you’re uppity”. What do you mean? So bringing people in by saying, just vocalizing or writing down or saying, “I actually need some time to process this. Do you mind if we do this in an async chat instead?” A lot of these things convey to people, “Here’s how you can help me”. There’s a principle of reciprocity.

If somebody helps you, they’re more inclined to keep on helping you, which is not necessarily reciprocity, but if you want something from them, give them an opportunity to help you first. And that can be done in a non-sociopathic way, obviously, because we all do it. So there’s that. How can you collaborate already that feels comfortable for you? And then how can you slightly nudge yourself out of that comfort zone, not so far that you snap back immediately, but being like, “Okay, maybe it’s with two people rather than one-on-one”, maybe I’ll go to Toastmasters and practice voicing out an idea out loud in a succinct way, in an environment that is safer to “fail”. Some ideas like that. And obviously it does depend on what your specific obstacles are. Is it to do with processing difficulties? You actually don’t hear information, so you can’t respond to it? Or is it about fears? I don’t want to look like an idiot. So depending on whether it’s mechanical or mindset-related, there are different avenues to go in those. And ultimately the two are not separate.

Supporting team members with ADHD [17:21]

Shane Hastie: Leaning a bit more into neurodiversity and ADHD in particular, if I’m working with people on my team that have acknowledged that they do have ADHD, what do I need to do to adapt to them?

Frankie Berkoben: Ask them. One person with ADHD is one person with ADHD. There are lots of commonalities, and as you noted, there are stereotypes for a reason, but especially with people who are extremely smart, brilliant and capable, often very self-aware, but with huge blind spots, self-aware about their faults more than around their strengths, that some things to be aware of are rejection sensitivity. Like a lot of people who are neurodivergent and who have not been historically supported in the ways that they naturally function best tend to have a lot of raw spots built up around not being understood, not being heard, being steamrolled over. So just kind of like, “What do I need to know in order to best manage you? What do I need to know in order to best collaborate with you?” And some people are more open than others, and this actually doesn’t limit to people of one specific neurotype.

This is the same for everybody, which is why my work is a third of my clients are ADHD, two-thirds are not, because many of those same things that impact people with ADHD all of the time impact people in leadership positions, high ambiguity, low resources, high visibility, all of the time, those executive functions. But coming back to that specific example that you raised, ask them and then understanding, “Well, okay, where does your ADHD show up? What can I do to support you? And if I can’t do that, what can you do?” Those are often things that help. There are menus of options for reasonable accommodations. So I’m based in the US. I’m from the UK originally, but there are specific reasonable accommodations that you can look at. And some of those like, “That’s so simple. I can’t believe that actually works”. And others, “That’s so simple, that’s never going to work for me”.

Understanding twice-exceptional individuals [19:44]

So understanding that, and I think there’s also something very key that I haven’t pointed out yet, which is for many skilled technical individuals or people who are in positions of leadership or professional excellence, like high performers, they tend to be neurodivergent in a couple of ways, especially around giftedness, high intelligence in whatever realm. It could be academic intelligence, it could be somatic intelligence or things like that, as well as executive function challenges. So this produces an even greater paradox than your quote, average person with ADHD. Their potential is much greater, and the gap between their potential and what they’re capable of on a consistent everyday basis is much greater, which means that the emotional impacts and the belief systems that people build up around what they can ask for, what they’re allowed to, what they’re worth, what risks they can take, what they are actually capable of is a lot greater.

So there’s often more of an emotional impact, and for these people call them twice exceptional, exceptional in one way and exceptional on the other extreme around executive functions is the simple things like administrative stuff are really difficult, but the complex things, the ones where your brain is buzzing and you’re like, oh, I could talk about this all day. Wow, I can work until three in the morning on this. The complex things come easily, and for the general population, say neuronormative people, it’s assumed to be a one-to-one correlation between difficulty and complexity, but it is the opposite is the inverse. Simple is difficult and complex is easy.

The inverse relationship between complexity and difficulty [21:36]

So how that applies in a work setting is the more administrative or rote functions or the things that are about doing things again and again, consistency, I guess those are the things which tend to drop off and where people may need more support, whereas the things which are more complex, more moving parts hasn’t been done before like, oh, this feels almost impossible to most people, never, ever cut that out for people who operate well in that space. So a lot of the challenges that I see with well-meaning HR folk or managers, is, oh, okay, we’ll scale down the difficulty so that they’re just doing the easy stuff, but in fact, you’re taking away the fun stuff and leaving people the drudgery that they quote should be able to manage, but is really draining. And so that’s another piece of advice I would give.

Communicating your needs as a neurodivergent professional [22:41]

Shane Hastie: If I’m on the other side of that equation, if I am the person for whom that complex stuff is exciting and the routine is hard, how do I communicate that most effectively?

Frankie Berkoben: Just as you said it, the complex stuff comes really easy. To me, it’s the routine stuff that is hard and where I need more support and acknowledging the mismatch in conception and understanding around this. I know it seems like it should be the other way around, but for me it’s not. You’ve really stated it beautifully. I mean, then there are other steps in terms of self-advocacy. So part of that is knowing exactly what you need in order to bridge some of those gaps or having the language that is appropriate for the setting that you’re in. So among peers, you might say, “Oh, this is brain fog”, but maybe with your manager, you can’t use exactly the same terms, but also what you’re asking for, it’s a matter of also translating from colloquial terminology to business terminology without using psychological or medical terminology. There’s some skillful translation skills required there, but there are enough people and resources on the internet, and especially with the advent of AI chatbots that you can talk through this and be like, “Hmm, convert this for me”.

Why this is relevant beyond ADHD and engineering [24:13]

Shane Hastie: What’s an important question I haven’t asked you?

Frankie Berkoben: Why is this relevant, I think? Why is this relevant beyond people with ADHD? Why is this relevant beyond engineers? Shall I answer that?

Shane Hastie: Please do.

Frankie Berkoben: Yes. Human beings are complex, and we’re not robots. We do operate on not only a spectrum, which implies one, well, two dimensions, but multiple axes. And what is normal is system dependent and dependent on the eye of the observer or who defines normal. It’s a definition of success or way of doing things. And not everybody fits cleanly. In fact, most people don’t actually fit cleanly into what we think of as the average box, which in some ways gives us great flexibility in acknowledging, “Oh, yes, I have different ways of doing things, and that’s normal. That’s okay. It’s not about a deficiency on my part. It’s not about me not fitting into the system well enough, but it’s about, well, the system isn’t quite supporting me either”.

So it’s not just a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, but each of us are different star-shaped pegs or something like that, where we have areas where we are amazingly brilliant and other areas where we’re not really meeting the bar for that system. But if the system doesn’t flex, then of course a lot of challenging things happen. We cut off those sparkly pointy bits because we’re “too much” or we try to stretch, or the system maybe can flex to fit. We talked about interpersonal, different people and collaborations. It can also be what are tools or technologies that you can use? And this applies to everybody. This is not limited to one neurotype. And also it’s context dependent too. Everybody is, especially here in the US, geopolitical instability, economic instability, a trend towards more top-down command and control management rather than human first.

The impact of stress on executive functioning [26:35]

We believe that people are people, which means that you are more prone to executive functioning challenges, being unable to see fit, clearly, prioritize, make wise decisions, tap into resources or decisions you’ve already made, etc. When you are stressed, if there’s a big life change for you recently, maybe half your team got laid off and now everybody is doing five people’s work. That stress level means that your brain goes into fight or flight. And a lot of the executive functioning challenges that are prevalent to many people with ADHD certainly, and other forms of neurodivergence also apply to you. So ergo, some of those tools will work for you too. So it’s like the curb cut effect. That applicability beyond ADHD, beyond neurodiversity, beyond engineering is we all function differently and we all have different needs at different points in time, and our needs are not static either.

Shane Hastie: Frankie, a lot of great ideas, a lot of food for thought here. If people want to continue the conversation, where can they find you?

Frankie Berkoben: I would absolutely love anybody who’s listening in who this resonated with to connect with me on LinkedIn and especially send me a DM letting me know what resonated most, what you want to know more about, even if you might want to set up a conversation. My LinkedIn is Frankie Berkoben. And yes, it’s always amazing having these conversations because you never know what sparks in other people, but it would be a gift if people could share what that sparked for them.

Shane Hastie: We’ll make sure we include that link in the show notes.

Frankie Berkoben: Thank you.

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