Team Self-Reliance Success Story

Are you a senior engineer whose team relies too heavily on you for day-to-day tasks? Is this keeping you from focusing on strategic initiatives and stalling your growth?

My new client was eager to make their team self-reliant to free up their time for new challenges that would contribute to larger organizational goals.

We started by identifying why the team wasn’t self-sufficient. It was made up of junior to mid-level engineers eager to make an impact quickly, relying on my tenured client for readily available answers. The remote nature of the team reinforced this dependence.

An empathetic company culture also made it hard for the manager to hold the team to higher standards. Combined with poor capacity planning, this led to constant context switching, on-call incidents, and multitasking, keeping my client bogged down.

Six weeks into our work, the team responded to a critical production incident with a proactive mindset: “We need to improve this!”

Six more weeks later, engineers on the team were consistently making monitoring improvements to stabilize the system without direction from my client.

Coaching on relationship building and leadership skills was key to this transformation:

We worked on helping the remote team members understand my client’s bandwidth and boundaries, not just seeing them as a resource for quick answers. My client also learned mentoring techniques that empowered the team to find their own solutions by asking the right questions.

Building a stronger relationship with the manager was critical. My client guided the manager to challenge the team to a higher performance bar, with support in place. Through delegation and leadership coaching, my client was able to step back and let the team grow.

Cultural challenges are hard for engineers to diagnose and fix on their own. A skilled coach can help you navigate these issues without needing to change your team or company.

Feeling stuck? Schedule a Call to explore new possibilities!