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Why coaching?

It can be really challenging to get ahead in your career when you don’t have the right resources to support your growth. We often enter the IT field because we love technology, and we’re adept at navigating and managing it. But figuring out how to get things done in a corporate environment requires an entirely different skillset. Without the right manager, mentor, or coach, it can be bewildering (and sometimes soul-crushing!) to navigate your relationship with “the business”.

When we work together, I’ll draw upon over 20 years of experience working in IT and 10+ years of managing people to help you grow and work through the challenges you’re facing. You can read through some examples of the things we could work on together in the sections below, but this list is by no means exhaustive. During our free introductory call, we can discuss your goals and decide together if there’s a good match for coaching.

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Who can benefit from coaching?

Everyone can benefit from coaching! The key is finding the right person to help you develop or hone your skills. Many IT professionals at smaller companies fall into one of two categories:

  • Their manager doesn’t have experience in corporate IT.
  • Their manager has Corporate IT experience, but has a million other responsibilities that get in the way of spending more time with you.

In either case, you might find yourself in a position where:

  • It’s hard to manage expectations with your manager.
  • You have great ideas but can’t get approval or funding to move them forward.
  • You’re frustrated because your stakeholders in the business seem to be speaking a different language.

If any of this sounds familiar, coaching might be helpful. While I’m happy to chat with anyone, I’m best positioned to help people in some of the following situations:

Solo IT Managers / IT Professionals

Whether you’re starting from nothing, taking over for someone who left, or moving away from an MSP, it’s tough to be the only one in charge of IT. Sometimes you just want to bounce an idea off someone or get advice from someone who’s done it before. Your manager might be great in some areas, but they might not know much about IT. We can help you develop the skills you need to be more effective in your role and grow professionally, like:

  • building technology roadmaps
  • building support for your initiatives
  • building, nurturing, and repairing stakeholder relationships
  • managing and communicating change to your stakeholders
  • weighing business risks against technology and cybersecurity risks

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Aspiring IT Managers

IT Management is a challenging and rewarding career path that lets you combine your tech, work, and people management skills to make a big impact on an organization’s success. There’s no one-size-fits-all path to IT Manager, and different experiences and journeys can help you stand out. We can help you develop the skills you need to transition into an IT Management role, such as:

  • effective time management and prioritization
  • articulating and communicating the business value of technology solutions
  • developing leadership skills
  • talking with your manager about your career goals
  • building a professional development plan

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New People Managers

A lot of new people managers realize that the skills that made them stand out as individual contributors aren’t the same skills they need to be successful people managers. As your team grows, your effectiveness isn’t measured by your individual contributions, but by the impact of your team as a whole. So, it’s important to develop the skills that will help your entire team be successful. We can work on things like:

  • building and nurturing an inclusive team culture
  • knowing when to direct, coach, support, or delegate
  • having difficult conversations
  • setting clear expectations around performance
  • measuring your own impact as a manager

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What are some skills that we could work on?

While this list is by no means exhaustive, here are a few of the things we could work on together:

Defining and Communicating Business Value

A lot of people who work in tech are great at understanding how tech works, but they have trouble when they need to get approval or funding for a project from management or stakeholders. Something gets lost in translation. We can help you develop your ability to:

  • build relationships with your stakeholders
  • understand the problems your stakeholders are facing
  • identify opportunities for your team to add value
  • discuss and validate the business value of your ideas with stakeholders
  • communicate the value of your ideas in a way that resonates with your audience
  • build the support you need to successfully manage change

Building and Repairing Relationships

Have you ever felt like you and HR are always at odds? Or maybe it’s just one person in HR? How about the people in Sales and Marketing? What about your “end users” in general? If you don’t have a good relationship with your stakeholders, your day-to-day work can be miserable and delivering on projects that involve change for your stakeholders can feel impossible. We can help you develop your ability to:

  • build relationships with new stakeholders
  • repair relationships with existing stakeholders that aren’t going so well
  • strengthen relationships with key stakeholders who are critical to your future success

Professional Development

Sometimes it can be tough to figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be, especially if your manager doesn’t live in the world of IT. We’ll work together to figure out how you got to where you are, what you like about your current role, where you want to go, and how you can get there. Sometimes there may be a chance to grow into a new role within your company, and sometimes you may need to move on to a new company. We can work with your manager to develop a professional development plan that will help you develop the skills you need to advance at your current company. We can also work independently to develop your skills if you decide to move on to a new role.

Roadmapping

IT is often a limited and shared resource. You don’t have enough resources and you have many stakeholders with different priorities and needs. So it’s pretty difficult to tell people when you can start on something, let alone deliver it. Similarly, annual budgeting can be a nightmare when you have a centralized IT budget, but you still need to support many customers with different needs. We can work together to help you develop and iterate on an approach to roadmapping that has just enough structure to provide you and your customers with the clarity you need to make decisions about resource allocation, timing, and dependencies.

Business Process Fluency

As IT professionals, we’re experts in technology, but we must remember that every IT solution exists at the intersection of technology, people, process, and data. We can work on your abilities to map out, evaluate, and improve business processes. These skills will help you to:

  • understand how your customers currently do their work
  • make sure that your customers are on the same page within their own teams about their processes
  • have better conversations about what technology can and cannot do
  • explore process alternatives that improve business outcomes or simplify technology requirements

Other Skills

If there are other skills you’d like to work on, but they aren’t listed here, let me know! If I can’t help you, I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can I afford coaching?

If you’re having trouble affording coaching, we can talk about it during our free introductory call. If it seems like coaching would be a good fit for you, I can provide you with resources to help you talk to your employer about paying for your sessions. If you’re not currently employed or your employer won’t pay for them, I do have a few slots available for sliding scale pricing. If I don’t have any sliding scale slots open right now, I can put you on a waiting list for when I do.