Why is moving from individual contributor to technical lead or team lead such a hard leap? For Marni Coffey, it was about learning to develop the people around her. Developing others is something Marni chose to do as a team lead, and as a people leader she continues to do it. In Episode 279, you will hear how Marni approached the first set of one-on-one career conversations with members of her team after joining McKesson. We will also discuss change management and considerations for doing it within global organizations. Should good managers be doing a form of change management for the careers of their employees? See if you can formulate your own answer after listening to the episode.

Original Recording Date: 05-19-2024

Marni Coffey is the Senior Manager for Business Systems and Indirect Sourcing and Procurement at McKesson. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Marni, check out Episode 278.

Topics – The Technical Lead as a People Developer, Change Management, Improving Employee Experience and Career Development

3:21 – The Technical Lead as a People Developer

• Marni mentioned being a technical lead. What should someone expect if they are an individual contributor seeking to take on a technical lead (or tech lead) role?
  • “It’s a leap. Moving from individual contributor to technical lead is the hardest leap, the hardest leap I ever took.” – Marni Coffey
  • As an individual contributor, Marni would learn how to do things and not stop until they are complete, delivering excellent solutions to internal customers and stakeholders.
  • “Becoming a lead…you now have a team, and they all have individual tasks that they are going to contribute to. And you will have some of your own tasks, but mostly, you’re kind of going around and making sure everybody can do what they do…. You are supposed to enable them to do the job…. You don’t just take the task and do it. And too many technical leads do it…. That is not what the people on your team want you to do. They don’t want you to take their tasks. You may think that you’re doing them a favor. You are not. You should be developing them.” – Marni Coffey, on the role of the technical lead
  • Others on a team may not be able to perform tasks as quickly as the technical lead, and the technical lead should understand this.
    • The tech lead can peer review a team member’s work and provide feedback and coaching on how to make it better without doing the task for the team member.
    • If a team member needs help, help them. Help does not mean taking the task and doing it yourself!
    • The technical lead’s job is to develop the people on the team and ensure they can complete their work.
  • Deadlines are also an important consideration in all of this because they must be met.
    • Marni tells us sometimes people are working in the wrong role. Maybe a person is working in the data layer and needs to be working in the presentation layer.
    • The tech lead needs to understand when people are in the wrong role and help get them in the right role. Someone on the team may be struggling or not enjoying the work they are doing, for example.
  • “As a technical lead that was the hardest thing. The hardest thing is not doing it for them. It is teaching them to do it.” – Marni Coffey
• Does the technical lead essentially manage the team’s task workload to ensure deadlines are hit?
  • Marni says yes, but the job of the technical lead (or team lead), it’s your responsibility to go and speak with stakeholders.
  • If you are someone who is afraid to talk to other people who may be leaders within your company, the technical lead may not be right for you just yet. Start by participating in presentations to stakeholders as an individual contributor to prepare for this role.
  • A team lead can develop others on the team by involving them in presentations to stakeholders. This allows participation without ownership of the entire presentation.
  • In her current role Marni likes to bring her team members to and involve them in presentations. She can set the stage as the manager but then allows the subject matter experts on her team to cover their respective areas.
  • “If you’re a team lead and you’ve got people on your team who are aspiring for that same role, and you want to help them get to that next step, that’s one of the things you can do. When you are giving your presentations to stakeholders and senior leaders and you’re making sure the deadlines are met with the project managers, bring them in there with you. Let them speak a little bit. Let them start to sharpen those skills.” – Marni Coffey
• Not everyone may think a key output for the team lead is team member development.
  • When in the technical or team lead role, Marni felt it was her job to develop others on the team.
  • Some people feel the role of the team lead is to…
    • Ensure work is being completed by the people on the team
    • Assign people to perform specific tasks
    • Report task completion and progress to leaders
    • Give presentations
  • Marni took on a little extra to develop others when she was in this role. She believes we need other people to accomplish things for the greater company, and it will be easier to work with others if we develop them. Marni says this development effort creates future partnerships.
  • John suggests maybe a primary metric for a team lead is project delivery.
    • Marni agrees, but for those who want to move on to more than just a team lead (going into people leadership), developing people will be something you need to know how to do. And no matter what, the team will be more successful if you spend time developing the people on it.
    • “I’ve done it both ways. It was more successful when I let them do it and helped develop them.” – Marni Coffey, on being a team lead and developing people
  • Marni tells us there are times when a team lead may need to step in to help expedite a task to avoid missing a deadline. Marni would work together with the member of the team on a specific task, and though she may have done some of the work, she was there with the team member so the other person could speak to the changes that were made.
    • “I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. I didn’t just take it and leave them out of it. I was in the room with them.” – Marni Coffey, on stepping in as a team lead
• Marni defines stakeholders as people who have a stake in a specific system or who have a stake in what you are delivering. Examples could be end users of a system or people who are going to be in charge of managing / maintaining the system.
  • Nick suggests we might be so focused on fixing technical problems that we have not sharpened our communication skills by truly understanding what the requirements of our stakeholders are. Having discussions with stakeholders may uncover they really needed something different than they originally thought.
  • It’s important to ask others what they are trying to accomplish before we recommend solutions. Even if someone comes to you with a different question, understanding what they are trying to accomplish is key and may reveal a very different solution is needed. This is called “solving for the latent need.”
• Is the team lead or technical lead always an individual contributor?
  • Marni says it depends. You can be an individual contributor in the role.
  • Are there enough people on the team to accomplish all of the work, or do you as the team lead or technical lead need to take some of the tasks?
  • “You want to make sure as the team lead that you do leave yourself enough time to be able to represent the team, to be able to give those updates. Sometimes you’re working with a project manager, and sometimes you don’t have a project manager.” – Marni Coffey
  • Marni says it can be more time intensive when we work with a project manager than in the case when there is not a project manager. She sites this as another way she grew in her career.
    • Marni took a project management course to better understand some of the reasoning behind the actions and questions that came from project managers.
    • “It feels like nitpicking when you don’t understand why somebody wants something, so I think you should always seek out that why…. Never stop asking why. Be a 5-year-old your whole life. There are business principles built on asking why over and over and over again.” – Marni Coffey
• This idea of asking why gets us right back to empathy. One of the keys to successfully delivering a solution is understanding what people really need and why it is needed.
  • For a people leader to be successful in delivering projects and solutions, the leader must make sure their people have what is needed to be successful.
  • “You’ve got to make sure that you’re giving your people what they need to be successful. That’s what I mean by you work for them. They don’t work for you.” – Marni Coffey, on people leadership
• John feels not every people manager would feel they should start with employee experience.
• Marni says she’s worked on teams who had some really hard problems to solve, but she had really good people.
  • “We’ve had a lot of real problems to solve, but I had really good people. And they knew if there were on the phone at 2 in the morning, I was going to be on the phone at 2 in the morning with them. They knew that when we got off that call we were going to have a little lessons learned session, and we were not going to have that problem again. They knew that I didn’t want them to have to be on the phone at 2 in the morning.” – Marni Coffey
  • Marni would not stand for anyone treating any member of her team in a disrespectful way, regardless of the person’s working location.
  • The people leader cannot look at their team as “minions.” Team members are the ones doing the work. The people leader’s job is to make their employees successful.

14:54 – Change Management

• Some of the examples given earlier were really about change management. When you work for a global company like PepsiCo, what are some of the considerations that go into change management of systems designed to support a global workforce that others may no realize?
  • At global companies, every system change makes an impact. The system gets used by someone 24 hours per day, and you cannot avoid impacting at least someone when making a change.
  • It is important to communicate when a system will have downtime, what the change will be, when the change will happen, and what the system behavior might be during the change.
  • A change may impact a specific region like North America or even just one specific team that is using a system capability.
  • Marni stresses the importance of leveraging a change management process even for small changes at global organizations like PepsiCo. If a small change brings the entire system down, it can impact production business operations and become a priority 1 or priority 2 incident. Technology operations teams are on the hook to get these resolved quickly.
  • Change management is extremely important for global organizations, but even at smaller companies, you are likely talking with other team members about changes that will be made to different systems.
    • If you worked in an office of 10 people and were about to make a change that would only impact the people in that office, you would let the people in that office know about the change in advance.
    • At global companies like PepsiCo it’s a little more complex. You need the required documentation like an implementation plan, a pre-production and user acceptance testing plan, risk documents (if applicable), estimated downtime, a documented escalation path for system support, and a documented rollback plan.
    • The documentation needed is one thing, and then there is an approval flow for the change itself.
    • Marni would advise several days be allocated for getting a global change approved. It will take time to communicate with others who work in different countries and time zones. Change approvers may have questions or need further clarity of the change being made.
    • If your change is rejected, you have to start over.
    • “You will spend possibly four times as long on your change request as you do on your implementation.” – Marni Coffey, on change management
  • When we talk about downtime, this means a feature or function of a system or the entire system is unavailable for use.
• John says people often complain about change management, but we have highlighted even small organizations have change management, even if it’s less formal. As an organization gets larger, the less we can rely on those informal lines of communication.
  • “The other thing that I always point out to people is the change management process and the requirement that you’re filling out is a response to a failure in the past that cost money.” – John White, on change management
    • For example, a risk analysis document was likely added to your change management process because previous changes did not have this and resulted in loss of money.
  • Marni says when the change process evolves or has new requirements, it affects all teams whose systems are governed by change management. And it might not even be your area that was the reason for the adjustment to the change management process.
  • John thinks a good change management process leads people through the process of thinking through things they should have but maybe didn’t or would not think of without the process in place.
  • “Did you tell people you were going to do this? Did you send out an e-mail letting them know you were going to do this and after this is done this is going to be different? There’s a lot there. You don’t think about those things.” – Marni Coffey, reflecting on how change management gives you a checklist for thinking through system changes
  • Marni mentioned when she was a developer, she would just make changes. Then people would come to her and point out specific issues which were caused by the change that was made.
  • “The end user always does something you never think anyone would do. So that’s why you have change management. That’s why you have user acceptance testing. Because they are going to find the holes in your program, in your system that you did not know were there, that you wouldn’t even think to check for….” – Marni Coffey
  • John tells the story of an end user who kept important e-mails in the trash folder. This person was impacted when John and his company implemented automatic e-mail trash emptying.
• John points out a dynamic tension between the change management process we’re talking about (strict change management) and companies like Netflix and Amazon who are constantly changing their products (a more agile form of change management).
  • Marni mentions being agile does not mean you skip change management altogether.
  • “Agile is for development. It’s for quick development. It’s not so you can skip change management. It just means you need to plan a little better to include it.” – Marni Coffey, on change management and agile
  • Marni describes the tension with development teams and change management. She would have to tell development teams they were not following agile development because they had not included a change manager in their process (someone dedicated to submitting change requests and ensuring they get approved).
    • Change management operates on a schedule. Approved changes have dates and times they will be applied. Marni had to tell people in her past roles that the change someone wanted (which didn’t go through change management) could not be placed ahead of previously approved changes.
    • Marni says it can help other teams when you explain the why behind the change management process, the need to follow it, and documentation / templates to help teams get started in following the proper processes. This helped ease the burden of going through agile development and change management.
    • “We developed templates, little change management scripts, templates for what the change approval board is going to look for…. We did a lot of helping people and getting them up to speed on it as long as we could…. Anything we could do to relieve the pain of the change management process encouraged them to follow it.” – Marni Coffey, on helping other teams follow the appropriate change management process as part of agile development
    • Marni’s operations team was able to empathize with the work needed to do proper change management. They understood what other teams felt when they were new to following the proper processes for change management and sought to provide guidance and help. This came in the form of templates or even directing others to people with more expertise on the process when needed.

25:04 – Improving Employee Experience and Career Development

• How does someone improve the employee experience through career development discussions?
  • One of the first things Marni did with her current team was suggest each member work with her to create a career development plan.
  • In order to do this Marni would…
    • Learn about each person
    • Ask what they would like to be doing
    • Understand strengths
    • Ask about areas of development / improvement
    • Gauge perceived struggles and roadblocks to progression
    • Consider ways to make connections for her employees to meet the right people – one example was using presentations to other groups to build relationships
    • Help the person gain visibility through participation in certain projects
  • Career development is a huge part of Marni’s job. She is constantly thinking about what will happen to her people when they are ready to move on.
  • Marni has a great team and understands it is not reasonable to keep team members forever. Keeping someone in the same position for too long creates an unmotivated, unhappy person.
  • “I am constantly looking for that next opportunity for my people, even though it means I’m going to have to fill a position. It’s going to be hard. I am going to have a partner at the end of it because I helped them. I supported them in any way they needed to get them to that next step.” – Marni Coffey
    • In developing a partner in this way, Marni would have shared some of her experiences and suggested some development for the person, for example.
    • Also, McKesson has a networking / mentoring program to help employees develop.
    • Marni mentioned the people in her leadership chain really care about the career paths of everyone within the organization. She does not have to try to develop her people without sponsorship.
  • According to Marni, the people leader should always be developing their people.
  • Marni cites a member of her team she feels has the potential to be her boss one day. She sees the potential and truly wants to be a positive part of that journey for employees on her team.
• What was it like to have career conversations with people for the first time on Marni’s new team?
  • Marni said she had different reactions from every team member despite asking them the same questions.
  • Some people knew what they wanted to do next. Some had not really thought about what they wanted to do next and acted a little guarded.
  • Marni prepared for the meetings and laid out the strong points of each person during the conversation. Some team members were surprised at the things Marni pointed out as strengths.
    • Marni pointed out strengths she saw as someone who had experienced the team member without knowing them extremely well.
    • Marni shares the story of someone who believed herself to be the quiet one on the team. Marni pointed out this person was very good at presentations and encouraged her to present to some senior leaders (which went extremely well).
  • A member of the team thought at first it might not be very productive to have a career conversation with Marni.
  • “But I think over time they realized that I am the person I said I was. I really am that person. I really do care about them. And I do care about their careers. And I do care if they’re doing ok day to day, getting their jobs done. I do care if they are successful, and I do care if people know they’re successful…. And over time…and I’ll admit I thought it would take longer…I have developed a bond with my new team. I haven’t even been there a year, but I feel like we are a team. We are a really good, strong, cohesive team. And now, they are all actively engaged in their development plans. They see that there are people in their corner that want to help them get there. They take those steps. They are engaging. And it’s exciting to see someone wake up like that…. They were just heads down doing their jobs not thinking about themselves, and it’s important to think about yourself. It’s important to think about your career development. No company gets better if you stay exactly where you are. You have to move on and be successful and do great things and keep doing better things and getting better than that for the company to be successful.” – Marni Coffey, on career conversations with her team (a mic drop moment)
• Should a career conversation result in homework for both the employee and the manager?
  • Yes! Marni says this is a partnership and not a hierarchy.
  • Marni has things to do for her team, and they have things they need to do for themselves.
  • Deliverables still need to be completed. That doesn’t go away. But doing a great job is how you get the recognition, which allows your manager to “talk you up” and for others to see the great things you have done.
  • Most people probably meet their deliverables. It’s more about how someone did it than anything.
  • At McKesson, the organization wants all employees to exhibit leadership. It’s about taking charge, facilitating change, and having an enterprise mindset (all part of winning mindsets to incorporate on a daily basis).
  • “I think it’s important also that they understand it’s up to them. I empower to lead and lead by example, but they have to seize that empowerment. They have to take control and do what they’re going to do. And they can all do it. You just have to empower them to do it. They have to believe it, and then they have to go act on it.” – Marni Coffey
  • If John gave Marni feedback, he would say she exhibits not only empathy but also authenticity. The joining of these is extremely powerful.

Mentioned in the Outro

• Is technical lead or team lead something you want to pursue, and if so, will you decide to develop people? Could you already be developing people even without being in that role?
  • We know the tech lead is going to have to communicate with many stakeholders throughout the organization. Hopefully that makes you a more effective communicator.
  • There is another benefit for the team lead / tech lead that falls in line with career development. Being in the role could allow you to learn about other groups and different roles within those groups that you might want to pursue later in your career. It also helps you make connections and meet more people.
• Meeting deliverables is more about the how. Marni is modeling for us that we can meet our deliverables in a way that shows others who we are and that we will do the things we say we will do. We can show authenticity like Marni does.
• The discussion of change management made Nick think of career change management.
  • People leaders consistently have to do this (or the good ones do it, at least) – change management for the careers of the people on the team.
  • The individual development plans are like collaborating with the people you lead on the documentation needed for them to submit a future career change. The person whose career could change gets to submit the change request when they are ready.

Contact the Hosts

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