Three Best Practices to Grow Your Happiness as a Manager

At first glance, achieving happiness and effective engineering leadership don’t seem to have much in common. Marcy’s talk and my personal experience working with her as an executive coach, have proven that these concepts coincide.

This is the final talk in a twelve-part series covering the sessions from Calibrate, an engineering leadership conference held September, 2015 in San Francisco.

Marcy is an experienced technology leader - she was VPE & co-founder of three companies, has led 3,000 person engineering teams, and grown organizations from an idea to a public company. Her key insights in this talk come from her experience as a coach of Silicon Valley leaders for the past ten years.

Executive coaches typically meet with an executive leader (founder, CxO, VP, etc.) on a regular basis to:

• Identify strengths and weaknesses and develop plans to improve weakness and play to the strengths
• Talk through the daily/weekly challenges
• Organize the chaos that is a startup into something that looks like a plan
• Form processes to regulate the chaos so that it can be handled by a human being
• Map out the do’s and don’ts of running and growing an organization
• Act as a sounding board for ideas and plans to make sure the founder remains in check
• Make sure that throughout the trials and tribulations the exec is happy

The four themes she found that were the most effective in increasing an exec’s happiness and effectiveness were:

• Curb Judgement
• Embrace Fear
• Step Away to Plan & Reflect
• Kindness

In this closing keynote, Marcy gives some poignant advice and take aways for everyone in the audience. Watch the video to learn more about each of the areas. And as Marcy says, not only will this advice make you a stronger leader, but it will also make you a better person.