Management Coach Lara Hogan on Developing the Craft of Leadership

Each member of your team has different needs, reacts to feedback in different ways, and moves along different trajectories — and management should always take this into account. Even when you achieve the perfect team dynamic - a new hire or budget cut can easily throw things off balance. But no matter how isolated a leadership position can be, you don't go through it alone. And best of all, as Lara Hogan says, you really don't have to.

Lara Hogan is an author, speaker, and management and leadership coach. Over the years, she's held positions such as Director of Engineering at Etsy and VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, growing emerging tech leaders, demystifying public speaking, and championing public speaking. 'engineering. But it wasn't until 2017 that her passion for coaching led her to co-found Wherewithall, a knowledge service to help managers hone their skills to better support their teams.

In their workshops and trainings, she found herself giving the same advice over and over, so she decided to write it all down. His latest book, Resilient Management, grew out of this. When should you empower and coach your team rather than giving them specific instructions on what needs to be done? How can you build the resilience needed to succeed at work? What does good, actionable feedback look like?

In today's episode, we sat down with Lara to discuss leading and supporting a team, from learning mentoring and coaching skills to mastering the art delicate feedback.

If you're short on time, here are some quick tips:

Develop a plan for individual interviews based on the person and the context. While some people might need more mentorship, others will just want feedback or ideas. Over time, teams can experience friction, but that's to be expected. Think of it as a learning opportunity so they can understand how each person feels and how they can work together. Most of us default to mentorship – sharing advice on what to do – when supporting others. But coaching — helping people find the answer themselves — can be even more valuable. Instead of giving prescriptive advice, focus on the recipient and give feedback on their motivations and concerns. This way it is much more likely to stick. The larger your support network (inside and outside your organization), the more resilient you become as a manager.

If you like our discussion, check out other episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in the reader of your choice. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the episode.

The job of manager

Liam Geraghty: Lara, welcome to Inside Intercom. We are delighted to see you again.

Lara Hogan: Thank you very much. I can't wait to go out again.

Liam: For those who haven't heard the episode, which I think dates back to 2016, could you tell us a bit about your professional background so far?

Lara: Absolutely. So in 2016, I was working as an Engineering Manager at Etsy. After that, I served as VP of Engineering at Kickstarter. And since then, I've been trying to support managers and leaders, usually in the tech industry, as they support their teams. I try to do this through individual coaching, group coaching and training workshops.

Liam: Today is about how to be a resilient manager, which is appropriate I guess because you wrote a book about it. This is called resilient management. Why did you want to write this book and what motivated it?

"I realized I was saying the same things over and over again about how to be a good coach for someone"

Lara: I spent a lot of time thinking about what managers needed when stepping into this role. From my experience as head of engineering, director of engineering, and then vice president, I've seen a lot of managers step into this role, myself included, without any training or guidance. It was a bit of luck of the draw. If you had a team of experienced managers who were good at teaching, helping and supporting you, then you could level up and understand...