Break through team friction, get on the same page, and create a high-trust and high-performance team.

I remember a time when I really struggled with leadership.

I felt exhausted in the morning just looking at my calendar. Another 5-hour block of back-to-back meetings. I knew that keeping 1:1s were important, but sometimes I couldn't tell if they were making a difference at all.

I quickly scanned the codebase and opened up a few pull requests to make some minor improvements — these small changes gave me an immediate sense of productivity and relief. I had done some work that day.

I was a new lead for a small project, and I had been excited to take it on. Finally! I was being given an opportunity. But I soon felt overwhelmed from being pulled in so many directions.

Halfway through the sprint, we were still waiting on designs for core functionality. The product managers were still sneaking in hypothetical features. It felt impossible to line up meaningful work for a handful of engineers.

“We can't possibly ship without that.”
“We can't increase the scope without pushing out the launch date.”
“Why can't you just get the team to do it faster?”
“Oh, I had assumed we would ship it with this feature as well.”
“He told me your team was owning this other feature for the launch.”

Just when I thought we had everything under control, another miscommunication reared its ugly head.

The launch date was only a few days away. I didn't know how to get my team on the same page about the priorities, and I didn't feel like I could ask people to work faster or later. I didn't want to micro-manage my team either, and so I just hoped I had been clear enough about what needed to get done.

I wasn't.

I ended staying up until 2am to finish everything myself and tie up all the loose ends.

We shipped the project, but I was exhausted. It wasn't super bad, but it wasn't the best either — and I knew it wasn't sustainable.

The worst part of all this was, I didn't even know if I was doing a good job.

I thought that my situation was unique to my team, career, and company. When I started sharing more through my writing, I started receiving emails from people saying I was describing their situation exactly.

And in conversations with Edmond Lau, a leadership coach who wrote the book The Effective Engineer, we realized that many engineering leaders we've coached or worked with experience the same problems.

That's why we co-founded Co Leadership and are crafting leadership experiences to help people to start leading from where they are.

In the past few years, we've coached over a hundred engineering leaders across the tech industry. And we've discovered a common pattern that holds people back as they take on informal or formal leadership roles.

Up to a certain point, you can be successful by working hard and by being effective at your own tasks. But then as your work depends on more people, you hit what feels like an upper limit:

Friction and miscommunication keep slowing things down.

You get stuck. You see the potential that your team could be reaching, but you're not sure how to get there.

The things you try can all feel hit-or-miss.

You've talked to your manager about the problem, who seems to listen and sometimes gives helpful advice on how to lead the team. Other times, nothing comes out of it, and you don't know what to do next.

You're reading books — Radical Candor, The Manager's Path — and any blog posts on engineering leadership that you can get your hands on. But understanding something intellectually just isn't the same as internalizing it into your daily practice.

You've looked for mentors, but they all seem so busy. Sometimes you get a lucky break and get a coffee meeting. But you still don't know how to get them to invest in your success.

But what if you had the tools to break through team friction and the recipes to handle difficult team situations?

What if you could clearly communicate what was important in every project and get your team aligned behind those priorities?

What if you could quickly build a circle of trust on your team through short but impactful conversations?

What if you could boldly give feedback that lands with the person you share it with, and receive feedback without taking it personally?

What would be possible for you?

Many things that you thought were hard as a leader would become easy.

You'd stop wasting all your mental and emotional energy second guessing people's motivations — and feel equipped with the vocabulary and language to clear up any assumptions. With that saved energy, you'd focus on building a really great team and product.

You'd be able to develop and grow the engineers on the team with frequent feedback, knowing that people would see your good intentions and understand that the feedback is a gesture of trust.

You'd break out of what feels like a tug-of-war between competing priorities, knowing clearly what each stakeholder cares about the most.

Instead of trying to build consensus — which can oftentimes be elusive — you'd ensure that everyone feels heard and their inputs included before going forward with an aligned decision.

Your teammates would follow in your leadership, take ownership, and pitch in where they're most needed.

And at the end of the day, you'd look back at the progress the team is making, and be confident in knowing:

“I'm doing a good job.”

This is all possible for you.

Stop waiting. Start leading from where you are.

All it takes is building alignment.

In this full-day leadership experience, we teach a powerful framework grounded in our hundreds of hours of leadership coaching and training. In addition to our combined decades of experience in engineering roles just like yours, we've coached over a hundred ICs, tech leads, managers, directors, VPs, and CTOs.

And we've distilled the most important communication patterns we've identified from our years of trial-and-error in engineering and coaching into a one-day leadership experience.

You'll watch live demos of communication skills and observe their impact. You'll get hands-on practice and feedback on your own practice in a highly supportive learning environment. And you'll engage in discussions of how to apply the tools and skills in real-world nuanced scenarios.

You'll leave feeling empowered and confident to immediately apply what you learn in your day-to-day work.

We highly encourage you to sign up with one or more teammates. They can be anyone you have some shared context with: a peer, a tech lead, an engineer, a product manager, a designer, a manager, or anyone else you work with.

If you come with teammates, you'll have the opportunity during the day to practice the tools you learn on real issues in your relationships in a safe environment. As a side effect, you and whoever you come with will take away an increased level of trust in the relationship. And you'll be able to leverage that trust to create more powerful results in any future projects that you do together.

Through the experience, you'll also get access to a community of individuals in situations similar to yours. During the breaks and catered lunch, you'll get to connect with other technical and product leaders to share stories and experiences.

Here are just a few things you'll learn from the experience.