#195 Leading a New Team with a Personalized Approach

Notes:

If you’re a sales engineering manager, you know that your people are the lifeblood of your company, and you want to help them succeed as much as possible. But how? It’s not enough to just give them tools and training. They need support too – someone who can answer questions when they arise or even anticipate what those questions might be before they happen so you can preemptively address them. That’s why in this episode, we have Derrek Young with us to talk about how you as an SE manager can provide support for your team members and make sure every one of your SEs has everything they need at their fingertips so that nothing gets in the way of closing deals faster than ever before.

Derrek Young is the Worldwide Director of Sales Engineering at Stack Overflow. In this episode, you will discuss how to get to know your team, the LOLA approach, and most importantly, build a culture of feedback.

Key Takeaways:

His journey as a sales engineer and becoming the Worldwide Director of sales engineering for Stack Overflow
What made him decide to step up to the challenge of leading and managing sales teams in a new company
Why it’s important to get to know your sales engineering teams
Derrek’s personal approach with leadership and management
How to find the balance between learning about your people and learning about the business
When managing teams, listen, observe, learn, and assess (LOLA)
Why Derrek is a huge proponent of a feedback culture
What you can do as an SE to give feedback to your SE managers
Derrek addresses one of the common fears of SEs who might not be sure if they’re right for the role
Which was easier to handle: building a team from scratch or inheriting a team
The biggest challenges Derrek had to face as his responsibilities have gotten bigger
How can you make sure you build an enablement team that’s reflective of your team’s needs and done by an expert?
Who Derrek turns to or asks help from as a sales engineering director

Quotes:

“There’s no shortage of information. There’s no shortage of discussions that are happening. There’s no shortage of docs and slides and whatever else. And what typically happens is that people have grown and sort of built a hodgepodge of solutions. Maybe it’s Slack, or Teams, or Confluence, or Google Drive or Dropbox, or something homegrown. The problem is that it starts to create silos. And then once you have those silos, people aren’t as efficient to be able to answer their questions or find things or figure out how to get from point A to point B in the workflow they’re trying to accomplish.” – Derrek Young

“As with anything in life, there’s always room for improvement. So I’m just trying to try to focus my time and effort right now on what can I do to add value? And what can I do to make things a little bit better for the team for sales for the company?” – Derrek Young

“Getting to know somebody helps me to better relate to them. I can be a better manager, I can be a better mentor, I can be a better sounding board, right. Because if I can start to learn how this person approaches problems and situations and how they think, I can adapt my response better, as opposed to trying to take a one size fits all, cookie-cutter type of response.” – Derrek Young

“If I can come in and listen, observe, learn, assess and sort of gathering the information about what both people and the business then that puts me in a situation where I can start to make informed decisions and hopefully not break too much in process.” – Derrek Young

“If we can have a productive conversation about why something is or isn’t working, that’s useful.” – Derrek Young

“You have to start with a position of trust and integrity, and then just take the leap. And what I’ll find is that a lot of times, I want to extend the olive branch and show that hey, having this level of vulnerability is okay. Let me show you how I do it. And you can model it back to me.” – Derrek Young

“I want to build that culture of feedback and have the trust there so that people do feel like they can come in and have those conversations.” – Derrek Young

‘Even if you’re staying the same, your competition is getting better, they’re finding ways to level up. So by proxy, you’re actually getting worse. So you have to find ways to continually improve, and just try to get better.” – Derrek Young

“It’s enablement and analytics. We all have to put our people in a situation where they have the absolute highest chance to succeed.” – Derrek Young