Darian Shimy, sports coach turned engineering leader at Square, shares coaching techniques applied in teams, effective delegation, and creating trust. Topics include communication for improvement, leveraging time for productivity, scaling junior team members, and handling failure risk.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Coaching Lessons from Softball
Darian Shimy shares lessons from 12 years coaching girls softball from very young to competitive levels.
He parallels coaching sports with engineering leadership focusing on improving others, not playing oneself.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Give Meaningful Feedback
Always provide meaningful, specific feedback instead of empty praise.
Push even top performers to find ways to improve and ask them how they can do better.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Redirect Employee Efforts
Redirect motivated but misaligned effort by appreciating it first, then guiding focus towards priorities.
Explain context and importance so people see how their work impacts team success.
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Darian Shimy (@dshimy) shares the lessons he’s learned as a longtime sports coach and engineering leader. You’ll learn coaching techniques he’s applied in his engineering teams you can leverage to increase the value and productivity of your teams. Plus how to scale your leadership through effective delegation and how to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability.
"You should be a coach, not a referee. And the coach is the person who is there to help you improve. The referee is the one who is there to point out all the problems. They're not there to make you better." - Darian Shimy
Darian Shimy is the Engineering Lead @ Square. As an engineering leader who scales teams and products, Darian Shimy is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience. He is currently at Square with prior leadership positions at Weebly, Attensity, and eHarmony.com. He received an MS in Computer Science from The University of Southern California and continues to code as a hobby. Outside the professional setting, Darian is a softball coach for various age levels from the recreation to competitive level.
SHOWNOTES
Darian's lessons from coaching sports applied to engineering leadership (1:29)
How to communicate when someone is doing well but can still improve (9:20)
How to leverage your time to create more productivity and value for your team (13:08)
How to elevate and scale productivity and learning in your junior “players” (18:22) (20:47)
How to handle the risk of failure when delegating (21:39)
Create consistent, good management by modeling the way (25:14)
The impact when you treat your team as humans (30:36)
Our key takeaways from the episode (33:20)
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