📚 Player-Coach: A member of a sports team who simultaneously holds both playing and coaching duties.
📚 Players’ Coach: A coach who has been on the field/court and can diagnose situations from what they see on the field/court, and can incorporate it with their experience.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen more job descriptions for Player-Coaches. Organizations are looking for people who will both write code and manage people.
My client, who had been seeing this same trend, asked me about this.
I’ll share with you what I shared with them.
It doesn’t work well.
Organizations that seek Player-Coaches typically have the following attributes:
1) Incomplete understanding of Engineering Leadership
– An Engineering Leader’s duties include the following:
– Manage Team(s)
– 1:1s
– Collaboration
– Conflict
– Career Development
– Promotion Packages
– Project Management
– Strategic Planning
– Budgeting
– Manage Offshore Team(s)
– Be a Dotted Line to QA, DevOps, Data, and Docs
– Partner with Product
– …
Therefore, to be expected to do all of the above and more while writing code up to 50-60% of the time is not feasible.
Organizations know that the job market is challenging, which can be used to try to hire a single person to do the work of two or more team members–that’s a 🚩. Player-Coaches may potentially lead to even more stress, burnout, and turnover.
2) Act as if Context-Switching doesn’t negatively impact the deep focus needed to develop software.
Basically, Player-Coaches are Tech Leads. Unfortunately, many of them are being tasked with learning people management on their own. The sink-or-swim axiom not only negatively impacts the Player-Coaches, but also their team and ultimately the organization.
These organizations would be better served to focus their search on Players’ Coaches.
Players’ Coaches are engineers who no longer write code as their main job function, but are still technical.
Being technical is a valid concern.
As someone who has worked for both technical and non-technical engineering leaders, I can attest that my experience with non-technical engineering leaders was challenging and frustrating because they lacked actual software development experience.
With that said, I understand why organizations are seeking Player-Coaches.
However, I highly recommend that organizations seek out Players’ Coaches instead. That way, they get an experienced technical people leader who sets the team and organization up for success.
💎 Exceptional Leader Practice:
⭐ Hire Players’ Coaches
⭐ They’re Technical
⭐ They’re People Leaders
⭐ They Can Relate to the Team
⭐ They Think as Players and Act as a Coach
🗝️ BONUS: Tech Leads who aspire to be engineering leaders can succeed with the proper guidance.
You got this!
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