Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
John White | Nick Korte
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
A Space for Critique: Lead by Amplifying Voices and Giving Credit with Erin O’Quinn (2/3)
Looking to improve the performance of your team? Improve the way they communicate, and you just might surprise yourself. When we take the time to understand how people like to be communicated with and how they like to communicate with others, it changes everything. In episode 331, Erin O’Quinn is back with us to share what it takes to create a safe space for collecting ideas from members of a team so that all voices are heard and the right people get the credit for great work. You’ll hear all this through the backdrop of Erin’s experience as a team lead and people manager, and you won’t want to miss the story of how Erin shifted her personal brand to improve her own job performance in the process. Original Recording Date: 05-14-2025 Erin O’Quinn is a senior manager of customer advocacy at a sizable tech company. If you missed part one of our discussion with Erin detailing her early career, check out Episode 330. Topics – Elements of Leadership and Experience as a Team Lead, Giving Others a Voice and a Space for More Contribution, The Tactics Behind the Strategy of People Management, Promotion and Personal Brand 2:49 – Elements of Leadership and Experience as a Team Lead To this point we’ve talked about a lot of projects with which Erin was successful, and people started to give her more. In all of these cases there were elements of leadership in getting the project accomplished by working with others. Let’s explore how Erin moved into the team lead role. The team lead guides a specific group of people toward a goal and is usually not the people manager of any member of the team. A team lead could be leading a team of people who report to many different managers, for example. Erin began leading programs in her twenties, but at first, some of her colleagues with more experience were apprehensive about Erin’s placement in that position. Erin remembers having great managers who would sense a conflict coming and have a conversation with people before Erin did as a form of blocking and tackling and supporting her in these situations. “With the team lead piece it’s figuring out how to get a successful delivery of something. You may not always run each of these people’s schedules or timelines, so it’s being that program or project manager. And you have to deliver a successful result. Usually for me, with these marketing pieces, it was to an event or to a point…. It was going to have a final point and stop. There was a put up or shut up moment that will happen for every single thing that I touched, and you will know if you succeeded or your failed because it happened or it didn’t. And if it didn’t, then we have another problem, and that’s another conversation you’ll have with your actual manager.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin says the team lead role is about learning how other people work, and one of her biggest challenges was figuring out how to best communicate with people. She gives a few examples: People take criticism and feedback differently. Some people are very shy in a group setting and don’t feel comfortable speaking up, while others are loud and consistently speak up in a group setting. Erin gives the example of navigating how to take feedback from the person talking the most in a meeting as well as feedback from someone who sent an e-mail or had a 1-1 conversation with you after the meeting because they were not comfortable speaking up in the meeting. “Being able to hear the different levels of voices as a manager of a program or a project or a team became one of the challenges that I got really excited about because I knew so many people…they were geniuses when you would put them on a stage or get them speaking to people, but they would get in these…quagmires when they were talking to their managers because they didn’t know how to speak to that one individual.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin saw this kind of thing happening and didn’t want to be in this situation. She also did not want to be the future manager who didn’t let a top performer shine due to not knowing how to make them look better / get seen in the best possible way. Erin would e-mail the team to communicate decisions in a way that showed the rest of the team how she was going to take in team member feedback. She gives the example of sending a message and adding in an important context point one member of the team brought up to her directly. “It became a learned process to how to work together…. A lot of times the loudest person in the room is the one that gets heard the most, and that’s the way that you always go. But…they realized that sometimes there was a benefit to the other quieter voices actually having a say or letting them own a piece of something in a different way and letting their creativity shine in a new way that maybe would have been squashed down in a bigger group so that everybody had something that they had ownership of. There was more pride. That allowed the team to do more things better because they were willing to do it that way. And it was a lot of fun.” – Erin O’Quinn, on being a team lead 7:41 – Giving Others a Voice and a Space for More Contribution Did experience as a team lead get Erin comfortable to start looking for a people manager position? “I think I was always looking for a people management position, but being a woman in tech…there’s a tendency that if you’re not already qualified to do the job you’re taking on you don’t apply for the job that you’re taking on, that you really want.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin mentions there is statistical data supporting the stark difference in the likelihood of applying for a job between women and men. Women feel they need to have significantly more of the required skills for a specific job before they are comfortable applying. It’s been harder for women to get into upper-level management because they are more tentative and don’t push because they think they shouldn’t unless they are perfect for the job. “I think there’s a little bit more bravado that comes from a lot of guys where they’re like, ‘I want that so I’m going to go for it’ versus women who say, ‘I’m qualified for it so I will go for it.’ One is a lot harder to do than the other.” – Erin O’Quinn Erin was on a team that was half men and half women with each person having their own communication style. Erin noticed women on the team would be collaborative with each other and work together well. If put into a larger group with men, they would often not speak up the same way they would if part of a group of all women. “So, figuring out how to be the voice willing to come over the top and say, ‘such and such has an idea or such and such has this approach…let’s look at all of them together’ became my superpower…. And it didn’t have to be me. If anyone else put a new idea on the table let’s at least look at it because even if it wasn’t the perfect idea, it’s going to spur on ideas from others that maybe leads to that perfect idea or a better idea than just the one that was shouted out the loudest. That’s where I started to learn the team management skills….” – Erin O’Quinn Erin first had to learn how to lead a group of people, and the people manager skills came only after getting to that position. Were people initially uncomfortable with their ideas being shared with the entire team if shared with Erin 1-1? Thinking back to the first time this happened, Erin shared an idea without asking first because the person was not comfortable speaking up in larger groups. After doing this Erin went back and spoke to that person 1-1. Everything turned out ok in this case. After later becoming a team manager, Erin would have these conversations with people beforehand to ensure it was ok to share their ideas / feedback with the larger team. As part of these discussions, she would help team members understand the value of their idea to the larger group and both the timeliness and urgency of sharing the feedback. In early management roles, Erin liked to make deicisions, go fast, and consider the right factors and team member input before a decision couldn’t be reversed. John says in an ideation phase, having more ideas is better than having less. But judging the ideas is a separate phase entirely. Erin says it should be but may not always happen that way. “If you go into a room with a lot of people and there’s different levels of role within that room…if I’m not at the bottom, I try not to talk first. There’s a power with having a title or having an experience or what have you where if you say, ‘this is my idea,’ some people who are junior might go, ‘oh, that’s THE idea’ not ‘this is an idea.’” – Erin O’Quinn Even if a person with a high title says something just to get the conversation going, junior team members may think their opinion will not matter. Erin stresses the importance of letting more junior people share ideas first. The team can then iterate on those, and junior team members will not be afraid to participate. It puts everyone on equal footing. Erin tells us there have been a number of times where she asked a question about something a senior leader said in a meeting because she felt like it was a safe enough environment in which to do it. She made sure to ask questions before a decision was made so as not to question the direction set forth by the leader. “If we’re still trying to figure it out or trying to sus out what the goal is, throw everything up then, and don’t be afraid…. If I was doing this with one of my teams I would always start…asking other individual contributors first…. Where should this go? What is your idea? What problem do you see with this? Give them a space to critique somebody else, or give them a space to critique somebody who is more senior to them, even if they have the same title, because
Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional RSS Feed
