‘Coaching, Goal Setting, and Creating Ownership’ — How to Excel as a Leader and Empower Your Team

Women are not always well represented at higher levels of business, especially in the tech industry. We sat down with Carolyn Woeber, Director AE at Cadence Design Systems, to understand what has made her a successful leader in her career.

According to Carolyn, one key aspect of leadership success is the ability to translate your strengths at a different level. “For true growth, I had to learn how to adapt them for use on an organizational level instead of on an individual project or customer problem,” explains Carolyn. “Being able to understand how to translate those skills to a different scale and look at issues that arose through a business lens became critical.”

One way that you can develop and translate these skills to a leadership position is through mentorship. “Mentors have been a crucial element of my professional support system,” Carolyn says. “From being a more effective communicator, to coaching, to managing cross-functional teams, to looking at problems through different lenses to make better-informed decisions — mentor guidance has mattered.”

Another critical part of leadership? Asking the right questions  to find a solution. “You must focus on developing the right solution for the right problem — not the problem you assume exists from your own experiences or biases,” Carolyn states. “Always challenge your assumptions.”

And, as Carolyn emphasizes, leadership doesn’t solely revolve around growing your skills or solving problems. “It’s also about enabling and empowering your team to meet goals,” she tells us. As a leader, you should help your employees set their own goals and assist them in seeing how their work impacts an organization’s overall goals. Then, you need to tie this work into a system of accountability. “Both take time and effort but pay dividends in the long run when it comes to creating alignment and engagement in your team,” Carolyn notes.

Photo courtesy of Cadence Design Systems.

In this article, Carolyn — who has been a people leader for 14 years! — shares more on what she’s learned about managing others during her impressive career, and why she’s decided to grow her career, and the careers of others, at Cadence…

How do you make sure that your direct reports feel well-supported in their lives both in and out of the office?

The relationship between a manager and their direct reports works best as a two-way street. For their part, direct reports have deliverables that must be completed to meet business objectives. Managers, meanwhile, can empower direct reports to be successful in their roles by providing the right systems, tools, and coaching to make employees feel supported and effective.

For instance, the coaching a manager provides in regular meetings with their direct reports impacts how supported they feel about their career path and wellbeing. In those meetings, it’s important not to assume that direct reports will always share what is bothering them (if anything). People feeling comfortable enough to share that type of information openly and unprompted often doesn’t come until they have developed a strong relationship with you. And, even then, I have observed that employees can be hesitant to start these types of conversations.

So, first and foremost, ask each person how they are doing — and listen. Then, ask further clarifying questions if needed to understand their situation completely. Your direct reports deserve and need to feel heard. This is the first level of ensuring that you understand their perspective and experiences. 

The second level is asking them what you can do as their manager to help. Responses to this question are often a mixture of professional and personal concerns. Clearing roadblocks related to issues or a lack of resources, tools, and skills are examples of where a manager can provide support. Personal concerns are an opportunity for you to show empathy and provide the appropriate level of actions necessary to aid them, showing you care genuinely about your direct reports. 

When managing an individual or team, what strategies have you used that have been particularly effective?

The impact that coaching, goal setting, and creating ownership/accountability can have on a person or a team cannot be overstated. These are some of the most important investments an organization can make to improve employee growth, productivity, and job satisfaction. 

Over the years, my mentors and managers have shared books and courses with me on leadership, coaching, and business that helped me identify what I felt were best practices. Three books in particular that impacted me were Catalytic Coaching by Garold Markle, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. 

Through the ideas I learned in these books as well as my own experiences, I formed the core of my own leadership strategy:

• Align your team with your company’s vision and mission. Ensure that your team understands how their activities contribute to the company’s mission and vision. It’s important for your team to see how their work makes a difference. A useful exercise is establishing a team mission statement that clearly explains the team’s purpose, especially if you can do it in the context of the larger organization.  

• Create annual team goals that support your organization. Each year, your organization will set goals; gather these from leadership and work with your team to develop two-to-four high-level team goals that support one or more of those organizational goals. Make the creation of the team goals a collaborative effort — preferably through group brainstorming sessions. By creating them together, you encourage team members to get aligned on what’s most important, which helps them develop a sense of ownership with the goals.  

• Help team members assess their strengths and areas for improvement. This step is critical and can be accomplished in a variety of methods. This could be one-on-one meetings where you and a team member discuss what they (and you) currently see as strengths or areas for improvement. Alternatively, there are formal assessments from third parties (like workstyle assessments or 360 feedback surveys) that you can use as a leader to help you and your team members gather and discuss this information. 

• Work with team members individually to set three-to-four annual SMART goals with milestones. Individually meet with each team member and work together to identify SMART goals that enable them to capitalize on their strengths and grow in their areas for improvement. Ensure that the milestones and timelines for the goals are spread throughout the year and are in challenging, but manageable, chunks of work.  These goals are usually a combination of things that help achieve team-wide goals and professional development items.

• Routinely meet with individuals and the team to review progress toward milestones and goals. At this point, you have a framework for success in place. Meet regularly with each team member one-on-one. Depending on the size of your team, this could be once a week, twice a month, or once a month.  At those meetings, don’t dive straight into the nitty gritty; spend a few moments getting a feel for how the employee is currently doing — connect with them. Are they stressed? If so, why? Are they disengaged or bored? If so, why? Work to understand where they are mentally and what is (or is not) motivating them. Finish your one-on-one meeting with a review of the progress being made toward achieving the milestones and goals that they set for themselves. Is it going smoothly? If not, do they need help with a roadblock or have questions about their ongoing work? As their manager, how can you enable their success?  

Also, meet regularly as a whole team to foster relationship building, collaboration, and accountability. There’s a book called Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman that was a fantastic reference for me in how to build up an effective team meeting that ensures you stay on time, solve the real issues impacting your team, and support your desired growth. The overarching recommendations of the book were intended for use in small-to-medium sized companies, but I’ve found they scale well for small-to-medium sized teams within a large company with some modifications.  

Finally, looking back at your career, what has led you to stay at your company?

Much of the culture a person experiences at a company ties back to not only the people they work with but also the types of interactions they experience with those people. When I’m working with people in my department and other colleagues, it’s important that I feel like we are all part of a team, that we support one another and help each other grow. I feel incredibly fortunate to have that support system and culture in place in our team and organization. 

Cadence also enables people of all ages, backgrounds, and experiences to grow and contribute to solving some of the toughest systems-level problems out there. Their commitment to equity and inclusion is evident in the opportunities I have seen them make available to employees from under-represented communities. I like the fact that they recognize diversity can make an organization and technical products more innovative and competitive.

Photo courtesy of Cadence Design Systems.

Another aspect is the work. I ask myself: Is the work interesting and challenging? Is this work helping me continue to learn and grow in the technical or business arena? I’m a lifelong learner and a compulsive problem-solver. I love having a puzzle or a challenge to unravel and enjoy learning during that process. With the breadth of applications that our computational fluid dynamics (CFD) suite tackles at Cadence, there are many areas where I have growth opportunities every day.

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