A Leader Overcomes Burnout By Taking a Career Pivot

IBK Ajila, Director, Engineering Leadership Development, Shopify

Like anyone, leaders are susceptible to burn out. We don’t talk about it nearly enough which is why I’m talking about it again with another leader. I met IBK Ajila at the Leading Eng conference in San Francisco where he told me about how he shifted his career after feeling like he needed a break. I knew I had to share his story. In our conversation we talked about the clues he was nearing burnout, how he turned his break into a career pivot and how he uses his coaching experience in his role.

I last saw you last at LeadDev Leading Eng.

That's right, in September, I think.

You and I had this wonderful conversation at the airport. You literally walked up behind me at the TSA line." Then we sat by your gate and chatted, and because of our conversation, I thought, "Oh, yeah. IBK needs to come on the show to tell his story."

Yeah. I'm super flattered.

For people who don't know you, can you just give us a quick introduction of yourself?

Yeah. Of course. My name is IBK, and my pronouns are he and him. I'm the Director of Engineering Leadership at Shopify. So I run programming for leadership development and our craft programming as well. So that involves manager training. That involves programming around technical decision-making, running our communities of practice, and things like that. So that's what I do for work.

How long have you been in that role?

I've been in that role for about two years. Before then, I was an engineer.

One of the things we'd talked about that early morning was you taking a career break. What were the factors that led you to take that break?

I've been an engineer all of my career up until now. I started as a mobile developer, and I tried out management, and that seemed to be going well, so I did more of it. By the time I got to this break, I'd been leading our retail engineering team for a while. It was during that first summer of the pandemic. I think everybody was asking “why do I do what I do”? It was an incredibly introspective time for, I think, a lot of the world as it was for me. At that point, there were a couple of things that came to a head for me.

One, I'd been in that role for a while, and I'd been used to changing what I was doing every so often. So, at this point, I was in my fourth year doing the same thing, but my interests were also starting to shift a little bit. The things I was reading, the things I would concern myself with were less and less related to engineering specifically or my work and more related to other things that I was interested in: leadership development, psychology, and philosophy. The real clue I had that I wanted to try something else was when I thought about just taking on a different team or a different job in engineering. At that time, that did not energize me. I wasn't motivated to go do more of the same just on a different product or on a different project, and so that's when I realized, "Okay. Wow. You have to zoom out now and consider what you want to do."

It sounds like you needed a break.

I did. Yes, I did. In addition to all of these things, I was coming off of a summer where we were just trying to rebuild this product, and we had had some hiccups as well, so the level of effort that was required was really high. So there was a little bit of it that my interests were shifting, but also, it was a high-effort period of time for me.

Where were you on the burnout scale?

I would say I was pretty burnt out. I know it looks different for everybody, but for me, it was marked by consistently questioning, "Why am I doing this?" 

That's probably a clue because high effort doesn't have to be bad. Tons of high effort can be really productive for people and it has been for me in the past. But usually, there's some motivation behind it that allows you to sustain things, and so I was starting to lose connection to what that might be for me, and that leads me to believe that it was a time of burnout for me.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, when you're saying that we need a break, I often think there's probably some element of burnout involved but you didn't want to leave the company.

Yeah.

What did the break look like?

In hindsight, it seemed so linear, but at the time, I didn't know what I was going to do. I just knew it needed to be different, so I first evaluated, "Maybe let me work on a different product." That didn't seem like the answer, so I just continued to think about what that might be. I started to assess what my interests are, the classic thing you do, I guess, when you're soul searching, and it led me to a place where I remembered I had had a coach years past, and she had said to me, "I think it would be really interesting for you, and I think you might be good at it, and so you should consider that."

At the time, I was like, "No way. I'm not leaving engineering to be a coach. I love what you have to offer, and I enjoy my time with you, but that's not going to be the case." But then, it almost was like a process of elimination. I just had nothing else that I wanted to dig into, but this coaching thing sounded interesting. Having known a couple of people who've taken coaching training or become coaches, I know that it's also a time of intense personal development. I was ready to sign up for that so I thought, "At a minimum, I'm going to sign up for coaching training. I'm going to develop more of myself, and if I become a coach at the end of it, even better. But if not, at minimum, this will be a year of self-development." So that's what I chose to do.

I think leaders often don't feel like they can take sabbaticals or take a break and stay at the company so it would be great to hear what it looked like practically. Were you on a sabbatical? Did you work part-time? 

For sure, and I considered all those options. So I considered, "Maybe it's time to leave, and I'm going to do this training." I considered, "Maybe it's more of a sabbatical, and I can do this training." But at the time, we were starting a new program, manager training specifically for engineers, and I started to catch wind of this, and that's very interesting to me. It's for engineers and that’s a group that I care about. It's about leadership. So, I thought, "Let me find out a little bit more about that."

I knew nothing about learning and development, and I knew nothing about facilitation, but the subject interested me. So I pitched to my company that I'd be involved in this and pair it with the coaching training that I was going to take on, and that's exactly the move that I made. I know that's not always possible for people. In my case, it was, and I'm so glad that that's what happened because those two things that I did, getting involved in manager training and taking coaching, have informed the work that I do right now. So I'm really glad I was able to take that opportunity to do that.

That's great that you pitched that to them. When you say get involved in manager training, were you helping to develop the program?

Initially, it started by just being a subject matter expert on a topic, and then eventually, I was like, "You know what? I think you should let me run this thing. Even though I know nothing about learning and development, I think that I can bring a lot of value to this." So, over that time, I've also learned from others in this space to be able to build a better program. So we started this, I don't know, in 2019. We're on our sixth iteration of it. It's gotten a lot better since those days.

That's great. Well, yeah, and you talked about L&D, learning, and development.

Yeah.

It's a whole craft. It's a whole thing.

It's a whole thing. Honestly, I love it so much. I see so many parallels in learning and development with actually the work I did in product and engineering. There's a customer obsession that you can bring to the role. There's learning. "What do they really want? How would they really like to engage? What is actually useful?" There are measuring things. "How do we know that we solved the problem?" So I really love this craft because it reminds me of a lot of things that I like about product and engineering.

Mm-hmm. There are a lot of parallels there. Okay. So you decide to take a break, and the break is from traditional engineering. You go into a coaching program, and you went to New Ventures West.

Yes.

I went to the Coaches Training Institute. What made you choose New Ventures West?

Yeah. So, over the years of having been coached, I've heard of an approach to coaching called integral coaching. The idea is that we are more than just our “cerebral” selves. There's a lot of wisdom in our minds, but there's wisdom in more than our minds. There's wisdom in our bodies, in our gut. I knew that this is a form of coaching that New Ventures West practices and this integral nature is something that I felt weak on, so I was very curious about how that would show up, and that was a primary reason that I signed up for New Ventures West. I wanted that breadth of coaching experience for myself and to just know what that would be like.

How long was this break in total, by the way, just when you started this break/ hybrid thing?

It was about a year.

How long is the New Ventures West coaching program?

Also, about a year. I designed this break to at least take me to the end of my training program.

That's so great. So, can you talk a little bit about what that year is like? A little bit, tell us a little bit more about New Ventures West. How does that program look, and how does it work?

Right. I think now that I finished our program, I think it's designed brilliantly, and it's meant to develop you as a coach, and your approach to doing that is through your methodology as well, through coaching as well, and so I think it's brilliant. The program starts with a focus on you as an individual, so you don't start coaching right away, which I appreciate because there's a lot of “you” that shows up in being a coach. Therefore, it might be useful to understand how you show up, and your typical ways. So they take good care of building your self-awareness, expanding how you see yourself, which is such an important part of being a coach, and it's an ongoing practice as well. It's not something you ever finish. 

Was that in-person classes? Is it online? What is that format? Especially because this is still pandemic time.

That's right. So this was a big change for them because it was during the first year of the pandemic. They usually bring their students together four times a year in person in San Francisco or other places. This time, it was over Zoom. So it was really interesting to see people from around the world, and we were together synchronously four times in the year as was the case before, just not in-person. That's how we did the entire program. It was all remote. So, yeah. So, roughly, the first meeting, the first synchronous session is about you developing greater awareness of yourself, and then the last three are deepened practice and progressively more, maybe richer or deeper in the practice of coaching. So we were introduced to a methodology of coaching in the second session. We built on that. We recruited our clients. We practiced through that experience as well. Every session was deepening and deepening in that. All the while though, there's still that thread of developing yourself, and so that was a huge part of the program and something I now really appreciate that was included.

You have to tend to yourself as an instrument to be an effective coach.

Exactly. I think we underestimate how much that is true, and what I've come to learn is that coaches can be a good example of that, but even your most productive leaders are a good example of that. How much are they able to tend to themselves? We've talked about energy in the past, and where do you derive the source of energy from? How are you able to withstand difficult situations in your life or at work, or if you're trying to do anything significant? So, now, I can see how this thread is important to doing anything meaningful. I think it's important to being happier in general. I think there's a lot that we can borrow from that. 

Was there anything out of that that stands out in terms of personal development through coach training? I’ll go first. The biggest piece of personal development for me was that I didn't know how powerful I was, that I would shrink. Before I went into coach training, I shrank, and how that impacted and made me a less powerful coach. So I realized that I needed to take up more space to be more effective. They gave me the name Madam President.

Right, step into that.

Yep. I'm curious at what level you might feel comfortable sharing what some of your personal development a-has were.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had a similar experience. At the beginning of the program, you're asked a little bit, "What brings you here? What's true for you today?" At the time, my biggest question was, "What do I want to do with my life as a vocation? Especially, what do I want to be when I grow up?" Similarly, they had a metaphor for me to step into as well, and that was... I think mine was something like a “wise elder”. Honestly, I did not get it. I was skeptical. I wasn't able to deal with that for a while. It wasn't a big a-ha at the start. In hindsight, I still ask myself that question, "What do I want to be when I grow up?" But what coaching has done for me is expanded my capacity to sit with that and to deal with that at the start of this program.

We like to know the uncertainty, the unknown, the ambiguity, and the question. Sitting with the question can take effort.

Sit with the question essentially. Yes. 

At the start of this program, I was in an existential place. I was lost. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I would say I'm a lot less lost today, but I still love sitting with that question and not having a good answer for it. I'm more comfortable pondering that, and to sit with that, and not let it affect me too much. 

In some ways, I can see how the wise elder has come out, out of that season. So that was a big development edge for me in that year.

Do you now know what they were getting at with wise elder? What came out? What do you think they were getting at? Because I was confused too at first. I was like, "That? That? What?" I think it was because I just couldn't see that I wasn't taking up space.

Right, right.

Was there a point when it started to click for you what they meant by wise elder?

Absolutely, and I think in some ways, it's almost natural to not be able to get what is coming at you because what they're trying to do at that moment is they see an ingredient in you. They see a spark of something that you probably don't see in yourself. So they're assessing that, and they're naming it. So, oftentimes, you're going to be like, "What? I don't get it." You might connect with it a little bit, but you likely won't connect with it a lot at first, and this is why it's so powerful. Over time through your development, you start to be able to utilize some parts of this metaphor and see it in action.

So, for me, it was moments where I found myself less questioning or when I would reframe things for myself like now, I feel less of a need to define myself by what I do as I did before. So even that gives you more space to sit with what might I want to do. I think more about who I want to be than what I want to do, and I think that in the context of being a coach or in the context of what I do for my job. So that wise elder metaphor came to me throughout the year. It became more true through the year than it did at the start of it.

Yeah, and that's wonderful. I think this is important for leaders like, "Who do I want to be?" Not just like, "What do I want to do?"

Absolutely. I was talking with another coach recently, and as I thinking about a future for myself as well, he first asked me, "What would you like to work on development-wise?" I was finding it hard to put an answer together, and then he went, "Actually, who do you need to become?" It made me sit back because now I had a very clear answer for that, and I thought that is a great question for when we want to assess our direction and our goals. Maybe you have a clear picture, "This is what needs to happen next for me," and you're trying to think, "How can I operate well in that place?" We tend to ask ourselves, "Okay. What are my weaknesses? How am I going to buff them up?" and things like that, but a better question is, "Who do I need to become to do this thing?" It's a deeper question. It's more holistic. Now, you can think of your weaknesses in the context of how you would like to show up, and so I agree that that is a very powerful question.

I think the hardest part about leadership is the identity shift and like, "Who am I? Who am I in relation to the work? Who am I in relation to these people? Who am I in my relation to myself when I am always giving? Feeling responsible for the weight of the world?” 

Yeah. I would add to that and say, "Who am I in relation to these circumstances?" We're in the latter part of 2022 right now, and the tech world looks different than what it did at the beginning of 2022. So, as a leader, you might find yourself asking that. Everything was good before, and your circumstances changed. Not so much you, but still, you have to consider who am I in relation to circumstances or who I need to become in relation to circumstances. 

Right because there's constant change.

That's right.

We always think there's homeostasis, and then we're like, "Reorgs," or, "Production enforce," and I'm like, "Change is constant."

Change is constant. Yeah.

These questions are so powerful. Being able to ask powerful questions is one of the best things I learned from coaching. So, you went through your program. Is there a certification in the program? 

Yeah. Yeah, there's a certification at the end. It's comprised of a whole bunch of things, including essay writing, an actual coaching recording, and things like that. New Ventures West made it a really powerful ritual for us, but yes, there's a certification, and it also relates to the wider International Coaching Federation certification as well. So those provide different levels of meaning to different coaches depending on your goals and who you are, but it is still a certain stamp of approval, of completion, and things like that.

You and I talked about that. I didn't go through ICF coach certification because at least when I went through the program many years ago, it was basically like, "Coach x amount of hours, and you're good."

Right.

The coaching certification I went through was I had a year of training, then I had another year just of full certification training, and I had a small group. We did exercises and coached, and then we had an eight-hour exam Part was written, and then you had to coach two people. One of them was an examiner. Not everybody passed.

I think there might be leaders listening who are interested in not only, "Do I want to get maybe some coach training?" but also like, "What do I look for in a coach, and what's the value? How important is certification?

That's right. Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. Yes, there's a lot of rigor involved, and I think what I saw was that this year prepares you for the practice of coaching, which is different from being a super masterful coach. Right? One, it's unrealistic to spend one year and be super masterful just by going to school. Two, it's not the point. The wider point is this “way of being”, this practice of being a coach, and tending to your self-development, further deepening time and time again. So part of that is going to be logging your hours and having practice, and practice, and practice. But I think they're trying to do a little bit more than that, which is, "Here's your toolkit for how you're going to practice this," and pair with that a community of practice as well where just because you're done your year, it's not like, "Peace out." There are going to continue to be people here who can help tend to your development. You just may not need the structure that you needed in year one. Now, you can go and take bits and pieces, and improve yourself that way.

I know you considered going into coaching full-time and decided against it. What made you make the decision not to do that, but instead to take your current role? 

I've said no to coaching full-time for now. It's something that may be interesting to me later, but going back to the way I crafted this break for myself, I'm really glad I paired it with the learning and development work that I did. So there was a lot of great overlap in the two programs that I was involved in, and that avenue has become quite interesting and fruitful for me because it allows me to engage with an audience that I'm interested and passionate about, which is engineering leaders.

I can bring some of the credibility I have from having been one, understanding the language, and I can bring the principles of coaching. When we talk about asking the right questions about working on yourself, how do we know when learning has stuck? These are all the concerns that we have in coaching, and I'm able to bring that to my work in leadership development. I think this is the right opportunity for me. I still coach lightly from time to time, but it's not my full-time thing.

How did the role you have now, Director of Engineering Leadership come about? Was that a newly created role? 

It was a newly created role, and out of this break that I had taken, we stepped back, and we thought, "Okay. What are we building here, and what would we call it?" It's interesting because a lot of what I do is through the HR and talent teams, so the lens we're taking here is that there is something interesting and unique about engineering leadership. I think we know that. While the subject might be the same generally, building it around this craft has shown to be fruitful for engineers.

Engineers tend to be skeptical of general leadership development and things like that, and so what we've been able to do is speak directly to them in their language, show them the ways in which this line of learning is going to enable them to be better engineers, and leaders, and whatnot, and people, really, and we brought them together. So a lot of the learning is cohort-based, and just that community fosters itself to be better. So, there's no magic to this. I think we've just taken a whole bunch of stuff that exists, and reconfigured it in a way that can be impactful for engineers.

That's so cool. It’s an interesting role. Who do you report to? 

It is. Yeah. I sit within the office of the CTO, so it is quite neat in that way. I know not all companies have that kind of structure, but I sit within the office of the CTO, and I work very closely with our friends in HR and talent because one of the things we want to do as well as we want to keep consistent principles, like leadership principles. Those do not need to be different based on your job, but the implementation of how it is taught can be different, and so I do that from the angle of the office of the CTO.

That's great. I've seen “the office of the CTO” pop up more over the last few years.

Yeah. It can be a great almost catchall for engineering-related activities. In my case, it's quite neat. 

That makes a lot of sense to me. Was it the CTO who you worked with directly to craft the role?

Before we built this leadership training program, we had and have a learning team within engineering, within the office of the CTO as well, so it neatly expanded that portfolio. So my learning was fostered a lot by what we were doing with technical learning in other ways. I just got to apply it to a different subject. Yeah.

What are one or two things you bring back from coach training that you bring to your role?

Something that we learned in coaching is that it's not enough to just know how to do something. A lot of the time, people come to coaching because they're stuck. You might get the feedback that you are too competitive or whatever, and maybe you know that, and you see how that negatively impacts your work, but part... You don't know how to not be that way because when you're not that way, you don't get your way, so you keep on being that way. So this is how people come to coaching. So the result of coaching is usually, "Can you use different tools and skills to be able to solve the situations that come to you? Can you intercept your natural tendencies and use different approaches? How do we make that stick, and how do we know that that has stuck?" That is probably the biggest thing that I bring to the work that I do.

It's not enough for a manager to know that they need to give feedback. They probably know that they need to give feedback, so we delve into, "Why is it hard? What makes it hard? What are the roadblocks and things like that, and how do we know that now we're able to overcome those?" So everything that I design has an element of practice, practice, practice, making sure that we can repeat it and get better at it over time.

It also has an element of, "What does it look when it gets hard? What does it look like when you get stuck, and how might we talk about that? Where's the nuance in there?" So we use a lot of our other leaders as subject matter experts because you know what? Giving feedback as a VP is also hard. That's what we need to know. It's not like it's easy for everybody, but there are certain ways of being that allow us to offer feedback in spite of it being hard, for example. So that's one of the things I would say that has been a big part of what I learned in coaching that I can bring to the work that I do.

I don't know about you, but I've also noticed that I feel like I can help myself get unstuck a little bit more, a little bit faster. I have some tools to help myself.

That's right.

If you could time travel, what advice would you give pre-break you when you were on that edge of feeling nothing feels great right now? 

One of the reasons I chose New Ventures West is for this integral approach to coaching, the idea that there's wisdom in many facets.

If I were to go back and offer myself some advice, I would look at past IBK. He would be stressed about everything. He would say, "I just have so much work to do and so little time, and I have to do it all." I would say, "You know, it doesn't have to be this way." I think a lot of us are in that position where we feel that our busyness is, "Well, we just have to. I have no choice. I have a lot of work to do. I have deadlines." All of those things are true, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Past IBK didn't have awareness of his energy, and how his body responds. He didn't have awareness of what mattered. He didn't have the capacity to listen to his gut. Everything was in his mind. Our world is very biased toward the mind, so that's not surprising. But if he was able to understand this, and integrate more of his life, he may still be in engineering, who knows, or not. But the point is that the way he approaches those problems would be with greater capacity, with a greater ability to say no to things that do not help him, with greater curiosity, and all these things. So I'm really glad that this whole journey happened because I think it would've made a huge difference then, but it makes a huge difference now, for sure.

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