Remember that heart-pounding feeling on presentation days back in school?
You’re sitting at your desk with your stomach in knots, hoping the bell rings before your name gets called. And, just when you think you might be safe, the teacher calls you to the front of the class. Suddenly, your throat tightens, and your mind goes blank.
For Danny Miller, that childhood fear of public speaking never really went away — but he learned how to overcome it as part of his development to become an engineering manager.
“This is something that you do as a leader: you get up in front of people, you talk, you share messages and you have to be able to do so in a way that shows confidence,” said Danny, who is now a senior software engineering manager at Manheim, part of the Cox family of businesses.
How did he overcome this fear, you ask? Streaming online while playing video games.
During the beginning of the pandemic, a friend of Danny’s convinced him to dabble in content creation, sitting in front of the computer, playing games while chatting with a few viewers on camera.
Those few viewers turned into a much larger community, where Danny would be streaming in front of hundreds of people and have a Discord server with thousands more. He also had a team of moderators and got experience managing conflict resolution across his online community.
Danny realized that this hobby not only helped him practice public speaking, but also flex other skills that gave him a taste of what becoming a manager could be like.
“I was, at that point, basically a manager of my own doing; all the while I was still doing my day-to-day work as a lead engineer here,” he said.
This is a lesson Danny now shares with younger engineers: “Just because we have aspirations for our professional lives does not mean that our professional lives are where we have to build all the experience for it,” he said. “I found something I enjoyed, and I was able to leverage that to build skills that I felt I needed, and I genuinely believe that helped prepare me for what I’m doing today.”
At the same time, Danny advises young engineers at Cox to lean into all the development opportunities the company offers. In the seven years he’s been at Cox, Danny has always been surrounded by supportive leaders and mentors who’ve helped him achieve his career goals.
“When I had decided leadership was the direction I wanted to take, I sat down with my manager and we looked for opportunities specifically to put me in situations that put me outside of my comfort zone,” he said.
Now that Danny is a manager, he takes great pride in mentoring and seeing his team members find their own success.
“There are so many extremely bright people in the room with me — so many people who are leagues smarter than I am — and I have a unique skill set that allows me to go and help them succeed,” he said.