• Agile Coach

From complaint to strength, by 1 justified comment on LinkedIn

“I expected a little more depth in this article,” wrote a concerned reader under the post in which I threw the 5 complaints about Agile Coaches on my timeline. Interesting! Shortly thereafter, I personally asked him about the points where I could provide that depth. You can read the result of this valuable interaction in this new article. So what you actually owe to that engaged reader.

I saw this, after my question to the reader in question, appear roughly as a response in the chat, “How do you avoid falling into the traps mentioned, how do you recognize them and how do you get out of them? See, that’s valuable. Grateful for this response, I got to work. So that below I give more depth to the 5 complaints about Agile Coaches in my previous article.
Following that are a number of possible answers, such as:

Lack of practical experience

If you don’t live through the Agile Manifesto, the link to practice is difficult. That works both ways: on the one hand on mindset, on the other hand on methodology. Because authenticity is key, people will see through you if you want to sell something you don’t support. And your work often consists of demonstrating, doing together and doing yourself. Difficult, when you have little practical experience as a coach.

What are you doing? In terms of methodology, I recommend you take internships with another coach, learn from the best practices of others. Taking practical workshops and trainings is also immediately valuable. In terms of mindset, I recommend you take a look at your approach to issues outside of work. Do you apply principles to the way you live? How do you work with others? How do you deal with uncertainties? You may come to some great insights that you can take into your professional self as well.

Too much jargon and dogma

The following can lead to frustration and obstruction of Agile principles: use of jargon and adherence to rigid methodologies. Yet the Scrum.org viewpoint says something like this: Scrum language creates awareness, supports letting go of old patterns and forces people to look at their roles and behaviors with fresh eyes. And, as it also says in the Scrum Guide: the Scrum framework is indivisible! As a result, there are many coaches who look at Scrum quite compulsively and can only introduce it to a team when everything is deployed completely.

How I see that? First, I regularly see team members who immediately go off at so many English terms. They call it old wine in new bags: “isn’t backlog just work inventory? In those situations, I don’t feel the need to discuss terminology, but rather to talk about the essentials. My advice to you as a coach is not to play scrum police, but to connect with the energy of real good conversation. My experience about the rigid deployment of Scrum is also not by the book: the practice of organizations is often more unruly than the theory of Scrum. In my view, it’s better to start where the team is now with their way of working, and improve that step by step based on empiricism. That makes for less resistance and more collaboration.

Excessive focus on process over results

If you grab enough space as a team to keep learning full steam ahead, you’re good to go. Okay, but let’s face it: learning without delivery is not a sustainable relationship. So let’s certainly not see self-organization and self-management of teams as an end in itself. No, it is a means of getting the best out of people. The other day, a training participant referred to the growth process toward full ownership over the way teams work and deliver as the process of situational leadership. He hit the nail on the head there!

What does that require of Agile Coaches? First of all, that you are not only concerned with the learning process of the team, but that you zoom in very much on what maturity level a team is at. Personally, I find Delegation Poker a very good tool to determine with a team: where we find ourselves acting on different topics and to what extent we expect guidance and direction from each other. In this way, we always openly coordinate learning and delivery with each other. And from your coaching you always give the right guidance, based on: teaching, mentoring, coaching and facilitating.

One-size-fits-all approach

Is your change approach an organized journey whose route and destinations are fixed or is it a backpacking trip in which you trek from destination to destination without a plan or road map? That apt metaphorical question Jaap Boonstra once asked during a change management class. The answer to that question, when it comes to Agile, is as far as I’m concerned: the backpacking journey. In the Cynefin framework, you would label an Agile transformation in the subject Complex and in that, elaborate blueprints simply don’t work.

So what will work? You will always have to tune in together: where are we now? What challenge is lurking? And what change is needed now to take the next step? This also applies when it comes to implementing SAFe: you don’t just do that overnight, because the change approach does not match the complexity of the change you are working on. So always assess very critically where your change to be managed is and what steps you can take together to validate that that change really works.

Too much cheerleader, not enough depth

I borrowed this pitfall from Dave Snowden. He’s critical of us as coaches because he thinks it’s too frivolous and too much fun. Energizers in sessions, million creative forms of retrospectives. Well intended, but also a trap for coaches who forget to address the underlying systemic dynamics. So it’s not about knowing the Scrum Guide off the cuff and being able to explain the Agile Manifesto. It’s about learning to look at organizations holistically as an Agile Coach.

So what is happening? As a coach, when you look at an organization through these holistic glasses, you see not only what is happening within a team, but also what is happening between teams. You pay attention not only to what is being said, but also to what is not being said. You help leaders recognize their changed role in the whole and explore together what impact their behavior has on the whole. You are always looking for the underlying causes and bring them back to the context in which they arose.

Thus, as a coach, you are not the solver of individual problems, but the facilitator of sustainable change throughout the system. As an Agile Coach you are sometimes a mirror, sometimes a guide, sometimes a thorn in the side. This requires guts, a feeling for language, sensitivity and systemic awareness. You make the undercurrent visible and help people see the bigger picture for themselves.

Also a critical and engaged response to this article? Send me an email, and we’ll spar it further together.