Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition

by Adkins Lyssa

“What should I, the agile coach, watch for to help you keep these essential beliefs in operation?”

Great question for any coach to ask.

These roles, each one complete and strong in itself, do not stand alone. As shown in Figure 7.4, it takes all three, operating well together, to give teams a chance at creating astonishing results and unleashing agile as a competitive advantage weapon for their company.

All the “overlaps” are this way. One role gets support, strength, vitality, and help from the others. Yet, that one role remains accountable. It keeps things clear in the midst of complex situations when one might be tempted to run away from one’s own accountability. No running away is allowed.

Interesting reflection on role overlap and accountability

Dynamic tension provides the edge needed for creativity and truth. It’s all for the sake of value delivery.

As guardian of quality and performance, the agile coach has all the authority (and responsibility) needed to look at the team’s products with a critical eye.

How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable?

To look for problems, apply this BART analysis customized for agile teams by agile coach Den Mezick (adapted from Mezick 2009):

However, to have a workable agile team, the members must be aware of the agreed-to roles and the boundaries and authorities that go along with each of them (Green and Molenkamp 1995).

Working together day after day is an intense human experience, with all the glories and warts that emerge from constant interaction between these astonishing, disappointing, challenging, infuriating, magnificent, normal human beings we call team members.

the agile coach faces conflict squarely, skillfully determines the severity of it, mindfully decides whether to intervene and how, generously teaches teams to navigate it, and courageously refuses to settle for a team that shrinks from greatness by avoiding it.

Speed Leas offers us agile coaches a framework we can use to determine the seriousness of the conflict (1985).

What people say and how they say it is the main key for assessing the level of conflict on an agile team.

remember these words from Chris Corrigan in The Tao of Holding Space: “Everything you do for the group is one less thing they know they can do for themselves”

Research suggests that it may be misguided to address interpersonal conflict on a team head-on. The way a team performs will likely influence people’s perceptions of their interpersonal interactions, not the other way around

Given what this research tells us, a coach should first attempt to address conflict by addressing performance.

Using this response mode, the structure the team creates becomes a call to action for each person. In so doing, you effect change through inspiration rather than consternation.

Instead of being immersed in the content of the conflict and the framework simultaneously, you can let them worry about the content, which frees you up to become the boundary keeper for the framework. In this role, you ensure that the framework is used as intended, not warped to fit someone’s position and not used as a way to “label” and weaken others or make their position wrong.

Team members know that one part of the agile coach’s job revolves around removing impediments to work, making the coach a popular target for complainers.

By carrying the complaint from complainer to offender, I ensured that there would be no full understanding of the situation from both “sides.”

Consent check and consensus check are two ways to ensure that team members are invited to speak, the team is called to listen, and overall understanding of one another—and with it, team positivity—increases.

Collaboration needs cooperation as its base, but it adds the essential ingredient for yielding innovative, breakthrough, astonishing results: emergence.

When collaborating, team members build on top of one another’s ideas, each person giving away their cherished vision of what it “should be” so that something better, something that no one of them could have imagined alone, emerges from the ash of their burned and forgotten personal visions.

Telling your truth with compassion instead of delivering “constructive” criticism

Worth considering this shift in perspective .

Collaboration starts inside the heart and mind of each person on the team.

A maxim in the theater tells us this: On time is already late (Devin 2009). That is, if we arrive at work on time with our bodies only, having not groomed our minds to collaborate, we are simply late. Unprepared.

Are you on time?

We are pushing the edges of people’s perceptions of themselves so that they can stretch beyond their role and title restrictions as they desire and as the team needs them to do so.

One of the first collaboration skills to build makes it acceptable for team members to speak out about things that make them feel vulnerable or uncomfortable.

To do this, you must coach the team to stay vulnerable to one another and keep speaking the unspeakable. Create safety for them to do so, specifically by “demonstrating tolerance for failure, refraining from punitive exercises of power, and participating in team processes rather than imposing rules”

Intimate...a completely appropriate descriptor for an environment in which people work closely together in a creative endeavor that has wooed them away from fierce individuality.

When I see collaboration being trounced by a sense of mania, I suggest that team members form a circle and count. This exercise, taken from the theater, helps people get back in touch with one another.

To be full of love and enthusiasm for your work is a prerequisite for collaboration, a professional obligation;

If you have a problem and to solve it you need someone else to change, you don’t understand your problem yet

the team views the product owner as a positive force propelling them toward a compelling vision and expecting greatness from them while also maintaining a strong grip on reality.

read the presentation outlines for an upcoming agile conference and then go learn about the topics you encounter there.

The desire to control comes through loud and clear in the way most people’s worth is measured by their company’s performance management process.

Agile coaching, done well, is impossible to see from outside the team and can be invisible even to the team members.

When you refuse to be measured by “directs the work of others” and instead stipulate “creates an environment where no one needs to be directed,” you can make a change.

Your sense of personal worth and value can easily take a nose-dive if you don’t make a regular habit of bringing your accomplishments to the surface.