More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Adkins Lyssa
Read between
July 22, 2023 - November 23, 2024
The people I coach are not motivated by carrots and sticks; they are motivated by a sense of worth and purpose.
Agile coaching matters because it helps in both of these areas—producing products that matter in the real, complex, and uncertain world, and adding meaning to people’s work lives.
Agile is easy to get going yet hard to do well. Many reasons collude to make this so. Chief among them is that agile exposes the dirt people have been sweeping under the rug for years. Who wants to look at that? Yet, we must.
Agile coaching is more about who you are and what behaviors you model than it is about any specific technique or idea you bring to the team.
We know that motivation in the knowledge age comes when people achieve autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose
Lead by believing. After all, if you don’t believe they can get to high performance, why should they?
Coaching starts with you, but it is not about you.
A powerful model to use for agile coaching, servant leadership builds strength in others (Greenleaf 1991). Strength in others leads to strength in the team, which leads to better, more innovative ideas.
Teams that fail together and recover together are much stronger and faster than ones that are protected.
A friend loves you just the way you are. A coach loves you too much to let you stay that way.
Remember the mentor side of your job—you know what an excellent agilist looks like, talks like, and acts like. Don’t demand the team members immediately meet your high bar of agility, but don’t ever let them pretend that their compromise has changed the definition of good agile and that now they’ve “arrived” so they can stop working at it.
Holding fast to your knowledge of agile done well can be a significant challenge, especially in one-on-one coaching conversations when team members’ stories of woe suck you in until the woes start sounding like reasonable excuses for why they can’t be good agilists.
The four pieces of groundwork to set in place before one-on-one coaching commences are as follows: • Meet them a half-step ahead. • Guarantee safety. • Partner with managers. • Create a positive regard.
Because agile coaching carries agile mentorship with it, we modify this rule to say we first recognize where our one-on-one coachees are, and then we meet them just a half-step ahead of where they are.
we coach the whole person who shows up in front of us, not just the work side and not just the life side but whatever combination they bring. We do this because work done well cannot be separated from personhood done well. And agile done well cannot be separated from values lived well.
Agile coaches uphold an environment of experimentation and risk taking because we know that only in such a place will brilliance emerge.
You don’t have to like the people you coach, but you do have to help them. When you coach someone you dislike, your feelings can easily show through. The dislike leaks out. People know when they’re being “handled.” They know when you view them as a problem to solve rather than as a human being with hopes, dreams, and desires.
The book Leadership and Self-Deception describes it this way: Imagine a box. Imagine that when you view people as objects, as problems to be solved, you are in the box. The box is a place of blaming, justification, and perceptions so distorted that the truth of the situation can no longer be seen. In the box, we inflate other’s faults and inflate our own virtues (Arbinger Institute 2002) so that we can maintain our view of others as the problem. When we’re in the box, all the management, coaching, facilitating, and cat-herding tools and techniques in the world don’t matter:
One way to do this is to believe that everyone is doing the best they can with the skills they have and the cards they were dealt.
A set of strong value statements in the agile manifesto and a fundamental belief that, given a simple framework, small groups of people can achieve great things together are what form the core of agile.
Hearing this from “higher-up” every once in a while helps them know that their efforts were worth it and that they are valuable to the company.
healthy agile team works together in high-bandwidth, high-quality communication.
In his book Succeeding with Agile, Mike Cohn offers an easy way to tell whether you have the perfect team size. If you can feed the whole team on two pizzas, you’re there.
Sprint Planning Structure Create a flip chart with these words, and let that be the structure the team uses to guide themselves through sprint planning: Sprint planning is done when we can answer these questions: • If the goal of this sprint were a newspaper headline, what would it be? • What is the team composition for this sprint? • What is the total team capacity for this sprint? • What are the highest business value product backlog items? • What are the concerns (technical, political, cultural) about these product backlog items? • What other concerns does the team have? • Given all this,
...more
Agile coaches Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley recommend capturing a “mini-quote—taking note of the exact words used” especially when you have heard someone voice a misconception or misuse of agile (Davies and Sedley 2009).
Powerful Observations Keep a running list of questions in your head as you observe a team in conversation. You can use these questions when it’s the whole team talking, just a few talking, or only two team members talking. Questions such as these let you hone in on the quality of the conversation:
Is everyone who wants to talk getting airtime? Are there dominant people in the room who need to listen more? Are there quiet voices that want to be heard? • Are the ideas high quality? • Is the team moving toward the simplest thing possible? • Is the team getting tired? • Is it tense? Do they need comic relief? • Is the team being audacious enough? Do they come up with great ideas or break through barriers? • Are they taking on as much as they could, or are they letting “accepted” barriers get in the way? • Is the team couching everything in terms of customer value? • Are they stuck? Do they
...more
Powerful questions work because they are truly open. They are not asked with a “correct” answer in mind.
Over a short period of time, team members catch on to the powerful questions a coach asks and, often, will take up this type of questioning themselves.
It is amazing the things that hold teams back. They accept limitations placed on them by their organization, by prior experiences (once bit, twice shy), and quite often by themselves.
Although you reinforce agile constantly as the team works together, the team start-up allows you to teach agile at its most basic and potent. This time will not come again.
Teaching agile to experienced agilists starts with the coach saying, “I know you are experienced in agile. Let me take ten minutes to show you my version of agile so that we can make sure we are synchronized in our understanding of it. It’s from this version of agile that I will coach you, so it’s important that you know where I am coming from.”
The agile frameworks most often used are lightweight and simple—easy to convey in ten minutes if you get good at your whiteboard talk.
Individuals shape into a team when they learn first about one another as human beings and then grow from that understanding into a sense of who they can become together.
We use activities under the “team building” heading to help people learn about one another so they can depend on each other as they pursue shared goals.
A few activities that have become my standard fare in building this type of understanding are Journey Lines, Market of Skills, Constellation, and Values. Journey Lines yields a deep understanding of each person’s past—their accomplishments and disappointments, their skills and talents, and a bit about their lives under the surface. Market of Skills, an alternative to Journey Lines, primarily highlights people’s skills and talents. Constellation provides a window into how team members like to work and don’t like to work, what motivates them and what kills their drive, what they aspire to
...more
As with Journey Lines, “participation in the Market of Skills activity strengthens the team’s awareness of their combined skills as well as the areas in which team members can support and educate each other. The activity is both an appreciative aspect of team identity and a way to know one’s teammates better” (2009).
Imagine that each team member owns a booth at a market. Within 20 minutes, each person makes a poster that answers the following questions: • Which competencies, skills, and abilities related to the team are available at your booth? • What is available under the counter of your booth? (In other words, which competencies, skills, and abilities do you possess that may not be relevant to the goal of the team?) • Which competencies, skills, and abilities would you like to achieve or learn from some of the other team members? Next, each person presents their poster. During the presentation,
...more
Other relevant competencies, skills, and abilities that you know this person possesses but didn’t mention (this could be on red sticky labels). • How you can help the person to gain the competencies, skills, or abilities the person wants (this could be on yellow sticky labels). After the presentation, the other team members individually give their feedback and post the sticky labels near the person’s poster (Myllerup 2009).
Envision Invite the highest-ranking person you can find to paint for the team a vision of the product to be created by them. This person’s opinion matters to the team. It’s someone they want to impress and who has a vested interest in the product because the company has conferred formal authorization to this person to achieve company goals. More than likely, this person sponsors, or pays for, the project. The one holding the purse strings has great influence. Use it. Prep this person to speak about the importance of the project at two levels: company and personal. It’s useful to know how this
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Newspaper Projection Tell the team, “Imagine it is a year from now, and the product is a resounding success. It surpasses all expectations and is touted as a total breakthrough. The Wall Street Journal (or substitute your favorite newspaper) has written an article about the product and the way it was created, citing it as a model for others to come. Write that article. In it you might interview customers and team members, detail the positive impacts of the product, or explain the special way in which the product was built.”
If a team gets off to a rough start, that’s OK as long as you don’t save them from themselves. Educate throughout, coach, and abide by their choices. Let them feel the natural consequences of their decisions and then, when they are ready, guide them back to the core of agile.
Restart teams when team membership or team goals change significantly. You need not do everything you did in the initial start-up, just the parts that have changed or need bolstering. If team membership changes, ensure that you teach agile again. The ten-minute whiteboard talk does the trick. Regardless of the reason for the restart, take advantage of this time to address lingering team ills with a little retraining and positive reinforcement.
Keep team membership as stable as possible, and coach the team to only introduce or take away team members between sprints. Remember the rule: The people who made the commitment deliver the commitment.
A poor product owner creates a languishing team, one half alive, just going through the motions. A good product owner helps keep the team moving in the right direction. A great product owner accelerates results and stays open to allow astonishing results to emerge.
To help them, remember this memory-jogger: CRACK. An effective product owner is Committed, Responsible, Authorized, Collaborative, and Knowledgeable (Boehm and Turner 2003):
To provide such a low-touch way to guide teams, Mike Cohn offers this model: Containers, Differences, and Exchanges (CDE). In a nutshell, agile managers exert control over the following: • The containers within which teams work, specifically their physical location, organizational position, and team assignment • The differences between the backgrounds of team members, going for a mix of people that will yield a high level of team interaction • Transformational exchanges in which team members are changed or influenced by their differences and interactions (Cohn 2009)
Agile roles are not titles, so they can be taken up by anyone who has the ability and desire to do them well.
It is unhealthy, for example, when the product owner also serves as the team members’ direct manager. Clash. It’s a bit unhealthier still if the product owner also serves as the agile coach’s direct manager. Double clash. This team suffers from unclear dual-role boundaries. Here are other unhealthy role boundaries:
Product owner as both project manager (schedule slave driver) and agile coach Agile coach as subject-matter expert and team member Agile manager as agile coach
