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

by Adkins Lyssa

To avoid role and title jumbles, use this rule of thumb when something needs to be done, but who should do it is not clear: Carefully consider whether you are the right person to do it. Ask yourself, “Am I the source? Am I the one who should suffer if it goes wrong? Does this fall within my area of responsibility? Is this part of my commitment? If the answer to any of these is “yes,” then you are likely the person to rightfully take ownership. If the answers are “no,” then hand it off to the person in the appropriate role.

doing something for someone else, which really means doing something to someone else.

How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • 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 what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have man...

If you don’t like the survey questions or want a “second opinion,” try boundary, authority, role, and task (BART) analysis.

Are all formally defined roles in your agile framework occupied by specific individuals? For example, is there one and only one product owner and agile coach (or your equivalent terms for these roles)? Do team members know the definition of their role, “team member”? • Are all formal roles functioning within role boundaries (but not beyond) and done well and completely?

Is any one person taking up more than one formal role defined in your agile framework? If so, what is the impact to the use of authority and boundaries on the team? • If the team has added additional formal roles, are these roles completely described? Are the people occupying them performing them within the formal role boundaries and doing so well and completely?

Tasks • Does the team get great clarity about their team purpose from a shared mental model they can each express? • Can someone distinguish all the different tasks needed to accomplish the team’s purpose (such as a product owner with a prioritized backlog)? • Which histories and past experiences do people “import” from prior, similar situations? How does this affect their ability to see the true nature of the current tasks at hand? Authority • Is authority for each role clearly specified, understood by all, and adhered to? • Do team members “take up” formal authority appropriately? For example, does the team appropriately “take up” their authority over the daily stand-up meeting? Boundaries • Do people work within the boundaries of the authority granted by their agile role? If not, what are the effects of these authority-boundary issues? • How do team members grant one another the authority to claim tasks within the sprint? How does this change over time during the sprint? How does this change across multiple sprints?

What are the various “turf” boundaries on the team? Are these turf areas “markers of identity” for one or more team members (Green and Molenkamp 1995)?

the job of the coach ...is not to repair or “fix” the system but rather to reveal its nature to its members. Armed with new awareness the systems’ members can become “response-able” to better perform the tasks of the system. This mirroring process empowers the self-regulating function of the system

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right. —Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

The goal of navigating conflict is to de-escalate.

Agile teams—even new ones and even broken ones—can often navigate conflict by themselves, even conflict up into the level 3 range. So, sit back for a while and witness their moves. See whether they make progress. Even if it’s not perfect or the “complete” job you could do for them, if team members navigate the conflict well enough, leave them alone. To help you live with the uncomfortable feeling of watching a team’s bumbling attempts to deal with conflict, 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”

The analyze-and-respond mode for navigating conflict may feel comfortable to you—an easy shoe to slip on. If that’s the case and if it seems the best choice for your current level of skill and confidence, use it. However, you should know that it is the weakest response mode for building high-performance teams because it puts the coach in the driver’s seat. It also relies completely on analytical thinking, which is just one small way to think about conflict.

use structures to indirectly navigate conflict.

The next time someone brings you a complaint, try this three-step intervention path

Never carry anonymous complaints.

If you relay an anonymous complaint, you open yourself up to manipulation, and you model that talking behind team members’ backs is OK.

Use a consent check when it sounds like all the voices that want to be heard have been heard and the group is generally moving toward a shared conclusion. On the flip side, use a consensus check when all voices are not being heard and it is unclear whether the team is moving toward a shared conclusion.

In “the dream behind the conflict,” the partners are coached through an activity that calls to mind the reasons why the partnership was a good idea in the first place. In so doing, they remember the excitement of the “dream” and regain the big-picture view of the partnership’s purpose. With this big picture purpose in mind, they often see that the unsolvable conflict is secondary, maybe even unimportant.

Collaboration yields that old adage: The whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Cooperation yields the sum of the parts. Let’s explore these in greater detail so that you’ll have a framework that helps you determine which of these approaches fits the team’s situation.

To encourage cooperation as a basis for collaboration, teach the team to treat their daily interactions as a game called tit-for-tat. It’s played in pairs: Both team members start out cooperating. From then on, each matches what the other person does. If one cooperates, then the other keeps cooperating. If one turns uncooperative, then the other matches that uncooperative behavior, giving the “defector” an immediate reflection of their defection in the relationship. If the “defector” doesn’t get the behavior hint, then the other team member tells them they can have it be one of two ways: cooperative or uncooperative. It’s their choice

Real collaboration between persons requires at least some intellectual and/or social intimacy. The intimate state is reached when both parties signal willingness to work in a “zone” or “field” of trust, vulnerability, openness, mutual accommodation, and respect.... Teams who are intimate have the potential to be cognitively intimate. In this state, most team members understand the cognitive styles of most all other team members and can sense and anticipate how other members perceive communications, and new information. Cognitively intimate team members can sense and anticipate individual and group-level misunderstandings in the perception of new material, and quickly intervene to clarify, leading to more rapid understanding at the group level

To be full of love and enthusiasm for your work is a prerequisite for collaboration, a professional obligation; to be full of love and enthusiasm is a choice you make and a skill you learn and practice.

Another harbinger of failure modes comes in the form of multitasking and its cousin, continuous partial attention. Both are fairly new, evolutionarily speaking, and scientists tell us clearly that the human nervous system may not be built to handle them (Kabat-Zinn 2006

Continuous partial attention arises when the coach coaches multiple teams or is otherwise distracted, running from one team to the other. It leads to the Seagull, the Spy, and the Butterfly. These are all some version of doing just enough to make one’s presence felt so it will look like you are coaching when you are really just barely there.

Regardless of what happens with how others measure you, be sure to do your own measuring. When you leave a team or a group, look back over the whole time you have been with them. Conduct a personal retrospective, your own private inspect-and-adapt loop. Being honest with yourself, make some lists that consider your impact.