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by
Adkins Lyssa
“To improve teamwork, I need to improve me” and “I am responsible for all the relationships within my project community.”
And herein lies the practice of agile coaching: to constantly reawaken and refocus, so you can improve the span and impact of your coaching. Why? So that people become great agilists, teams create products that make them proud, and companies and nations reap the benefits of free and accountable teams living in a world of possibility from which both innovation and excellence arise.
In my world, project management was essential, serious business because project managers orchestrated the workings of the whole machine. Everything about getting projects done was complicated and big, and I was convinced it had to be this way. I couldn’t imagine what a small team working together through plans of their own devising could possibly create. It just seemed too flimsy for getting “real work” done.
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 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.
The most important thing you can do in the face of your mistake is to model the agile value of openness. Transparently and with humility, simply own up to the impact of the mistake, and apologize for it. Tell the team which agile value or principle your mistake undermined so they can learn from your example.
Imagine a team that admits mistakes, reinforces their shared values, forgives one another, and moves on. Do you think such a team would come up with astonishing ideas? I do.
When teams mashed up Scrum with something else, such as lean or user-centered design, they enjoyed success if they kept the Scrum framework mostly intact and the agile manifesto completely intact. When they let the Scrum framework and agile manifesto fall by the wayside as they sought a way of working that fit them best, they often struggled and sometimes outright failed.
Therein lies the seed of their downfall—finding a way of working that fit them best. In so doing, they often dismissed the inspect-and-adapt loop as superfluous, preferring to believe that they didn’t need a formal structure to make themselves continuously improve.
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Clients’ needs change. Gravity. What the team can do is known only to them and changes over time. Gravity. The world moves at an unbelievably fast pace and creates situations no one could have foreseen. Gravity. You cannot make a commitment on anyone else’s behalf and expect committed behavior from them. Gravity. Agile accepts gravity and accommodates its pull within its very practices and principles. Dealing with gravity is built in.
Wheatley, M. 2006. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. This is essential reading for any agile coach (and all the managers an agile coach encounters) to understand why the machine model of getting work done no longer applies and what the role of “leader” in self-organizing systems, such as agile teams, should be.
Expecting high performance means that you believe the team can attain it, so you hold them, compassionately and firmly, to that expectation. By believing, you urge them to strive for a vision of what they can become together. They get called forth to be more than they are now.
Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up.
Tobias Mayer uses the imagery of “building a foundation” in his classes. It’s a simple list of five things that make Scrum (and all agile methods) work. He tells people that if you have these five things, then you have everything you need, and the other details will work themselves out (Mayer 2009): Empiricism: Succeed through a rapid progression of failures. Drive by hindsight, not foresight. Self-organization: The people closest to the problem know best how to solve the problem. Collaboration: Foster a “yes, and” mind-set. Re-conceive ideas; do not compromise (Austin and Devin 2003).
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• Before every conversation, do you check your intention to see whether you are as interested in others getting their needs met as your own?
To have an important impact, the kind of impact a coach needs to have to influence people and help them become good agilists, you must pay attention to your language and take responsibility for your emotional wake (Scott 2007). This means that you own up to your impact whether harm was intended and whether you think the other person should feel hurt or not.
When we focus on clarifying what is being observed, felt, and needed rather than on diagnosing and judging, we discover the depth of our own compassion.
“...Make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” (Greenleaf 1991)
“It is often a devastating question to ask oneself, but it is sometimes important to ask it—‘In saying what I have in mind will I really improve on the silence?’” (Greenleaf 1991)
How you react to conflict, how you communicate, how well you embrace being the team’s servant, and how you bring choice to emotional responses are all facets of who you are becoming as a coach. How and how much you bring these into your coaching is a matter of choice balanced with opportunities lost. The more skilled you become at mastering yourself, the more self-organized and self-monitoring the teams will be. If you cannot or will not do these things well, the consequences will likely not be dire. You just won’t be getting as much as you could for the teams or for yourself.
Be detached from outcomes: Give the team ample space to come up with the best ideas and build the best product.
Take it to the team: Believe it or not, you are not the best person to solve the problem, whether the problem lies with the product the team creates or with the way the team works together.
Master your words and your face: To do this well, practice nonjudgment and practice nonviolent communication, not only in the tone of your voice and the words you choose but also on your face.
Let there be silence: Get comfortable with uncomfortable silence. Do not fill it yourself. Let someone else on the team have room to speak. They will.
Model being outrageous: The things that hold teams back will amaze you. These inhibitors center around their beliefs about what they are and are not allowed to do.
To help you manage yourself, make use of control by release. Control by release works when you “control by turning [the team] loose within well-understood given circumstances...control by trusting the process” (Austin and Devin 2003).
To help you during your judgment fast, remember control by release. When you recognize a judgment, instead of speaking it to the team, write it down. Then, look for an agile practice, principle, or value you can reinforce with the team to help them do agile well and address the matter that caused your judgment. Write what you offered down next to the judgment. Keep this “judgment vs. agile” list going while on your judgment fast and see how much trust you can build—trust in them, in yourself, and in agile.
If, for example, what you truly care about is that they find their own voice to speak up about things that impact them, then everything you do will come from this place of helping them find their own voice. Your ability to respond will come from the clarity you have about how you can best serve them. In fact, a good way to discover what you care about arises from your answer to this question: How can I best be of service to the group? Use whatever answer comes to mind. It’s probably right or, at least, right enough to be useful.
Staying connected means staying connected to one thing you care about. That’s the trick to making this work. You probably have a long list of things you care about. That list has its uses but cannot be kept front of mind when you are in the moment and things are happening all around you. So, pick one thing to stay connected to. Just as a product backlog can have only one top priority, you must choose one top thing you care about. Make it the one you feel will best serve the group.
Sometimes, the team needs you to remain unfiltered—to see your reaction as a reflection of what just happened. More often, though, your reaction is about you and has no place in the coaching. Notice your reaction, and consciously choose whether to act on it. This is the practiced skill.
Every time you want to speak, make sure your “come from” place is all about them. Ensure that your words are aimed at helping them get better as a team.
Instead of speaking, count to 10 (or 100). Use this classic exercise with a twist: While you count, pay keen attention to see whether someone else in the group will speak your thought. If you wait several minutes, you will likely hear your thought, or the core of your thought, expressed by someone else. If you wait several minutes and no one expresses your thought, wait a few more and then see whether it is still relevant or helpful. If so, speak it with clarity and simplicity. You’ve been thinking about it for a while now, so you should be able to express it in an incredibly short, precise,
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Greenleaf, R. 1991. The Servant as Leader. Westfield, IN: The Robert K. Greenleaf Center.
Scott, S. 2007. Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time. New York: Berkley.
Teaching: When you teach, you lay down the law and teach the rules. This can be done gently or forcefully, that matters not, but it must be done with a steel rod in your back—that matters. You know a better way to work, so feel the steel rod as you teach agile. Convey the rules strongly, along with your belief that agile gives us a better way to work. Back this up with your experiences illustrating why this is so. In so doing, you teach both the practices and the principles.
Encourage the team to relax their incessant need to know everything right now. Instead, ask them to follow you and get agile practices working well as their first job because doing so leads to their initial successes.
Regardless of the coaching style you choose at any given moment, be actively Modeling. Constantly model the behaviors that lead to success: listening to one another, building on each other’s ideas, courageously facing impediments, and tending toward the simplest thing possible. Everything you do transfers a mind-set or tool the team can incorporate into their way of being to enhance their success. And, yes, this diminishes their reliance on you.
Hunt, A. 2008. Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware. Raleigh: Pragmatic Programmers. Use this book to take your brain on a tour of different ways to approach your work and view the progression from newbie to master.
If we want to stretch to the full capacity of agile, we’ll amend that statement to be faster and better with innovations marvelous and yet undreamed. That’s what agile was built to do. To these ends, you coach to • Help the organization achieve astonishing results, the kind that will matter to the business and the team members in a fundamental way • Help the team develop and get healthier together (or recover more completely when not healthy) • Help each person take the next step on their agile journey so they can be more successful agilists and contribute in a way that feeds team improvement
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A friend loves you just the way you are. A coach loves you too much to let you stay that way.
True compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Because of this firm foundation, a truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively. Genuine compassion is based not on our own projections and expectations, but rather on the needs of the other: irrespective of whether another person is a close friend or an enemy, as long as that person wishes for peace and happiness and wishes to overcome suffering, then on that basis we develop genuine concern for their problem. This is genuine compassion (The Dalai Lama 2003).
Following this lead, feel genuine compassion for where this person is in life and work. Feel genuine compassion for the impact they have on themselves and others through their actions. Then, reaffirm your belief that no one would knowingly negatively impact themselves, and believe, again, that everyone is doing the best they can.
While the coachee vents, remember this: The opposite of talking is not listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. —Fran Lebowitz
The conversation ends with the coach acknowledging the coachee for who he is being. For example, “I want to let you know that, in this moment, I see courage in you that is palpable.” An acknowledgment is not “Thank you for being courageous in the way you are addressing this issue.” The “thank-you,” although polite, raises the coach above the coachee and saps the coachee’s power. A well-delivered acknowledgment, in contrast, honors who the person had to be in order for you to feel their courage. Receiving such an acknowledgment magnifies the coachee’s power.
You need not be an expert in any of their domains to coach them well, as long as you stick to coaching and veer away from solving their problem for them. Certainly, learn about the latest software refactoring technique or peruse the cool trend data for the product’s target market if that interests you, but don’t let that knowledge move you into solution mode. Instead, offer insights as their agile mentor, and coach them to come up with their own solutions.
If you have a tendency to take on other people’s problems as your own, check your actions to ensure you have not unintentionally burdened yourself with responsibility for the coachee’s situation. The problem and the action rest with them. You cannot make the problem go away by solving it for them.
Agile itself blurs the line between work and life because, to do agile well, we ask people to bring their whole selves to the endeavor at hand. We don’t ask people to check their courage at the door. In fact, coaches create an environment that invites people to be courageous. We don’t tell people to shut up and go along because we need the diversity of ideas that come from every voice being heard.
The microdefinition expresses the next critical business objective we must achieve on the way to creating the whole product.
the next time the product owner sorts the product backlog, ask that it be done in two passes. Instruct the product owner to let the first pass be based on business value alone. Coach the product owner to be unreasonable in this first pass. Tell him to take the position that this product is the single most important initiative for the whole company. Ask him to imagine that he has just stepped into a world where he can get anything he needs to deliver the highest impact for the company now.
