I forget when I first thought about this idea, but it’s been several years. It’s about taking a service-oriented view to agile coaching.
One genesis point for me was talking to an agile transformation director leading a team of coaches. He lamented that his coaches were constantly pulled in multiple directions well beyond their capacity and skills.
I brainstormed with him about whether a service-oriented mindset or approach would be helpful to him. And we defined that as—
Define a set of coaching services that his team would provide;
Define Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) or delivery agreements for each service;
Market the services to the organizational stakeholders;
Manage capacity (across services, across coaches, and unique skills);
Perhaps on an annualized basis, reevaluate service outcomes, needs, and rebalance the investment in the team.
One problem he was experiencing was the incredibly broad skillset assumed by his coaching team. That is—they can coach in any situational context. Which certainly wasn’t true. A service orientation would not only define what they would provide but what they would or could not provide.
The 2022 Agile Coaching Report sat in my inbox for almost two months until I finally reviewed it in detail a few days ago. Several areas were worthy of a deeper dive, but one particularly struck me. The report's preface reads: "Notably, coaches believe the biggest impact they are making is in shifting an organization towards an agile mindset and culture. Interestingly, they also find this to be the most challenging shift to make and one of the biggest impediments to agility if not achieved." This sentiment isn't surprising to most who have worked in an organization transforming toward more agility. It's an issue Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, leaders, managers, and team members run into often.
It's not surprising this shift is difficult because a transformation of an individual's mindset requires an internal change in their value system, which is not only what they say they value but what they believe they value. Unfortunately, leaders, managers, and stakeholders often say they value the agile transformation or value delivering useful products or services to their customers but underpinning those statements is a desire for more money, more accolades, more acceptance, and more power. There's nothing inherently wrong with some of these underpinning values, but it's essential to understand the true driver of the desire to change. It's important because our job as coaches is to nudge them toward more agile ways of thinking. And to do that, we must understand where the individual's values are rooted.
Happy New Year, dear readers, clients, friends, and colleagues.
2022 was a topsy-turvy, hold-onto-the-rails kind of ride for me. Here are just a few highlights—
I published my Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching book in January.
I followed up with an audiobook version in July (my first).
I delivered in-person coaching again at several organizations, and it felt strange but good.
From a revenue perspective, and this surprised me a bit, this was the second-highest year in the 20-year history of my consulting practice.
I spoke at many virtual conferences and events. Particularly in the areas of agile leadership and coaching. One of my favorites was a pair of Ask Me Anything sessions at Scrum Masters of the Universe.
I was fortunate to go on-site at the Denver Scrum Gathering and the Nashville Agile Conference. At the Agile Conference, Jen Fields and my session on agile coaching was standing room only, AND the EBAC book sold out at the bookstore.
I did more pro bono coaching and mentoring than in any previous year.
I granted over $25,000 to CAL students with my DEI discount program.
I closed the year by running an experiment called Badass Agile Coaching Day. It drew over 190 attendees and generated proceeds of over $6,500 which I split across Agile for Ukraine and Africa Agility (see below).
And that’s just a sample…
I saw this post on LinkedIn the other day from Julie Springer
“So… this all sounds great, but are you going to provide this same training to our leaders?”
I’ve heard this question multiple times, and the underlying message is clear.
Teams are being asked to work in new ways, without any confidence that their leaders are going to make changes in the way they lead or approach their work.
It’s unfair to train teams on how they are empowered to self-organize to deliver value if nothing around them is changing.
Start with a vision for the change at the leadership level and get clear on what structures, approaches and behaviors need to be in place to support agile teams, before providing training and inviting them to work differently.
There’s a nice dialogue of comments and reactions to the post that I recommend you read. That being said, I didn’t see a quick point I’d like to make…
This is a conversation/reaction topic between Toby Sinclair and Terry Brown recently on LinkedIn. You can find it here. The net of the discussion was—can a manager coach the people that report to them? And, to be clear, the coaching in this sense was professional coaching.
Here’s Toby’s post—
Managers can’t be coaches
But they can coach. Let me explain.
Line managers face barriers to being a coach. These include:
Power dynamic between manager and direct report
Knowledge is held by the manager but not the team member. e.g. Upcoming reorganization
Confidentiality conflict between manager and other team members.
Unwritten constraints in what can/can’t be discussed in the corporate culture.
Commonly to the direct report, the manager will always be a manager. Not a coach.
I subscribe to Mike Cohn’s newsletter and I received a post on January 20th, 2022 entitled—
7 Reasons Teams Underestimate Work.
It was quite short but sweet and valuable. I’m sharing his list of seven factors below.
Overconfidence
Lack of clarity about the feature
Estimating a best-case scenario
Multi-tasking is not considered
They aren’t including time to iterate
Not all work is included
Assuming they’ll be more productive than is realistic
And it inspired me to think of other reasons, not directly related to the team, that might cause the team to underestimate.
Peter Stevens, in this blog article entitled The Elephant in the Agile living room, shared the following—
The agile movement has no positive message to offer company leadership. Because Agile transformation is often not about things executives care about, these transformations are very low on the executive priority list. Until we fix this, agility will not be a high priority. The Personal Agility System brings genuine benefit to executives: Executive Agility. Let’s look at why and how this works to show the potential benefits of embracing agility to the executives themselves.
I recently attended a meetup presentation given by a senior transformation leader of well-known organization that is transforming themselves. They highlighted the challenges executives face: An agile transformation is about giving up responsibility. They have to find a new role, without any clarity about what that new role is. Implicit is a loss of status, power and influence, with a corresponding risk of executive pay cuts.
At another event, another transformation leader of a large, well-known company: “why is your company doing an agile transformation?” “To improve employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction,” they answered. How important are these topics to your executives? Since these are typically not a significant factor in the executive’s bonus, their commitment is somewhere between giving lip-service and none at all.
What does agility offer to leadership personally? Until now, very little. Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and most if not all other agile frameworks all about teams producing stuff. But most managers and executives are not part of a team that produces stuff. They are accountable for teams and their results, but they not part of the teams.
Senior executives are especially vulnerable: they are like likely to be in competition with each other and serve at the whim of their boards. What does an agile transformation offer them? Loss of power, loss of influence, turning them into coaches, and probably a loss of income. Why exactly do they want to go there?
Peter goes on to make a case for leaders to tackle his Personal Agility System (PAS). I want to take a different tack by reacting to some of the leadership quotes.
Not that long ago I encountered a company that was fully invested in Empowered Product Teams (EPT’s). You know, the work that Marty Cagan and SVPG have been evangelizing, training, and consulting on. It’s essentially the culmination of the work that Marty shared in his Empowered book.
Full disclosure, I’ve not studied Marty’s work in excruciating detail. I’ve read it and I largely agree with his perspectives on modern-day product development team dynamics that lead to success. However, I’m not SVPG trained nor an expert in the approaches.
But that being said, the company I ran into illustrated a problem with EPT’s that I want to share so that others might reconsider the model and effectively implement it in the real world.
So, what did the company do? They—
