Agilifying Agile Coaches - Part 5 of 6: Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

Get By With A Little Help From My Friends.

“What would you do if I sang out of tune?

?Would you stand up and walk out on me?

Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song

I will try not to sing out of key”

Change is hard and will require more than you. A bad system defeats a good person every time.

So, as an Agile Coach, we are going to have to build human support systems to help the organisation more forward and help ourselves survive the experience.

First, we must make sure we build an environment for ourselves to make errors. If we cannot make it safe-to-fail for us, how can we start building that for our teams? If it is not safe-to-fail, then we may adopt a risk-averse approach and change nothing. Making us not an Agile Coach, but an Agile Actor creating Agile Theatre. The other direction is worse. If it is not safe-to-fail, then we will create casualties when we fail. Us yes, but worse still, we would leave a trail of destruction of our ex-colleagues and ex-companies. Remember, the common factor in the failures at all your previous companies was you.

So how do we create a safe-to-fail environment? First, let’s find some ways of splitting out the genuine safe areas from the dangerous ones! The goodwill technique from the last article is one. Here some other ways to work through those areas. All based around human support systems.

Pair. I believe that pairing is underused as an agile technique in development teams, and I am a proponent in using this method outside of software. I like to pair-coach. When I work in a company, I often find that any change I help introduce can fade as I leave. So I now make sure that I build the capability to change and not just the change itself. I do this via pairing with an internal member of staff (ScrumMaster or Agile Coach) and working side by side with them in a collaborate stance. I help them develop their skills as well as develop the organisations, as well as developing my own! I learn so much, and am happy to admit that there are far better coaches out there than me. A pair can also be a true peer relationship. Whilst I haven’t had the chance to do it recently, I used to really enjoy pairing with a fellow coach at BT, (where I first became an Agile Coach) and we found we could riff of each other quite effectively. One coaching pattern I liked to adopt was to have the two coaches adopt different stances. One could be in a teaching stance, perhaps explaining a concept and then another could interlace that with more of a coaching stance, using Socratic questions to weave together a quite interesting approach. Also, with a pair you have someone with you, who can help correct and facilitate if the other starts to go too far “off-piste”.

Gangs. This is a pattern that has existed under numerous different names. Communities of Practice, Guilds. I thought I invented the concept back in in the noughties, and called it “webs”! (Oh, the vanity of youth.) Whatever you call them, these are formal groupings of people with similar interests or technology focus. They frequently collaborate to share knowledge and improve their collective skills. This is a very common organizational structure, but is notorious for being implemented in a weak and half-hearted fashion. These can easily be theoretical talking shops, focused on theory and abstract concepts rather than the harsh reality. When I implement these, I try to make sure we have a core team supporting them and building a good calendar of options, and then try and draw the community in and have them deliver bottom-up content to supplement that core team. This can be done with tools such as Open Space or World Café. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology)

Scrummasters. This my secret sauce in organisational change and agile coaching. We have this often forgotten force of ground troops who can support and lead any change effort. And we are supposed to have a lot of them! Unlike the Gangs, which can be an adjunct or side line of someone’s work, the ScrumMaster community’s work is change. And therefore, they must frequently come together to support each other, and support you - The coach.

Don’t forget, the ScrumMaster is an upgrade of Agile Coach. Do you remember the old Scrum joke about “Pigs and Chickens”?

 (Thanks to Mike Vizdos!)

There is definitely an argument to be made, that you as an Agile Coach are a chicken and the ScrumMaster is a pig.

ScrumMasters are like organisational anti-bodies. One anti-body on its own will fix nothing… But get a lot of them, and then we start really having some effect. By having so many coaches available, we can spread the workload of change, and run trials in parallel to each other. Whilst each experience is unique, there may be some relevant learning we can share. ScrumMasters are the ground troops of the change. If we engage them, we can catalyse and ignite our culture towards changing. For me, these are most important community for you. If you can coach them to coach others, you are massively magnifying your effectiveness. ScrumMasters are an Agile Coach force multiplier.

Roleplay: I mentioned about the risk of leaving a trail of carnage behind a newer coach, as they learn over the bodies of their colleagues. This is caused by the fact that most experiences of coaches are learned by “developing in live”.

What about the idea of roleplay? Simulating work without the consequences of failure? I am still experimenting with this idea, and we have all done short roleplays in training workshops – but can we bring that to life? With the growth of immersion online roleplay, the concept of spending significant time on such an event, doesn’t seem as toe-curling as it would have been even five years ago. I have recently been trying in a coaching engagement, to develop up a parallel simulated product development for some newer ScrumMasters to experiment with. If you ever experienced any sort of “play-by-mail” roleplaying games in the eighties, then you would be familiar with the idea!

Coach or Mentor: Coaches need coaches. Do you have someone who can act in a coaching capacity for yourself? Whether a professional relationship, or less formal? Whether in the workplace structure or outside? It doesn’t matter as much as having that person there to help you help yourself. A mentor can be someone who provides advice and has more experience in the area you are looking to grow. An advisor who can consult with you and comment. A coach is all about helping you know yourself and your situation better. A mirror to challenge your own thought processes and motivations. Even some of the most famous Agile Coaches, have coaches. This is regarded as standard in the professional coaching sphere. Of course, it is hard to find someone who would fill this role in your life, and vitally, actually fit this role in your life. There has to be the right meshing between the two of you. I know someone who has worked their way through a range of coaches and mentors, and hasn’t yet found that someone with the right mix of attributes that they feel would be able to help them. Though be careful - as Yoda said “judge me by my size, do you?” Mentors come in all shapes and sizes. And often not in the form you expect.

I have a personal admission to make. I myself have never had a mentor figure, and I sense that I have missed out of opportunities and learning because of it.

Clubs and Buddies: Most of these ideas are taking place in our world of work. I believe there is a need for support outside the office. Clubs and Buddies is the name I gave to two of these patterns. The first is the outside of work community. Do we have the ability to meet others from other workplaces and share ideas, knowledge and support? The best implementation I have seen of this in the Agile world, is the ScrumAlliance User Groups. However, there are other Agile clubs out there, so it is not a solely ScrumAlliance thing. I have also seen this work online, but in a more private setting than Linkedin. I always imagined that LinkedIn would be perfect for this, but I have found it to be a bit of an unsafe political space. What you want with this Club concept is to have a social group that you can “drop the coaching mask” and engage with as a human being. Buddies is a similar concept but with a smaller circle again. Do you have one or two people you can go to and discuss your more personal ideas and issues? This is not a mentor figure, but more a couple of peers, “gym buddies” if you will, you can really be vulnerable with. A friend to sympathise with your situation. Sometimes, people don’t want answers, or solutions or coaching. They just want to be heard.

Remember I wrote at the start about making environments safe-to-fail? All these support systems can make it “feel-safe-to-try”. Remember, one of your biggest obstacles is yourself. If you feel unsafe then you may not even make an attempt to change anything. These human support groups are well placed to raise your confidence and feel nurtured enough to try for yourself by building the right environment around yourself, not just the teams or the organisational change.

Now, you may as a coach look to the existing human structures in your company for support. If there is that assistance, then great! The traditional management structure can be utilised to fulfill some of these needs.

But, (and you knew a but was coming!), be careful.

I have frequently used a (slightly snarky) phrase “bureaucrats support a bureaucracy”. I employed this remark to explain the difficulties in changing organisations, when the people who typically bring you in, are the people “supporting” (“bear all or part of the weight of; hold up.”) the status quo as part of their job, and thus often end up “supporting” (“give approval, comfort, or encouragement to.”) to the same status quo.

We can look at this in more general terms. “Position perverts position.” The role or job or task that people has, will distort their appreciation of any situation. So, be aware of that when building up your own human support. I personally would prefer to keep my mentors and/or personal coaches outside of my direct line management in work.

In conclusion, as an Agile Coach you are looking to help them help themselves in a work context. Not in a personal one. And you are looking to help them gain agility. You are an Agile Coach. Just because you maybe an expert in one field, does not make that expertise automatically translates to a different one such as Cloud or Crypto. I guess position perverts position in coaches as much as everyone else.

Which will be just one part of the final article in this series: Medice, cura te ipsum.*

 Here is the last article: https://lnkd.in/eMzjx6b

*(Physician, Heal Thyself)