How a Sex Therapist Made Me a Better Agile Coach

Recently my wife sent me a post from a Sex Therapist she follows on Instagram. It was about a podcast episode on flirting in a long term relationship. You may be wondering what on earth this could possibly have to do with Agile Coaching. Stick with me and I promise I’m going to connect the dots.?

First, let me explain why she sent me this podcast episode. We actually have a pretty healthy relationship. We believe in being proactive and continuously working to improve ourselves and our relationship, not waiting until there is a crisis. She let me know that she’d like me to listen to this episode because she wanted me to flirt with her more. Or rather, flirt with her differently than I do currently. Apparently my style of flirting doesn’t tick the box for her (which isn’t surprising, I’m pretty goofy). I felt that was a fair request so even though I felt a little unsure I decided to listen and see what I could learn.

It was an entertaining episode. A very casual, fun, and yes even flirty conversation between the therapist and her non-therapist husband. They gave lots of great examples of ways of flirting. And there was one piece of advice that really stood out to me.

They suggested that you listen to the episode with your partner. The reasoning was that if you ask someone who isn’t good at or doesn’t think they are good at flirting to “flirt more” or “flirt differently” that can be really intimidating. It’s a pretty wide open request. So sure, I can change things up, but how do I know what will be a better approach for her unless she is listening to the same suggestions and can tell me “yes, that is something I’d like” or “no, that wouldn’t be good for me.” That makes a lot of sense.

So, fast forward to yesterday at work. I was talking to my manager about how we engage with our Product leaders and teams. We have a set of Product and Tech Principles that were introduced across the company a couple of years ago. We recently have started framing our conversations with our stakeholders around those principles and asking them where they are having the biggest pains.

For example, one of the Principles is “Fall in love with the customer problem”. So a stakeholder may be able to point to that and say, “Here! We know what we are building, but we don’t have easy access to our customers to be able to understand how they use it and to verify that what we are building is the right thing to solve their problems.”

My manager was very excited about this approach. She pointed out that using these principles as guides for discussing our coaching engagements makes sense for us. Instead of a wide open “How can we help you?” we can have a discussion with an anchored and defined set of possibilities so that we are all talking the same language.

That’s when it clicked: Agile Coaching is like flirting. I mean…it’s not, but in this way it is. Our stakeholders don’t know what they don’t know. They may know they need help, but if they don’t have knowledge of what we can help them with, how can we expect them to be able to tell us?

There are other ways to learn…observation, surveys, metrics, etc. But having a set of principles or values or focus statements (it doesn’t really matter what you call them) to anchor the conversation can provide information to increase the speed of alignment and can help assure that you are all looking for the same outcome.

I believe this will be a great tool in my Agile toolbox to help us define the scope of our engagements faster, give the stakeholders more confidence in discussing their needs and allow us to start making an impact much more quickly.

If you are reading this and thinking, “Well, that’s great for you, but my organization doesn’t have a set of [insert your term of choice here]. How can I make use of this technique?” Don’t worry…I’ve worked at a lot of organizations throughout my career that didn’t have something like that. You have a couple of ways forward that I can think of.?

One, you can start the process of creating a set of values or principles yourself. Start the conversation with the head of your Agile group in your organization and try to gather a cross functional group of people that can help create buy-in.

If that isn’t possible or if you need to get started and can’t wait for your organization to create their own, use the Agile Principles from the Agile Manifesto. Those are a great place to start and are definitely better than nothing.

I’d love to hear if this connects with you! Also, I’d love to hear any techniques other coaches might use to ensure you are empowering your stakeholders in conversations and aligning on the outcomes you are driving toward.

Stay Agile my friends.?