Organizations dealing with the COVID-19 crisis are needing to reduce costs quickly and are consequently looking to remove or reduce their coaching cadre. This is understandable as it is often more challenging to see the value that a coach brings, after all, coaches are about making their teams shine not themselves. But a coach’s value should be best demonstrated by team’s positive improvement of their speed, quality and value delivered.

Additionally there is a belief that Agile Coaches are only about standing in team’s ceremonies and doing minor course corrections as they overhear work being done by teams. With teams now working distributed, organizations believe that because coaches can no longer see and hear teams, that their effectiveness is significantly reduced. However, Agile Coaches are needed more now than ever before in order to support teams in helping to work effectively whilst distributed. This includes training on using new tools to effectively collaborate, focussing higher on alignment prior to starting work, empathatically connecting with team members to resolve issues and ensuring team members aren’t feeling socially disconnected.

Agile Coaching of leaders is just as equally important for a similar series of reasons that existed prior to COVID-19 including how leaders can best enagage, support and get transparency of their teams using digital tools.

Whilst teams and leaders need to adjust to this distributed world, Agile Coaches too need to make some adjustments in how they have traditionally worked. The following are the top seven changes that Agile Coaches need to make to be more effective in remote coaching.

1. Build trust virtually. Trust is a critical element to be established in any coaching relationship. If you have an established coaching relationship when working virtually is unlikely to be a significant hinderance. But for new coaching relationships, building trust will take longer and be more challenging to detect nuances in body language. Coaches will need to demonstrate more vulnerability and humility than they may be used to in order to help build a trust relationship. Check out these 13 simple strategies for building trust.
2. Get familiar with new games and activities that can be run virtually to teach people agile behaviours, principles and practices. Lisette Sutherland, co-author of “Work Together Anywhere: A Handbook on working remotely, successfully – for individuals, teams and managers” has produced a brilliant page of ideas and tips on her collaboration superpowers site. Utilise simple Trello boards to run training agendas and vitual whiteboards or virtual post-it note tools. To inject some competitive, multi-choice activities into training utilise tools like Kahoot.
3. Adapt your coaching style to focus heavier on general coaching and less on Agile coaching skills. Great coaches already utilise a broad toolkit that includes deep Agile knowledge and strong capabilities in general coaching utilizing coaching models like GROW. With anxiety and stress levels so high, coaches will need to ensure that their coachees are feeling supported and that conversations are focussing on the coachee’s needs over necessarily focusing on Agile maturity.
4. Focus on open questions. As coaching becomes completely virtual, it will be harder to see the “system of work”. Coaches will not be able to overhear conversations (unless the team is using constantly voice connected platforms like Discord). Consequently it becomes even more important that coaches ask open questions like “why”, “what” and “how” over closed questions that result in a “yes” or “no” response.
5. Support leaders to not revert back to command and control. When under stress and anxiety we will revert to utilize patterns that have been deeply established in the neurons in our brains. Coaches will need to be super sensitive to this shift in leadership behaviours and watch out for it in emails and in voice communications. When detected, coaches need to be congniscent to the context – maybe the group required some immediate and rapid direction setting as the situation had become chaotic. If the context didn’t require micromanagement, then coaches should be empathetic when discussing this with leaders, appreciating the stress that they are under and supporting them by letting them know when they themselves have failed to re-enforce behaviours and fallen back on old habits.
6. Ensure teams and leaders have access to the tools needed to collaborate. Along with the tools previously mentioned, ensure that the team has access and training on to tools to manage their work. Look out for plug-ins that can make their work even easier. Help by cleaning up the quality of information inside of the tools so that leaders and teams have better insight into the work.
7. Strive for alignment across teams. Listen out for team members that are unclear on the purpose and acceptance criteria of their work and help them to connect with stakeholders to resolve ambiguity. Often team members have little visibility on what other teams are up to – coaches are in a unique position to detect cross-team misalignments and should help to resolve these. For teams that are utilizing SAFe to create alignment, coaches should continue to help out preparing and supporting PI Planning distributed. Xebia has done a number of great blogs on how to do remote PI Planning and remote core team ceremonies.

Before then, most people were either Scrum Masters or other crazy terms including process improvement (which always felt at odds with the manifesto) or continuous improvement manager to delivery leads.

Scrum Masters who had a few years of experience under their belts understood that a two day training on Scrum wasn’t enough to learn what worked and what didn’t and began to see patterns of poor practice and better practice emerge through their own test and learn experiments. Over time, they helped to kick off new teams who were trying Agile for the first time. They did this by working with new Scrum Masters and guiding them on the pathway to change.

It wasn’t a role that just came to be one day, it evolved over time to be what it is today. It was initially driven from both an opportunity to scale Agile ways of working quickly and a desire to share patterns of success (and failures to hopefully not repeat). This is why as a community, Agilists tend to have a higher centricity towards sharing information – we are focused on “uncovering better ways of delivering software” (or hopefully now better ways of achieving outcomes). The down side to this is that we also tend to be too focused on the “new shiny” thing rather than practically just focusing on the basics that we know will move us there.

This is what we have evolved to. But what do organisations need? What are their expectations for coaches?

I have had a lot of feedback in the past that I tend to be different from other coaches. I’ve even seen people refer to coaches as two different types, often not in good terms. One commentator referred to the schism as “fluffy agile sprinkles coaches” who are all oriented around mindset and “delivery coaches” who are all oriented around practices and techniques. To this commentator, the middle ground of coaches who are both and have the expertise to know when to use one approach over the other is a dark art that few know well.

I have canvased a number of different roles who sit at different levels of multiple organisations and asked them around what their expectations for their coach is. Rightly or wrongly, the following is a compilation of the feedback I received:

• I need someone who is pragmatic and flexible. I don’t need a purist answer, I need something that will work for my situation given where people are at right now in their learning journey.
• I need someone who can pivot quickly on recommendations or facilitate under great uncertainty.
• I need someone who will give me 1:1 time and tell me the hard truths, giving me a perspective that others wouldn’t ordinarily feel comfortable to do so. Note: this was said by people who actively wanted a coach rather than being given a coach, it is my experience that people who are given a coach don’t want this and you need to build trust and support before someone will give permission in this scenario.
• I need someone who focuses on the big picture, I don’t want everything to be about “Is my stand up going longer than fifteen minutes”, I want them to be looking at whether we are delivering faster, with better outcomes and sustainability.
• I need someone who will help me to widen my toolkit so I am better at solving problems more effectively, this could be either practical techniques or mindset/personal techniques
• I want someone who can help me understand the “why” behind certain Agile concepts rather than the what.
• I want someone to help me to have more effective relationships with those around me – especially in helping me to manage up when my manager is still thinking the old way
• I want someone who not only brings Agile knowledge but also has domain knowledge and experience in my domain
• I want someone who will understand my organisation and how things work in my area (the system I work in) before giving me advice
• I need a coach to know that it is a journey and that I have other things that I need to focus on which may mean my journey is slower than they would like
• I need my coach to recognise what I have done right. I’ve been working for many years and experienced many successes, all of me doesn’t need “fixing”
• I don’t want to be “coached” to get to answers all the time, sometimes I just need to know things that I don’t know which means sometimes I need advice or training
• I need options and examples of what has worked elsewhere and what are the pro’s and cons so that I can make an informed decision
• I need to be shown what good looks like which means sometimes I need a coach to be a “player” in the system
• I need someone who will help push along continuous improvements, which means owning them. I know some of my people need to do this, but there are so many issues I could really use more help.
• I don’t care whether it is Agile solutions or something else, I want my coach to help us with whatever solution that will resolve the problem

How does this line up to what you are expecting from your Agile Coach (or from what you are expecting of yourself as an Agile Coach)?

When you look for inspiration in the Agile Coaching community, the name Gordon Ramsay is probably not the first name to come to mind. He has been known to be belligerent, condescending and downright rude, but underneath this brute facade is a treasure trove of skills and talents that influence change.

In this presentation we will draw insights from his ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ escapades and draw parallels with how much his work aligns with that of an Agile Coach and the goal to successfully drive change and introduce a number of models and techniques that are indispensable in the coaching toolkit.

Here are some tweets and feedback from the talk:

When you look for inspiration in the Agile Coaching community, the name Gordon Ramsay is probably not the first name to come to mind. He has been known to be belligerent, condescending and downright rude, but underneath this brute facade is a treasure trove of skills and talents that influence change.

In this presentation we will draw insights from his ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ escapades and draw parallels with how much his work aligns with that of an Agile Coach and the goal to successfully drive change and introduce a number of models and techniques that are indispensable in the coaching toolkit.

Some pictures:

Here are some tweets and feedback from the talk:

First time to Agile meetup, exceeded expectation, will be back – Steve S

Awesome presentation. Thanks very much Craig! – Emi

This was my first Agile meetup. A great presentation and a well run event. – David Wilkinson

Excellent presentation. Some great reminders! – BronwynSC

This was my first time and it was a great presentation – Arthur

Always a pleasure hearing you speak Craig. I’ll be sharing your slides with the Elabor8 team! – Ryan McKergow

Thanks for a great presentation – Rob Lawes