Typical withdrawal symptoms of Agile coaches
From the Agility and Project Leadership Blog
by Don Kim
It seems some Agile coaches are getting withdrawal symptoms from having to manage self-organizing teams who, how shall we say… don’t exactly self-organize. So what’s the solution? According to this article on InfoQ, just what the good doctor ordered: Some prescription processes! Actually I meant prescriptive, but prescription sounded better and both words pretty much have the same connotation which is if something is not going right, it may be best to prescribe a formal directing process to get your team on track.
Though the Agile camp has a tendency to mock the “command and control” mentality of the traditional crowd, the realities are that not all teams can be handled in such a “hands-off” way. As quote from Mike Carey:
Pure Agilists have always pushed for a more "hands-off" approach. It's interesting to me how married some of agilists become to a certain methodology - conversations with these people usually boil down to "you should let people do whatever they want, but if you're a good coach and they really get the principles then they're most likely going to go with my favorite methodology.(…) The problem is, they've got a point about the coaching. You can't leave teams all to themselves; you have to support them somehow. I'm not saying all Agile teams need a dedicated Agile Coach, but they need the resources necessary to ensure the direction in which they adapt is in accordance with Agile principles and the environment that will support them when (not if) they fail.
Or this one from Robert Galen:
I honestly get the importance of self-directed teams within agility. I want teams to sort out things on their own. But I also think that we should occasionally provide some direction as coaches instead of always deferring to “it depends”—especially if we’re dealing with brand new teams that don’t have a whole lot of experience
My feeling is that the pendulum swung too far on the side of an exuberant call to action to facilitate the self-organization of the teams early in the evangelization of Agile, which I’m pretty sure many Agile project managers, coaches, ScrumMasters, or whatever, took to mean I need to be “hands-off”. As any good project manager would know regardless of your religious affiliation to a particular method whether Agile or not, is the fact that one could easily cross the line and abuse this sentiment by just being plain lazy with directing and coaching your teams.
It would become a vicious circular exercise in that if you were to ask such a person why is the team so disorganized, such a person would answer because they are managed “hands-off”. This would beg the question to ask them, “why are you so ‘hands-off’ in the way you manage them?” The reply from the person would be “because I’m an Agile coach and Agile coaches are ‘hands-off’”. Such replies would make any manager cringe.
To avoid these withdrawal symptoms, you sometimes need to prescribe some good old fashion style of leading and directing your teams towards the goal of completing the project and delivering value to your customers. The best ones know how to push and pull back to find the perfect balance of directing and being hands-off. We all could use a little good medicine!
Posted on: September 11, 2014 03:20 PM |
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 | quickscrum |
Agile Coaching is a powerful medicine for an organization and can cause serious side effects. The risks of applying it should be clearly understood.
That sentence should probably said at the beginning of every day an Agile Coach performs his work - basically written on the package as a warning.
THE CLIENT DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT HE IS GETTING HIMSELF INTO
Many organizations are used to employ temporary workers as specialists. They are sourced on the market by using the services of staffing agencies that have a huge database full of well educated and experienced people. That works usually quite good when looking for an additional programmer on a C# project or for finding a capable SQL database administrator.
At some point the temporary worker will show up and perform his duties as being asked to do. It is unlikely that he will get involved into anything outside his immediate tasks and he probably has learned a long time ago how to stay out of trouble: do your job and keep your head down.
COACHING INCLUDES CHALLENGING THE CLIENT
A coach - it doesn't matter which kind of coach it is - wants to help the client be successful in some way. When he helps the client to be successful the coach is successful.
Going along with the way things are will most likely not help the client much. Something is about to be challenged the moment the coach shows up. It is inevitable that some change will happen. Were that not the case, nobody would call in a coach. Help cannot be provided by not touching anything at all.
So the coach will look around, turn over the proverbial stones, ask questions and highlight facts that are probably hiding in plain sight. People may have been talking in the hallway for some time already. That activity might be seen by some as sneaking around, as putting his nose into someone else's business. Others may even perceive that activity as a threat.
THE ORGANIZATION HAS NO EXPERIENCE WITH BEING COACHED
All these activities may not be at all what a specialist is supposed to do. They may be seen as overstepping boundaries. It may be seen as causing turmoil in the organization. Management may grow afraid and accuse the specialist, who to them has gone rogue, of disrupting the work of their people.
Some of that actually points to a learning disability. See chapter 2 of Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline for common signs of organizational learning disabilities.
IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE WHO HIRED THE COACH
From my point of view a coach hired by a lower ranking manager is more likely to be seen as a specialist hired for a certain task than one who got hired by senior management. The lower ranking manager is more likely to have not understood what he is getting into. He may want to improve something in his own area of responsibility but doesn't yet know that the root cause for his problem is beyond that. Now the coach figures this out and starts to nudge. Suddenly some fragile working agreements fall apart.
If the coach has been hired by senior management the issues will be discussed on that level. There are more changes to explain or it was kind of expected. Now it depends on the wisdom and selfconfidence of everybody whether the coach gets fired in order to "protect" the organization or the issues discovered get addressed to help the organization mature.
Bruce Harpham
Editor & Author| ProjectManagementHacks.com
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Self-organizing is an interesting concept. There is a danger if nobody steps up to lead and provide momentum and direction.
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