The 5 Dysfunctions of an Agile Coach
Agile coaches help organizations to thrive in a complex and ever-changing reality. That’s easier said than done. Here’s how to get it wrong.
Inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a team, here are 5 agile coaching anti-patterns and how to overcome them.
Agile Heroism: Becoming a Bottleneck
As coaches, we’re there to enable others. The opposite of enabling others is making yourself “important”. That’s very tempting because like anyone else, coaches enjoy the appreciation of others. Are you running fancy retrospectives with impressive flip chart visualizations? You just taught your team that retros can only be run by a specialist. It’s always a bad sign when you hear something like “we can’t run the retro, because the agile coach is on holiday”.
Another classic example of becoming the organization’s bottleneck is when coaches and scrum masters start taking care of everything possible. Are you removing impediments for your teams like a good old scrum mom (or dad)? You might be hindering the team’s ability to self-organize.
Servant leadership is about helping others to grow. It’s not about doing other people’s work for them.
Try this:
1. Reflect on what’s motivating your daily actions. Are you trying to enable others, or are you seeking appreciation and self-importance?
2. Whenever you consider taking some extra responsibilities, ask yourself: Is this supporting other people’s ability to work independently?
Unclear Goals: “Go Make That Team Agile”
Buzzwords like “Agile Transformation” and “Self-Organizing Team” mean different things to different people. Just like anyone else, agile coaches need to work on things that have a clear Definition of Done. Instead of just doing retros and dailies with teams forever, we need to have clear goals on which we work in an iterative way. And regarding these goals: It’s important that the coach and the team are on the same page regarding what success looks like. As soon as a goal is achieved, the agile coach moves on to the next mission.
Try this: Before starting to work with a team, set goals together that have clear acceptance criteria.
Premature Interventions
As a coach, it can be tempting to immediately intervene whenever a process or behavior seems to be sub-optimal. Unfortunately, it’s not very effective. Like anyone else, coaches are biased and judge prematurely. We need a fair amount of healthy distance in order to maintain clarity while working with organizations and teams.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” — Viktor Frankl
Clearly discerning our observations from our interpretations is a good start. The next step is to base your interpretations on well-established models, so we don’t only work intuitively. I learned this approach from Stefan Willuda and I highly recommend reading his article about the scrum master’s diary.
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil” — Donald Knuth
Premature optimizations are a well-known pitfall when developing software. The same goes for agile coaching.
Try this: Reflect in writing or with a fellow coach, discern observations from judgments, and make model-based interpretations before choosing your interventions. Here are some models to start with:
The SCARF Model,
The Team Effectiveness Model (Google),
and, obviously, The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (This video is a must-watch).
Local Optimizations
As agile coaches, we need to consider the entire value-stream before choosing our focus. Otherwise, we might focus on things that don’t matter. It’s essential to focus on constraints because they dictate the performance of the entire organization. If we fail to work on the organization’s bottlenecks and weakest links, any performance improvements are as meaningful as a drop in the sea. To make things worse, local optimizations often lead to an overall sub-optimization by creating more work-in-progress. Here’s a must-watch video that explains this from a systems-thinking perspective.
Try this: Visualize the value stream and look for bottlenecks. Listen to various stakeholders, to get a better perspective of problems and their root cause.
Promoting Methods Instead of Attending to Needs
That magic framework, used by the Googles and Amazons might not be a good fit for your client’s case. There are no silver bullets out there. The starting point should always be the problems and needs of the organization. Based on that you look for a solution that addresses those needs.
“Invest most of your time listening to people’s problems and help them to explore the tool or framework that may better fit their specific need.” — Manoel Pimentel
Developers, designers, but also agile coaches are prone to confirmation bias. If we think a solution is marvelous, we’re in danger of wanting to implement it everywhere. This is also known as the Law of The Instrument.
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” — Abraham Maslow
Try this: Postpone deciding on a framework or tool to a later stage. Start by understanding the problems and pains of your coachees.
The Bottom Line
The road to failure is paved with good intentions. Effective agile coaches reflect on their work to avoid premature interventions. They consider the large context to avoid fruitless local optimizations. By working on clear goals, and then moving on, effective agile coaches enable others to deliver results, instead of becoming the bottleneck. Last but not least, they only offer solutions, frameworks, and tools in the service of meeting needs.
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