Pair-Coaching: A Non-Definitive Guide (Part 2)

Photo by Fabrizio Conti on Unsplash

In part 1 of this guide I talked about what pair-coaching is, about its potential, and the risks. In this part I will cover ways of going about pair coaching, the “secret sauce”, and ways to sell it to bosses and clients.

How do I do Pair-Coaching?

Have you gotten through part 1 with some heavy nodding and “aha moments”? Great! Now, when would you actually apply it? And with whom?

What Kind of Work can Pair-Coaching be Applied To?

The short answer is: pretty much all of it. I recently had a conversation with another coach about something as mundane as documenting a retrospective. Turns out we had quite different approaches. There are learnings to be found in even the most dull corners! You will of course need to do the math for your particular situation to see if it makes sense for you. I am sure it will for a lot of cases (probably not for documenting meetings though).

To make sure you don’t miss important aspects and consider all the possible areas of application, it can make sense to look at compilations of the jobs we often do.

I am personally a big fan of the Agile Coaching Institute’s Competency Framework to get a view of the lay of the land. Victor Bonacci used Bernd Schiffer’s “42 Tasks of a Scrum Master’s Job” to build a game around his patterns (see below). There is also a detailed paper by Barry Overeem on the 8 Stances of a Scrum Master.

There are perhaps aspects that aren’t covered by those lists. Either way, there are plenty of areas for application.

With whom can I Pair?

The obvious answer is another coach, be it an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, or a similar role.

If you don’t have such a partner on hand, don’t despair. There might be very suitable pairing partners in your proximity for any given task. For instance, I have paired with devs for technical workshops, and with team leads for team kickoffs. For a Scrum Master, the Product Owner is a natural partner for a lot of the work in and around a Scrum team. While not a coach per se, I have found that Product Owners often expand one’s perception in many ways.

There are also other dimensions at play when considering a pairing partner. You can pair with internal / external coaches, or a mix 3. And you can pair according to experience: someone more, someone less, or someone equally experienced7.

Next to these general considerations, there are a handful of common constellations for pair-coaching, which we will look into now.

Patterns in Pair-Coaching

Victor Bonacci collaborated with Yves Hanoulle to identify “common patterns so that we can refer to a common language when discussing how to be more effective at pair-coaching.” [2] [3]

I will describe four of them here (see the references for Victor Bonacci’s articles for more patterns):

• Trainer / Observer
• Driver / Navigator
• Contrarian (Progressive / Prescriptive)
• Co-learners

Trainer / Observer

This pattern is all about trainings, and there are many ways a second coach can add benefit. Take the example of a 40-person workshop I recently facilitated: I wasn’t sure if I would be able to take on all of the possible dynamics in the room. A colleague was able to join me and even though he didn’t need to jump in, it was good to know that he could have. After the workshop we sat down to talk about his observations and feedback.

Bonacci also lists sharing the facilitation, being called upon for expertise and experience, and scanning the audience for those needing attention as possible tasks for a second coach during a training. [3]

Driver / Navigator

“Similar to how developers may engage in pair-programming, two (or more) coaches can make light work of otherwise daunting tasks, saving time, catching errors and preventing rework. […] To extend the navigator role a bit, an internal coach may pair with an external coach to provide a much needed map of the terrain.” Victor Bonacci [2]

The coaches at Agile42 point out that coaching often involves getting into “the zone with a client” [10]. Having a second coach as a navigator will prevent the “driving” coach to lose sight of the overall goal and getting too close to the thought world of the client.

Contrarian

This pattern is about creating a situation where you want two different points or aspects to co-exist. This is not about misalignment, but rather about using e.g. different stances to address various needs in a given situation.

Victor Bonacci argues that an organizational transformation can greatly benefit from two different and yet simultaneous approaches. While one coach introduces agile ideas in a clear and straightforward way, another coach can focus on people’s reactions and help them deal with the fears that can come with the anticipation of great changes: “If there’s a bitter pill, there should be empathy”.

Another way to use this pattern is to model constructive dialogue between people with opposing views. [2]

While it isn’t part of the pattern described by Victor Bonacci, I’d like to add that coaches are of course different, and they might get along with some better than others — just like the people in the client organization. Having two different “characters” as coaches will also increase the probability that you reach all (most) people on a personal level.

The contrarian pattern is also known as “Yin / Yang” and formerly as “Good Cop / Bad Cop”.

Co-learners

“When the subject matter is new to both participants, or the terrain is dangerous, each coach helps the other understand in very short feedback loops. […] high-performing teams offer encouragement to each other as they make their way through uncharted and challenging territory.” Victor Bonacci [2]

Victor also points to the added benefit of having accountability. Co-learners have a shared goal, and having that shared accountability can give additional motivation.

I remember preparing my first Event Storming session with a developer. Neither of us had experience with the format, but we were curious and were eager to make it work. When applying something new, we do it very consciously, which occupies a lot of our mental processing power. Having two brains at work increases the chance of you making sense of all the new information and making use of it. And it’s fun!

You can also collectively learn by sharing your current challenges and seeking input from your peers. While you can do this with more or less no structure, certain formats can help you do this efficiently and effectively. I can e.g. recommend troika consulting from the Liberating Structures toolbox.

In this section, I outlined where and how pair-coaching can generally take place. If you want some real life examples of coaches pairing up, you can e.g. read stories from idealo [9] , astarteny [1] and Robert Galen [6].

For instance, Galen describes an example of how him and a colleague used pairing in a shared engagement. They divided some of the work, while staying in touch throughout the day to adapt their approach — depending on their combined observations.

“As you can see, our coaching stance and our focus (the lens) changed in real-time throughout the day. “ [6]

So far I talked about how pairing can work. Let’s look at how you can greatly increase your chances of reaping the benefits.

Marriage Counselling (or: How to Make it Work Between Pairs?)

The headline is of course tongue-in cheek. Still, the work relationship between a pair of coaches is something that needs attention, time to grow, and can at times benefit from the help of a third party.

Kerri Sutey [8] lists e.g. 6 ingredients in the „secret sauce“ for joyful pair-coaching:

1. Desire to pair
2. Willingness to learn
3. No ego
4. Get intimate
5. Working agreements
6. Awareness / Empathy

I will get into detail on some of those and additional factors below.

Do I Really Want to Work as a Pair?

There are heaps of benefits that come with pair-coaching. But it will, even in the best case, take some effort to make it work. And there are quite a few things required from both coaches to make it work, as we will explore below. When in doubt: run a few little experiments and see how you feel about it.

In the end, it has to be a good fit. If your pair doesn’t work despite a lot of motivation, don’t despair: maybe a change of environment or ultimately different coaching partners will do the trick.

Make Things Explicit

In one setting, two colleagues and I took several hours writing working agreements, after we had already spent time clarifying our individual and collective goals. We then used them for months to come. Going by the limited time the three of us spend on discussions that could be attributed to misalignment, I would claim that this was time well spent.

I talked about different pairing patterns above. In my experience, it is worth investing that one additional moment of making your particular role(s) explicit to each other. This could be e.g. deciding who will drive (what) when facilitating. Say you will facilitate a meeting as a pair. One way to do this is to distribute the tasks. You could also switch, e.g. having one driving the presentation and the other taking on the Q&A session. Making these things explicit in the beginning will pay off as it greatly reduces the risk of you “bumping into each other”, which can harm your cause. Once you “gel” as a pair, you might not be that explicit about your roles anymore. But until you get there, I strongly recommend talking about these things upfront.

Put in the Effort to Make it Work

We, as coaches, are people too. As such, we are also prone to everything that can happen when humans interact and work together. Just as we advise teams to regularly retrospect, a coaching pair can hugely benefit from doing this as well.

There are many ways to do this. You can use breaks to give each other feedback after workshops. You can ask a third coach to act as a supervisor, guiding you through a reflection of your work. And, of course, you can use retrospectives at regular intervals to check how you are doing.

Tricky (but Probably Mandatory) Stuff

Confidence

To work in a pair, you need to be confident enough to perform in front of a peer. “There is an implicit acceptance of exposing one’s style, behaviour, technique and experience to a peer’s feedback […] There is an inherent sense of vulnerability in pairing” [10].

At the same time, having too much (i.e. false) confidence isn’t helpful either. Working in a pair leaves little room for ego. If you need a lot of individual recognition, then pairing will be hard for you (and your partner). Pair-coaching is not a one-man-show.

Getting very well-grounded feedback is something that individual coaches don’t often get. If you have a peer around, this is likely to change. You need to be ready for that, too. And you need to have confidence in yourself that you can act on that feedback [10].

Control

Andrea Tomasini and Geoff Watts also point out that you need to be ok with letting go of some of the already little control you have as a coach:

“It requires taking some risk, and accepting that the journey will end up in places which might not be the one that we have envisioned.

It requires giving up control over how your part of the coaching conversation will play out. Of course a coach is never in control of the conversation but in a pair-coaching environment they aren’t even in control of their own side of things.” [10]

Now you are convinced that pair-coaching is awesome, know when and how to apply it, and how to increase the chances for success. What’s keeping you from doing it? Oh, right, you still need someone to pay the both of you…

Selling Pair-Coaching to a Client

“From a client’s perspective, it isn’t easy to accept paying double for the “same” service. Why should I pay for two coaches to do the job of one?” Andrea Tomasini and Geoff Watts [10]

“It reminded me of the resistance I heard in the early days of pair-programming. Many couldn’t get over the simple economics and look to the intangible (but real) benefits of pairing, which included quality benefits, risk mitigation benefits, and execution benefits. The reality is that even the best of coaches have blind spots. They can often miss important real-time aspects during their coaching. Having two sets of eyes working together can cover those blind spots. Making each of the coaches that much more effective.” Robert Galen [6]

Galen, Tomasini and Watts highlight that — similar to pair programming — pair-coaching is something relatively new, a service that hasn’t been offered this way before, and therefore needs additional explanations when selling it. Galen ponders whether clients believe that coaches aren’t good enough if they insist on working as a pair.He explains that in his experience though, the most resistance stems from the costs of employing a pair. For external coaches, this will also double the travel costs.

Whelan’s approach [11] is to explain the above mentioned benefits to a client, and state that this will be the offered modus operandi. If the client agrees to the terms, they will work together — if not, then not. Whelan describes it as a process of self-selection. He suggests that a client who will see the benefits of pair-coaching will be more successful in the transition.

In a way, it is understandable that clients don’t buy in. There is a job that has been done by an individual before. And now the client is asked to pay two people for that job and at most she has gotten is a good pitch of the potential benefits.

So what if your client doesn’t see the benefits, but you can’t pick another engagement, e.g. because you are a full-time employee? Bonacci suggests to work with what you have: as described above, you can use the patterns above with non-coaching roles as well. Once you show e.g. how well a Scrum Master and Product Owner work as a pair, you can “bring about better (localized) awareness of the value of pair-coaching.” [3]

Final Remarks

So this is everything I have learned and know about pair-coaching until this day (that I was able to remember and jot down on a few long train rides).

I think I’ve covered a lot of ground. Still, there is probably a lot more knowledge out there — please do comment or get in touch if you are in possession of it.

Either way, I hope that this will serve you when trying, applying, and selling pair-coaching from here on out. And I would love to hear about your experiences with it!

Last not least, a shout out to all the people that have contributed to this topic and that I have referenced here. Also a big thanks to those folks that have graciously agreed to look at drafts of this guide and provided useful insights. Because, you know, a second pair of eyes can’t hurt ;)

So long,

Gerrit

Sources (Part 1&2)

[1] astarteny (2016). One From the Toolbox: Pair Coaching. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@astarteny/one-from-the-toolbox-pair-coaching-530a55651125

[2] Victor Bonacci (2015). Patterns in Pair-Coaching. Retrieved from http://agilecoffee.com/patterns-in-pair-coaching/

[3] Victor Bonacci (date unknown). Pair-Coaching. Retrieved from http://agilecoffee.com/paircoaching/

[4] Victor Bonacci (2015). The Pair-Coaching Domino Game. Retrieved from http://agilecoffee.com/pair-coaching-domino-game/

[5] Cunningham & Cunningham Inc. Wiki (last edit May 21, 2007). Pair Coaching. Retrieved from http://wiki.c2.com/?PairCoaching

[6] Robert Galen (2017). Pair-Coaching. Retrived from http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2017/5/7/pair-coaching

[7] Grokshare Podcast (2015). Episode #1: Agile Pair Coaching with Victor Bonacci & Dr. Dave https://grokshare.com/agile-pair-coaching-with-victor-bonacci-dr-dave/

[8] Kerri Sutey (2018). The Joy and Reach of Pair Coaching [conference talk]. https://agile2018.sched.com/event/EU8t/the-joy-and-reach-of-pair-coaching-kerri-sutey-marcelo-camozzato

[9] Gerrit Lutter (2018). How we use Pair Coaching at idealo. Retrieved from https://medium.com/idealo-tech-blog/how-we-use-pair-coaching-at-idealo-9438e0859c6f

[10] Andrea Tomasini and Geoff Watts (2016). The Value of Pair-Coaching… What’s in It for You? Retrieved from https://www.agile42.com/en/blog/2016/03/18/pair-coaching/

[11] Declan Whelan (2012). Declan Whelan on Agile Coaching, Lean Startups and the Agile Alliance. Retrieved from https://www.infoq.com/interviews/whelan-agile-coaching-lean-startup