No evangelising required! Moving from Agile Coach to Coach
As the newest member of the Redgate Coaches team I decided I wanted to share something of what I have learned about coaching at Redgate, whilst my ‘outsider perspective’ is still fresh.
We are a team of three permanent in-house coaches whose objective is to ‘increase the impact and efficacy of Engineering’
We do this through a combination of professional coaching, team coaching, consulting or mentoring and occasionally training, with the emphasis very much on one-to-one, professional, coaching. Whilst all three of us do come from a quality coach or agile coach background and will bring that experience to some of our consulting or training engagements, we are not primarily here as agile/quality/team coaches, instead our job title is simply ‘Coach’. Our primary purpose is more aligned with that of professional coaching — to enable individuals’ growth and development — than the purpose of a quality or agile coach, which has more of a specific agenda, and is achieved largely through teaching and mentoring.
This is the first time I have heard of an organisation taking this approach, of investing in a team of coaches, and it makes perfect sense in hindsight, so I’m surprised that I’ve never come across it before. In my experience, it has been seen as a rare privilege to have a single in-house agile coach, let alone a team of 3 professional coaches for the 100 or so people who work across our 15 engineering teams. In my two previous roles I was the sole agile coach to respectively 7 and 20+ teams. An organisation that I interviewed with before joining Redgate is currently building a coaching team of 6 agile coaches to cover literally hundreds of teams. Whilst that represents a massive opportunity, Redgate excites me more because it feels like a reasonable ratio; it means that our impact can be deeper and more significant. Redgate is often at the forefront of adopting new ways of working. Does this signal a new shift? Could this be the next big thing?
I’m also excited about working alongside other coaches, after all that time on my own, for the learning opportunities. Every coach needs a coach too, right? Being the only coach can get quite lonely; I addressed this in the past by pairing up with a peer outside of the organisation, someone to bounce ideas off and share gnarly problems with. Now I get to talk coach talk every day!
I am not suggesting that all organisations should do the same, but it makes sense here because we really are a post-agile organisation; there is no agile edict or framework to follow, teams choose which practices work for them, and they are inevitably agile practices because, well, they have always worked here. No evangelising is required. The need for agile coaching decreased a while ago — as expertise in the teams and leadership increased agile practices became tacit (although some of our newer recruits will need some agile 101 training to get up to speed). As the need for agile coaching decreased, correspondingly the need for professional coaching has increased, to help people and teams take the next steps, to help them move from ‘good’ to ‘great’.
The challenges I anticipate are the flip side of the same things that excite me, moving from heading up the agile function, with its broad range of responsibilities, and fast pace, to a much narrower, attentive focus leads me to wonder; will I get bored, or will I find the necessary skills to ‘go deep’?
There is also the conundrum of how to demonstrate that we are adding value. Whilst much has already been achieved by the coaching team in terms of setting and measuring progress against clear objectives, process, transparency, and raising awareness, if the business asks us to quantify the return on their investment it may be difficult to do so — usually the success of a coaching session lies in the hands of the coachee, not the coach. Coaching outcomes can also take time to percolate and take effect, there may be a long tail. How exactly, then, are we supposed to measure our ‘impact and efficacy of Engineering’? No matter, within a week of discussing this as a team we have already collaborated on the first steps to do what we can do to address it, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative feedback, and the first survey results are coming in as I write.
Another challenge that I think we may be discussing is how to help those who are unsure about the coaching approach of ‘helping others to find answers in themselves’. Some people just don’t ‘get it’; they don’t see the value in coaching, instead they believe that teams should be able to solve all their own problems and that they want to be told the answers when they can’t. I suspect that, rather than trying to convert them, our best bet will be to share our successes and continue to improve understanding and awareness of what can be achieved through coaching. Best not throw that evangelising hat away quite yet then!
In conclusion, I’m excited about this shift in coaching, aware that some may see it as a luxury, and hopeful that we will be able to prove that it is, in fact, an essential service to enable the ongoing growth of mature teams.
We’d love to hear from coaches in other organisations who are doing the same. If you are part of, or aware of, a similar team, please do let us know in the comments below.
