Are You Failing as an Agile Coach?
Sometimes the things we do as an agile coach are often not enough to “impact change”. We do our jobs well, but don’t see any results. Not all the time, but many coaches I know have had this happen to them at some point and they feel like a big failure. I, too, have worked with teams that made me feel worthless, like I couldn’t do anything to help them.
You are not alone. But why do we feel like a failure?
If you’re like me, you have a very interesting mix of quirks and personality traits that some might think are a little weird. You’re optimistic. And you’re a big goofball; unabashedly transparent, leading with vulnerability to help build trust. You communicate with the enthusiasm of an extrovert but you’re drained at the end of the day and need to recharge. You probably even have a little imposter syndrome, doubting your skills and abilities and yet, fearlessly, you plow forward at the same time on really impactful work that can feel impossible at times.
And you have very audacious goals and expectations for yourself. This is one of our biggest weaknesses. Because there will inevitably come a time where you’ve done your job well, but you could not move the needle. The team is resistant; the manager still doesn’t get it; the team of teams reverts to old ways; or the people you coach don’t seem to be able to break old habits. We create this vision of success for ourselves defined by the people and teams working in new ways, building new habits, and applying new skills.
You do all of the right things and still feel like a failure. Why?
It’s perhaps obvious to say, but we cannot control other people. In fact, as a coach you’re probably not even giving people direct instructions. Our coaching style often includes very indirect, reflective techniques to both educate and guide a person or team in the right direction. We don’t solution for them. We don’t dictate. It’s very subtle. And yet, when it works well, coaching is like magic. Teams start to understand things in new ways. And through the practice of doing the new things on their own with someone to guide them, they learn it better.
But when our coaching targets don’t cooperate, it all falls apart. It can happen for many reasons: company culture, resistant individuals on a team, leadership providing instructions or commands counter to our teachings, overconfident teams taking shortcuts before they are ready, or any number of other corporate obstacles.
Coaching is different than a lot of other work. For most other people, they do stuff and can see or count or measure their results pretty clearly. Whether it’s the number of features delivered, campaigns created, customers contacted, forms completed, bugs fixed, or widgets produced. So, with coaching, we tend to gravitate toward these more obvious metrics as well, either because we’re used to doing that in prior jobs or because we want to align our success with the teams’ success and see these specific measurements improve as a result of our influence.
And yet, deep down, you know that isn’t always true. You can be a good teacher, but if the student isn’t listening they won’t learn the lesson. You can give good advice, but nothing guarantees it will be followed. You can even be a good parent, but some kids take a lot longer to learn life lessons. And the same is true of the people we coach. You can ask the right questions, present the right information, set expectations and guide them properly but it is not your fault if they don’t try or don’t follow through or apply what you’ve taught them. I know this sounds obvious, but some of us really need to hear this and dwell on it a bit.
So how do you escape or avoid this feeling of failure? I’m sure you already know. With your skills and coaching techniques, you know exactly what you would tell someone else in the same situation. It’s just a lot harder to give yourself advice when it comes to challenges tied to feelings and emotions, isn’t it? It can be helpful to do an exercise of reflection and objectification here. Imagine there is a clone of yourself and you are watching what that person go through the same challenges that you’ve experienced failing as an agile coach. What would you tell them? What advice or suggestions would you say to yourself?
We need to be OK showing up and doing our jobs of observation, articulation, education, facilitation, and communication. Our job is to notice things and prioritize what a person or team needs most and then help them discover that, present the information they need to hear, or maybe teach them an exercise to learn how to do the thing on their own.
As a coach, I think I’ve been lost in this feeling of failure before because I didn’t use enough science in my approach. I often just do my job intuitively, like it’s an impromptu conversation. And that’s part of my style and why I think I can connect with teams well. However, what I skip over is a very important part of what we should probably all do. Being more deliberate about what lessons and experiments you’ve decided to plan and execute for your team is crucial. Write it down. This week, I’m teaching the team about relative estimating so that they can learn a new habit to help them make progress on achieving sprint goals and slicing work into smaller, iterative pieces of work. When you write it down, you can parse out what part is your responsibility and what part is theirs. You know as a coach you will be successful if you not only teach the facts about the skill or technique but also the why behind it and the results they should expect to see and why those results are important to their overall purpose as a team. Recognizing this may help you more easily judge your own success.
I know as a coach myself, it’s very difficult to separate out the two different definitions of success. I have a lot of empathy for the teams and individuals I work with. I often feel like I become part of their team and the experience of seeing the people grow and learn and achieve new things is also tied to my pride and ego, so I get it. And frankly, when things are going well, I think it’s OK to be proud of what they’ve accomplished and to feel that sense of pride for having played a part in their success. But when you have a team that is not clicking or is struggling in some way, maybe spend some time really being diligent about what it is that you are doing. Write down your observations and experiments. And be happy knowing you are doing your job even if the team is failing to respond to your coaching the way you would like.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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