Is the agile grass greener elsewhere?
If you’re an agile consultant or coach who has left one gig that was frustrating for another, you might already know what I’m talking about. The sad truth is that for an agile coach or scrum master, there is no “perfect” agile company. There will always be challenges, often really big challenges. Which, frankly, is why our profession exists. The role of any agilist is to help navigate a path toward greater agility, no matter where their people are on the learning journey.
And yet, you can’t help but wonder… is the agile grass a bit greener at a different company? Would there be less politics? Maybe there are teams that are truly passionate about being agile? Perhaps an executive team that is reimagining their company centered around products and customers?
In the end, as you probably already know, you have to pick your battles. If you’re the type of agilist that focuses on product, make sure you find a company interested in building a product organization. If you’re an enterprise agile coach, make sure there is top-down support for being agile at the company with more than just one executive champion. If you’re a customer experience specialist, find a company truly interested in connecting with and solving their customer problems directly. And if you’re a scrum master, look for a company that supports forming self-sufficient teams with support from middle management. Also, don’t assume just because a company has been on an agile transformation for so many years that they are automatically good at the thing you hope they’re good at.
So what should you do when you get frustrated? Every agilist inevitably runs into this situation. What follows are some small ideas to help cope. Look for ways to contribute to a different part of your same company; perhaps switch teams or lean more heavily into mentoring individuals. Sometimes we need to switch up our own style or approach; if you tend to give a lot of advice and it’s not going anywhere, try flipping to only asking questions and leaning into a clean language approach to helping others discover their own paths forward. Regardless of what other modifications to your coaching style you might choose, consider looking harder for small wins to celebrate. I know I get impatient too easily sometimes and am eager to see the company making progress sooner than it may be capable of, so I need to remind myself to dwell on the small wins and try to make them contagious with others.
Sometimes, when you find yourself pining for a change and your instinct is to change jobs, sometimes you might benefit from some inward reflection first. Sometimes the greener grass is not far away… or was inside us all along.
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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The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, scrum master tips, AI prompts to dig deeper, and tons of third party references describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com
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