Coach as Mirror - Keeping Your Own Opinion and Judgement Out

A foundational attribute of an Agile Coach is the ability to be neutral. Whether you are observing, thinking about what’s happening, or talking to another person, make sure you are thinking in terms of the coachee’s own values, goals, and vision. Make sure you are not filtering what you see, what you think, and what you say through your own preferences, biases, desires, and values.

Neutrality includes using descriptive language instead of judgmental language, using non-judgmental body language and tone, putting all decision making in the hands of those you are coaching, and holding back your own opinion unless it is specifically requested or given after an appropriate request for permission. It means that even when you have a strong opinion on a topic, you find a way to let it go rather than communicating through your tone and body language that you think things should be going in a different direction. Genuine neutrality is a tall order and takes time to master.

Think of it as a mirror. The coach is able to observe what is happening and then play back their observations in a way that the receivers see what the coach has observed instead of “seeing the coach.” Coachees can “see the coach” when they see the coach’s observations as tinged with the coach’s biases and not reflecting reality.

This is not a call to be an emotionless monotone non-human machine. Embodying neutrality while remaining human and personable makes it an even more difficult skill to master. Being aware of the need for neutrality and the value of neutrality is the first step towards mastering neutrality.

Here are some guidelines for being neutral that you can apply when observing, thinking, or talking with others. These examples assume that the information to support the neutral statements is available in order to make the neutral statements:

• Specific, measurable
• Instead of “the customer intent is more clear” try “the who and why in these stories is very clear”
• Instead of “the standup was way too long” try “the standup ran to an hour instead of the expected 15 minutes”
• Neutral, non-judgemental
• Instead of “I didn’t like their style” try “they spoke too fast for me and seemed upset”
• Instead of “I liked their approach” try “their specific examples helped me”
• Instead of thinking “that person hogged the floor” try “the group ran out of time”
• Avoid words and phrases such as “good,” “bad,” “wrong,” “off the mark”
• Avoid speculating on intentions
• Instead of “I know she doesn’t want to be here” try “I notice she showed up late”

Next: Multi-Spectrum Awareness - Presence and Observation

The Case of the Self-Conscious Scrum Master

As an Agile Coach your success depends on helping others succeed. Sharing your Agile expertise will help them achieve their goals, but first you will need to leverage your interpersonal skills in order to uncover and understand their goals and motivations.

The better your interpersonal skills, the more successful you will be as an Agile Coach. We all have some level of skill with the various interpersonal skills needed as an Agile Coach. A good starting place for further mastery is to review these skills and employ them intentionally as you interact with others.

Emotional Intelligence

One of the most important set of interpersonal skills are the four skills of Emotional Intelligence. Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to successfully navigate the muddy waters of human emotions. That includes self-awareness of your own emotional state, social awareness of the emotional state of others, self-management of your own emotional state, and creating and maintaining good relationships.

An interesting experience I had when working with a manager illustrates the four parts of emotional intelligence. This particular manager was also the Scrum Master for the team that he managed. He invited me to his standup, but was very self-conscious about it. He said “I know it isn’t the best idea to have a Scrum Master that is also a manager, but I think it is working out ok.” I acknowledged what he said, but didn’t add my opinion.

Social Awareness
This is awareness of what is going on with others. The surface level of social awareness is fairly straightforward, though it requires intention. By simply paying attention to other people’s words, tone, and body language, one can get a decent sense of how they are feeling and how they are reacting to whatever is happening.

The manager ran his standup like a staff meeting. He would call on each person, comment on what they said, and then offer “suggestions” that were clearly more than suggestions. The level of engagement from the team was close to non-existent. More than once people had facial expressions and body language that expressed feelings of disappointment and disapproval.

After the meeting, in private, the manager turned to me and said “that was horrible, wasn’t it?” I told him that from a purely process perspective, the standup meeting had served most of its purpose and asked him what made him say what he said. He shared his observations of the team member reactions during the meeting, which matched my own observations.

Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a combination of paying attention to what is going on in our heads and considering how our emotional state and behavior play a part in the emotional state and behavior of others.

I asked the manager about why he might have been running the standup as he was and his understanding of what a good standup looks like. He demonstrated a remarkable amount of self-awareness about how his behavior had impacted the team and had a good understanding of self-organization. He just hadn’t had an opportunity to see the difference between what he hoped for and what was actually happening.

Self-Management
Self-management is taking advantage of being in the moment by changing your own behavior based on your social awareness and your self-awareness. When you see somebody reacting in an unexpected way, your self-awareness kicks in and you consider how your behavior may have had a part in that reaction and then take steps to change your behavior.

The next day, the manager explained to his team that he wanted them to run the standup on their own and his only requirement was that they finish in 15 minutes and leave follow-up for after that initial 15 minutes. It took them a few tries to take advantage of their new found freedom, but soon they were sharing with each other and suggesting follow-up actions. I didn’t see any eye-rolls in that meeting and their engagement was through the roof compared to the previous standup. I could see the manager catching himself a few times, but his desire to “have a real Scrum team” won out and he only interjected when the team was getting off track.

Relationship Management
Relationship management is what gives emotional intelligence its full potential. Practicing self-awareness, social awareness, and self-management can help to create and maintain good relationships, and good relationships reinforce self-awareness, social awareness, and self-management. To put it simply, the higher your EQ, the better your relationships will be and the better your relationships are, the more people will share with you about their internal emotional state and the more people will help you when your EQ is failing you in the moment.

In the case of the Scrum Master manager, the EQ that he demonstrated in the second standup had an immediate effect on his relationships with his team. I could tell from earlier 1-1 conversations with team members that they already appreciated him as a manager. In listening to their conversations with him after the second standup it was clear that his actions of involving an Agile Coach and making adjustments that they appreciated were just the latest reasons for appreciating him.

The Key to Emotional Intelligence
I’m not saying that just by being present I usually get the kind of result that occurred with the manager. It was his personal interest in doing the right thing that made him hyper self-conscious. It is that heightened awareness that I want to highlight. By consciously paying attention to others he was able to realize that something needed to change.

The key to emotional intelligence is to be in the same frame of mind as the manager. Practice reminding yourself during any interaction with others to ask the following questions until it becomes second nature:

• How am I feeling and behaving?
• How are others feeling and behaving?
• How are my feelings and behavior affecting others?
• How are other people's feelings and behavior affecting me?
• Based on the above, should I do something differently in order to create better outcomes?
• Am I acting in a way that is good for all of the relationships involved?

Next: Coach As Mirror - Neutrality

An Example Agile Coaching Conversation

Initiating a Coaching Interaction

Imagine that a manager comes to you and asks:

Manager: “could you teach my team how to use planning poker?”

It may be that there is a perfectly good reason for the team to learn and use planning poker. On the other hand, by following the coaching process, you may learn that the real issue is that the manager thinks the estimates that the team is coming up with are too large. In that case, teaching the team planning poker (when they may already know it) is likely to aggravate the team and leave the original issue unresolved.

Start with Relationship Management

One factor that contributes to the quality of interaction is the rapport you build with those you are coaching. In any interaction, make a conscious effort to contribute to that relationship. It can be as simple as doing a quick check-in and/or engaging in small-talk. When somebody approaches you with a coaching request, it can be tempting to dive right in. Not only does pausing to build rapport contribute to the relationship, it also gives both of you a chance to pause, become present, and focus on the coaching conversation. You may even discover some useful context for the problem at hand. Let’s see how the conversation that started with a request to teach a team planning poker might play out:

Coach: “I’ll have to check my schedule. How have things been going?”

Manager: “Things are pretty good in general, but this team has really been a problem. They are consistently behind and I’m starting to lose sleep over it. Anyway, I need to go, can you take it from here?”

Issue Identification

In the example, the coachee is trying to end the conversation before you have had a chance to do any coaching at all. Your goal is to get a coaching conversation started. A good tool here is to use a coaching question.

Coach: “I’d be happy to teach them planning poker, but I feel like I’m missing some context. Can we back up a moment? What precipitated this?

The question “what precipitated this” has started a coaching conversation. While the coachee has presented you with what may actually be the problem and tried to delegate to you what may be the solution, it is better to go through a process of identifying the issue, even if you end up in the same place you started.

From the conversation so far, you have surfaced that the team is “consistently behind,” that the manager is “starting to lose sleep over it” and that he would like you to teach the team planning poker. Planning poker may or may not be connected to his statement that the team is consistently behind, but losing sleep indicates that it is very important to the manager that something changes to make things better.

Manager: “well, I don’t think they are doing planning poker right because their estimates always seem to come out too high and then they don’t get the work done in time.”
From this answer, it seems that the manager may not understand the purpose of planning poker or may not understand the use of story points (or both). Let’s try another coaching question.

Coach: “I hear you saying that this team doesn’t get their work done in time. How would you summarize the high level problem here?”

Manager: “actually, there’s a lot on my mind. The real problem here is that as a company we seem to have lost the ability to make our customers happy. I guess I was just thinking that the deadline issue was low-hanging fruit.”

Aha! Now we are getting somewhere.

Goal Setting

Once the coachee has identified the issue that they would like to work on, the next step is to turn the issue into a goal. In some cases, the difference may only be semantics, but reframing an issue into a goal can shift the perspective from dealing with an energy sapping problem to investing in achieving an exciting goal.

Coach: “How could you reframe the issue ‘we’ve lost the ability to make our customers happy’ into a goal?”

Manager: [after thinking for a moment] “I think the Product Manager is also frustrated, but I don’t think they realize how good this team has been at partnering with product to better understand customer needs and come up with novel features that delight customers. They are just focused on getting what they want by a certain date. I think a good goal would be to help the Product Manager better understand what this team can do.”

We’ve come a long way from the manager’s initial request. And if we had stepped in with suggestions right away or made assumptions about what the problem was, we might not have ever gotten to this point. Of course, not all coaching conversations will end up with the coachee solving their own problem, but if we don’t try, we’ll never know. And regardless of where we end up, by following a process that includes coaching questions and active observation, we will surface lots of useful information that will come in handy if we need to move to another mode such as teaching or mentoring.

Uncovering Options

At this point, we could step away knowing that we’ve already provided a lot of value to the manager, but we’re not done yet. The next step is to uncover options for achieving the goal.

Coach: “what options do you see for achieving your goal?”

Manager: “I could go and talk to the product manager directly, but I don’t think he sees me as business minded. I could mention my idea to the product owner, I think they worked together at another company. I could also suggest that he talk to a customer that was on the verge of abandoning us until this team partnered with them to come up with some really awesome new features that then also led to a whole new market. Now that I’ve laid it out this way, I think the best bet is to talk to the product owner about setting up a meeting between that customer and the product manager. Thanks! This was really helpful."

This is actually just a fragment of a full Agile Coaching conversation. I've kept it short to fit into the format of a blog post.

Next: Coaching Questions

Coaching Questions

Coaching Questions are open-ended and non-leading. They should be appropriate to the stage of the coaching process you are in. Here are some that I have found useful.

Initiating

• What are you thinking about?
• What’s on your mind?

Information Gathering

• Let’s step back for a moment. What precipitated this?
• What’s the background on this?
• How would you summarize the issue?
• What makes this something that needs to be addressed?
• How does this fit into the big picture?
• Why is this top of mind for you right now?

Expanding

• Tell me more.
• And?
• What else?

Identifying Potential Outcomes

• What will success look like?
• What would failure look like?
• And what would you like to have happen?

Exploring and Discovering Options

• What options do you see?
• What paths do you see to achieving your goals?
• Who or what else could you leverage here?
• What’s the [ bravest / craziest / least likely to work /most fun / most surprising] approach to try here?
• If you have a hero that you think would be relevant in this situation, what would they do?
• What could you apply here from similar situations in the past?
• What would you do if you had a magic wand?

Focusing, Narrowing, and Planning

• What’s your recap of the options we’ve discussed?
• How do the various options we’ve discussed stack up?
• Out of the various options we’ve discussed, what are you leaning towards?
• Tell me your next step and when you will take it

One way to get used to using open and non-leading questions is to try “question of the day.” Pick one or two of the coaching questions above, or a question that you have used in the past that is open and non-leading. Try it in conversation throughout the day as appropriate. Try a different question every day. After a while, the questions will become a natural part of your coaching conversations.

A quick activity to get your mind started down this path is to play the coaching question game. Here are four potential questions. Guess which are coaching questions and which are leading, closed, or both. Answers follow directly after.

Questions

1. What’s the background on this?
2. Do you think they need to have more focus?
3. What’s the best way for me to take this off your hands?
4. What makes this something that needs to be addressed?

Answers

1. What’s the background on this?
   Good question
2. Do you think they need to have more focus?
   Closed: has a yes/no answer. Leading: assumes a need for more focus. 
3. What’s the best way for me to take this off your hands?
   Leading: assumes the issue should be delegated.  
4. What makes this something that needs to be addressed?
   Good question 

Next: What Does an Agile Coach Do All Day? Part 1

What Does an Agile Coach Do All Day Part 2

In my experience, there is no end of things for an Agile Coach to do. At times, the needs and requests will just pour in. And at other times, you’ll need to be more proactive. Let’s talk about what to do when things are slow. It may be that you are new to a team and they aren’t sure what to make of you yet, so they aren’t bringing you any requests. Or it may be that it seems like everything is humming along just fine. There’s no single way to discover the work that needs doing. Everybody has or will develop their own techniques. That said, there are only so many ways to discover the work. Here is a list of ideas to try. And remember, you don’t need to do this on your own. Consider finding co-conspirators that can help you look for potential problems and opportunities.

• Go to a standup or any other ceremony and try to use “new eyes.” That is, ignore the exact stories or issues being discussed. Look for boredom, agitation, rote patterns. Pretend you are attending the meeting for the first time.
• Schedule short 1-1s with folks to see what is on their minds. Don’t force the conversation, just see where it leads. Think of it as an informal session. Talk over coffee, perhaps at the local coffee shop.
• Spend some time with people outside of the team. What are customers saying? What about support, sales, marketing, or folks on other teams? Bring anything you find back to the team and get their thoughts. 
• Put together a special workshop for a team as a whole. Think of some interesting or unusual activities that will get people thinking out of the box. 
• Organize an open space event
• Think of a topic that may get people excited and put together a lunch and learn or book club. You don’t have to be the speaker. Perhaps there is somebody in the company that you could invite, or perhaps somebody from another company. Get people thinking in new directions. Hopefully, it will spark comments like “perhaps we could do something like that!”
• Spend some time going to meetups, reading blogs, or joining an Agile Coaching Circle
• Offer office hours 
• Create some mechanism for people to send you requests. For instance, set up a Trello board that people can add requests to at any time.  
• When you see somebody in need, offer to help. As a coach, you should be focused on helping people get to the point where they don’t need your Agile skills. But you may find opportunities to mentor people. For instance, if a Product Owner is feeling swamped and you offer to help write some stories, that may give you the opening you were looking for to introduce them to some new story splitting techniques. 
• Assess where your teams are on their Agile Journey. Doing it with them is the most effective approach. But if they are too busy or uninterested, you can always do it on your own as you look for new paths to take.

Do you have other ideas? Please share in the comments!

Next: People Do What They Desire To Do - ADKAR

What Does an Agile Coach Do All Day? Part 1

Understanding active listening, emotional intelligence, facilitation and a host of other coaching skills is great, but what does an Agile Coach actually do on a day to day basis? How do they create value? One can imagine a coach wandering around, making observations, dropping pearls of wisdom here and there, and being approached for advice. Or perhaps they are like a lucky charm; just great to have around, imparting greater levels of Agility through proximity.

Part of the difficulty of being an Agile Coach is that you are only successful when others are successful. You work is "indirect." Compounding this is the fact that if everybody were already experienced Agilists, you wouldn’t need to explain the value of Agile or how to become Agile. Agile is very different from traditional ways of working. As a result, it can easily end up in people’s “blindspot.” That is, when you explain parts of Agile, they can sound like exactly the wrong thing to do. For example, phrases like “consider working on fewer projects at the same time” and “produce new end-to-end functionality from scratch every two weeks” make many people shake their heads, even in supposedly Agile environments.

As a result, there are many different views of what “Agile” really is. When you show up at a client or a new team, it is likely that the true value that you can provide is not fully understood and that people will have certain pre-conceived notions of who you are, what you believe in, and how you will provide value to the organization, teams, and individuals. To counteract these difficulties, one thing you can do is create and publicize a catalog of service offerings. This gives people a tangible list of things that you can do for them that they may not have even thought of asking for.

Here is my catalog. It is in word format and I invite you to use any and all of the text that will help you create your own service offering catalog.

This idea came from Gillian Lee as she was looking to provide new ways to make Agile Coaching even more approachable and self-serve for her teams.

In Part 2 of this series I discuss ways to discover the potential needs of your teams.

Agile Games!

Over the past couple of years, and even more so lately, Gillian and I have been creating lots of Agile games, including user story games and games that teach Agile Coaching. You can download the full trove here.

Upcoming Events

I've got a number of events coming up! Tonight I'll be at the Kendal Square Agilists doing a talk/large game on "Scaling Agile Organically." You can learn more and register at their meetup page.

This Thursday, and every Thursday, I'll be doing an Agile Coaching webinar. Sign up for this week's webinar here.

And if you are interested in getting your ICAgile Agile Coaching certification (ICP-ACC), I've got three opportunities coming up in Boston and Dallas. Dates and details are on my eventbrite page. Use coupon code ICPACC1 to get $300 off!

Hope to meet you in person soon. What can we learn from each other?

Switching Focus to Agile Coaching

After a long hiatus on this blog, I'll be switching the focus from DIY to Agile Coaching. That said, the essence of providing information for the Agile DIY'er will remain, it is just a change of focus. So, what do I mean by "Agile Coaching?" Topics related to coaching within an Agile environment. Topics like powerful questions, presence, listening, and remaining neutral. These are all things that come from coaching and are independent of any particular domain area. But as an Agilist, you are often working to catalyze change which requires good coaching skills. So, I'll be talking about coaching, but within an Agile context.

One awesome thing about the Agile community is that we have so many tools that are great coaching tools. For instance, part of coaching is identifying what the issue is that needs coaching. Powerful questions are great for that. And what are speedboat and open space if not powerful non-leading open-ended questions? So I'll be talking about great tools like that within a coaching context. Let me know what topics you'd like me to cover and ask me whatever you'd like. I look forward to your participation!

The Best Product Owners Write Small Valuable User Stories

Are you a product owner, or aspiring to be one? Is your organization struggling with producing user stories that can be implemented start to finish in a few days or less that real users will recognize as valuable and say "thank you" for? Too often, the "user stories" that get implemented in a short period of time are really tasks. In extreme cases, providing end user consumable value takes multiple sprints.

On April 4th, Nexxle and Banner Solutions are partnering to bring you a webinar that will introduce you to a number of story writing and story splitting techniques that can help you and your organization create small valuable stories. We'll do a quick refresher on INVEST using examples of stories that meet or don't meet the INVEST criteria and then cover story splitting techniques including split by test scenario, split by generated list, cake slicing, and many more

Register now for our April 4th webinar.