I saw this wonderfully courageous and informative post by Sabine Canditt the other day where she wrote about Sustainable Scrum.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sustainable-scrum-responsible-choice-sabine-canditt-x0gef
After just completing a The Week program facilitated by the amazing Ann-Marie Kong, it touched my heart.
That said, I wanted to highlight one comment reaction/interaction between Sabine and Erich Bühler
Erich said—
Thank you for bringing this approach into the world! Scrum does provide an iterative approach for teams to create value, but its scope is limited to the product level and struggles with dynamics across the whole organization for several reasons.
Without updating the underlying business and financial model at a strategic level, Scrum alone cannot transform organization-wide sustainability.
I talk a lot about the first step in coaching any client (individual, system, team, etc.) is to build a relationship, gain empathy and understanding, and then gain an idea of where/how to help initially. So, do NOT start to coach until you’ve done some relationship-building.
But what does a coaching relationship, or a professional relationship in general, look like? What are aspects of that? Here are a few things that come to my mind—
Making + taking the time.
Explaining what you do—what is Agile Coaching.
Building some empathy; walking in their shoes; understanding where they are coming from.
Meeting them where they are.
Listening; reflective listening; building metaphors together.
Connecting with their language, not yours.
I was interviewing a personal trainer the other day. I asked them—
How should I measure your effectiveness and your value as my personal trainer to achieve the outcomes I desire?
And she responded with something interesting. She said, you can’t.
She followed up with—
My personal value and effectiveness must be coupled with your ability to partner with me to realize the results you seek. You see, at least how I see it, we’re in this together.
She went on to say—
I’m just now finishing up my agile coaching book and I’ve been thinking about aspects that I may not have adequately covered in it. Measuring agile coaches/coaching and the impact rose to the top of my mind. And as I considered my writing history in this space, it dawned on me that I had never tackled it directly and I began to wonder why?
I think it’s because I don’t like or agree or resonate with the idea of discretely measuring agile coach or coaching performance. Why? No, it’s not because I’m afraid to be measured or held accountable in some way. Mostly, it’s because I don’t think it’s relevant.
The very nature of agile coaching is helping others to experiment, to learn and adapt, to change, and to improve their results. It’s not about measuring the coach. It’s about the performance of who they are coaching that truly counts. That is measuring the individuals, leaders, teams, or organizations that are being coached.
For example, if I’m coaching a Product Team (Chief Product Owner, Product Managers, and Product Owners) in an agile instance do they…
Improve the ROI driven across products?
Connect more to their clients? Envisioning better?
Work more cohesively as a team and are better aligned (horizontally & vertically) across other functions?
Are they learning more effectively as a community of practice?
Are the leaders operating more as Catalyst leaders? (See Bill Joiner’s work on Leadership Agility)
If these and many other measures are trending positively and improving, then I might be a strong part of that improvement. But while I, as the coach, am part of the system, it’s the system that improves and it’s the system that should be measured.
But I do have a few thoughts on effective measures of the coach that might be separate from the outcomes they are contributing (or not contributing) to.
