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.
Dave Rooney is a Canadian Agile Coach who recently wrote a nice article about what he focuses on in his agile coaching. I thought I’d share it and play off of Dave’s ideas a bit.
In the article, he mentions 6 important activities:
First Do No Harm!
Listen
Ask boatloads of questions
Challenge assumptions
Teach/Coach Agile practices
Work myself out of a job
