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.
Simon Powers wrote an article entitled—The 9 most important skills for an Enterprise Coach. I’m still digesting the article and evaluating whether I agree with his nine skills. Not that they’re not relevant. But are they really in the top-nine of the skills required of an enterprise-level agile coach? To be honest, some of them I’m struggling with and that may result in a future post ;-)
But one of them really grabbed my attention, shook me, and caused me to think. Here it is—
