Why Agile Coaching Is Needed For Digital Transformation

A coach needs to be able to show how a practice they are proposing to a team or organization aligns with the intent and goals of the transformation and be comfortable to adapt the practice to the context of the team they are working with.

Teaching: A coach needs to have a solid understanding of how adults learn, be able to convey information clearly, and guide others in adopting new tools and techniques. They need to be familiar with concepts such as ‘Training from the Back of the Room’ and be able to present both formal and informal teaching sessions as needed.

Facilitating: As a facilitator, they hold the space for others while making things easy. The coach will frequently facilitate collaborative sessions where groups of people are working together to achieve an outcome. They need to remain neutral, guiding the process using collaboration tools and techniques, and adapting to the needs of the group. When taking a facilitation stance, the coach steps away from their own opinions and allows the wisdom of the crowd to emerge through the design of the session and creating a safe environment for healthy discussion, disagreement, and debate.

Mentoring: A mentor is the “guide on the side”, someone who has more experience and knowledge in a domain than the mentee and freely shares that experience to help the mentee grow in their professional development. When taking a mentor stance, the coach offers up their own experience as examples of “when I did this, here is what I saw”. A key aspect of mentoring is that the mentee has free choice to accept or reject the mentor’s advice.

Professional Coaching: When taking a professional coaching stance, the agile coach starts from the perspective that the individual/team they are working with is naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Professional coaching is about holding a space for the cache to uncover the solutions they already have to the problems they face and the coach’s role is to use deep listening and powerful questions to help them expose and explore the options available to them.

Technical, Business, and Transformation Mastery: The coach needs to bring to the table deep competency and experience in at least one of these areas. To support a transformation all three areas of mastery are needed, which is one of the reasons only having a single coach is generally not a good idea.As with sports teams, each coach brings a specific area of focus to the organization and it is through the collaborative guidance of a coaching team that all aspects of the transformation are supported effectively.

Coaching is NOT Consulting

A common mistake made by coaches and accepted by organizations is to allow the coach to dictate the approach the organization needs to take for transformation. Any time you make a decision on behalf of someone else, you disempower them and they lose interest and ownership in the outcome. A coach is there to provide options based on their own experience and knowledge of the wide variety of contexts they have worked in, but the decision about which approach to take, framework to use, practices to adopt and, organizations and team structures to start with should be made by the people who are closest to the business needs.

The coach who tells you to adopt a specific model (Spotify, SAFe, Scrum, DevOps,or Racoon) is doing you a disservice. The coach should be explaining the options, the benefits, and pitfalls of a variety of choices and leaving the decision in the hands of the people doing the work. Sometimes they will make mistakes, will need to revisit their decision, inspect and adapt, and that is okay. The coach needs to create a safe environment in which the empowered teams feel confident to make decisions based on their understanding of the work context.

In the book ‘Accelerate’ by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, which explores what the most effective organizations are achieving in their digital transformation, they say: “We find that teams which have the authority to experiment with new ideas do better in terms of both software delivery and organizational performance. Unfortunately, many organizations that claim to have implemented “Agile” still don’t allow this, and their software teams are still fundamentally just order-taking functions rather than partners in creating value.”

Hire from Outside or Grow from Within? Both!

You certainly can, and often should, bring in at least a few external coaches to help create the initial environment for transformation, to work initially at the senior leadership level to help the people at that level understand the real extent of the change they are embarking on and guiding these leaders into new ways of thinking and behaving.

Beyond the leadership team, the people most suited to coaching others in the organization are those who are already there—people who care deeply about the organization and their colleagues. Find people with the servant leadership mindset who genuinely care about the outcomes for their peers and lead them on a journey to take over the coaching responsibility from the external group.

Beware of simply repurposing managers as coaches—the competencies and skills of the roles are different, as is the fundamental motivation for the role. Managers are often incentivized on efficiency and throughput. Coaches know that in order to get better outcomes in the future, the whole organization needs to slow down and refocus, to stop trying to ‘do more with less’ and rather aim to simply do less, better. Outcomes instead of outputs, customer delight rather than feature bloat.

Employ people who have coaching experience not as external consultants but as part of the organization. Support these people with external coaches while they need it, but any external coaching engagement should have a clear end-date.

Continuous Education

Support the transformation with a solid education program. The teaching competency is one that needs to be available in both formal and informal education. Having a solid learning roadmap that shows people pathways for their own growth provides some clarity in uncertain times. Having a training program that enables new people to rapidly learn “how we do things here” as part of an onboarding process provides a common starting point for team integration, and providing people with a clear vision of how they can grow their competencies in different areas over time is motivational and engaging.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is tough. For most organizations, it starts with changing pretty much everything about the way people work together and it’s never finished. In order to be an adaptive organization, people need to become comfortable with constant changes and continuously inspect, adapt, respond, and improve the way they interact with their customers, the products they provide, and the services they offer.

In the volatile, evolving, dynamic organization that can thrive in the 21st century, a coach holds the space for personal and organizational growth and learning. When engaging a coach, make sure you find someone who will nurture that growth and challenge the limitations and constraints on the people they are there to serve.