When writing the EBAC book, my (our) perspective was largely from the position of the “universal” agile coach. One where the approaches, tactics, skills, and strategies were essentially the same no matter your place in the organization.
But there are many aspects of agile coaching where the subtleties of your place significantly influence your approaches. None is probably more varied and nuanced then whether you’re coaching as an internal (employee, full-time, FTE, role-based) coach versus an external (contractor, consultant, full or part-time, outside the organizational hierarchy) coach.
I think the differences are so compelling that I wanted to share the following table with you to sensitize you to some of the differences in perspective and approach.
While there may be differences, I want you to minimize the internal gyrations you go through to do your job. In essence, I still want you to be you as a coach. But, depending on your organizational positioning, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of these subtle and not-so-subtle differences.
General Comments
If I were building a coaching team, I would want to build it with a complement of full-time coaches, contract coaches, and consultant coaches. I believe having the different perspectives and competencies, would be incredibly powerful if the team had this sort of diverse make-up.
That being said, I would want more internal coaches on the team. Mostly because of the “skin in the game” factor and because of business domain experience. The leader of the team would obviously need to be an internal coach.
Another big focus for the team would be pairing so that we could take advantage of our experiential and perspective diversity. That would imply that our coaching services model would have it “baked in” to the strategy, our capacity, and our execution.
One of the challenges with this approach would be team agreements. Often, there are divisions between the two sides of coaches. An important point would be to emphasize reconciling all perspectives into a unified team view towards our coaching mission and vision as part of our team Liftoff and chartering activity.
Wrapping Up
And you need both kinds to make up a well-balanced agile coaching team because the pros and cons of each create a more balanced system of coaching capabilities and approaches. And, while there are major differences in how the coaches show up, there should be mutual respect for both sides.
A colleague of mine, Joel Bancroft-Connors, has written a nice article that complements this one. You might want to explore it as well.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.
As an adjunct to this post, I found a poll/discussion LinkedIn initiated by Lee Henson on the topic of External Coaches. While the poll was interesting, I found the comment/reaction stream it inspired to be insightful and interesting. You can find it here - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leehenson_i-am-seeing-a-new-trend-here-activity-6863462388251918336-olgw