If you’re a basketball fan and know who Allen Iverson is, then you’ll probably remember his infamous rant about “practice”. While he can never be questioned for the effort he put forth in games, he didn’t have a fondness for practice.
Now that doesn’t have much to do with coaching. Yet, I like the reference.
In this article, I did want to explore the notion of practice related to becoming a better coach. Both a professional coach and an agile coach.
A Sidebar
Not that long ago, I had a young woman sit down with me at a coaching clinic at the Scrum Alliance Gathering. She was a Millennial looking for career advice and she was very direct.
Bob, I want to achieve your level of expertise in the agile coaching community and I want to do it in a year. Please tell me how to do that.
Sadly, I don’t think my answer helped her nor was it well received. It was simply that…you can’t. And I wasn’t speaking from a position of ego. But from the position that it’s taken me ~20 years to acquire whatever skills I have in my journey. And I didn’t think that can easily be encapsulated and subsumed overnight or within a year.
My colleague and friend, Daniel Mezick, posed the following hypothetical on LinkedIn in September 2019 –
You are an independent Agile coach, visiting a potential client with 1500 employees. It's obvious that the intelligent, well-meaning executive that is interviewing you does not really understand that employee engagement is essential to success in transformation. His org wants to "roll out" imposed Agile practices. They plan to use this big, huge framework. They already decided.
With all the training and everything else, it's looking like about 200K coming your way over the next 8 months if you get this account. But you are 100% sure it's the wrong approach. And if you say so, you figure there is a 60% chance your concerns will be lost in translation. And you know you have no more than 45 minutes with this executive. So, you sit there, intently listening to his story, and pondering what it means to "do the right thing." There are 25 minutes left at this meeting. And you know some other consulting firms who are good at marketing will also be interviewed as service providers for this engagement. You realize it's now or never. And you are not too happy about this...
Link to the post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielmezick_you-are-an-independent-agile-coach-visiting-activity-6577891855055241216-oU7Y
As of September 16th, the post had received +20k views, 158 reactions, and 116 comments. Which is astounding to me.
Clearly, it’s created a buzz and generated reactions, which is probably why Dan posed it in the first place. I’m thinking he wanted to post a hypothetical that was open to interpretation and representative of a common agile coaching dilemma.
I wanted to weigh-in. Not as a way of directly responding to the scenario. And not, to the more than 100 comments. But more so, just from my heart. You see, I think the answer is quite simple.
