Something came up on the September 20th Kazi stream about how to maintain your energy level as a change agent, which is incredibly hard at times. And, on a related note, the challenge of knowing when it’s time to leave.
Change Agency is…HARD!
The harsh reality is that every Scrum Master and Agile Coach in any instance, situation, or context is a CHANGE AGENT. You are in a role that is trying to guide folks along a change curve to a new state.
And being a CHANGE AGENT is, in a word, HARD!
There’s no other way to say it. In many ways change agency reminds me of the Energizer Bunny in that you/we need to “bring it” every minute of every day. We have to bring enthusiasm, energy, positivity, engagement, and a can-do attitude every day to our work.
If you find yourself lacking on the energy front for too many days in a row, you have to seriously reconsider your choice of jobs. It’s that simple.
My colleague Dana Pylayeva has created something really interesting in the agile community. One of her research interests is fear in the workplace. Not in some academic fashion, but in how it shows up, that is what are the types and personas of fear in the workplace?
Dana enjoys creating interactive experiences, so she developed a series of cards (a game) that can help a team surface the various fears they may be experiencing. And, once they (the fears) see the light of day, the team can then discuss how they wish to deal with them.
Here’s some additional information on Fear in the Workplace (FITW):
Estimation FEAR Cards
In the November 2019 Kazi stream, Josh and I talked about teams often pushing back on estimating and some of the root causes. It seems like estimation is one of the hardest things for agile teams to get right (be balanced, feel comfortable with, do effortlessly).
This was inspired to write this by the Music City Nashville talk by Faye Thompson and Charles Husemann. It was entitled: Coaching Katas - In Search of The Answer to the Agile Kobayashi Maru.
Essentially it was a series of coaching scenarios where we run thru Coaching Kata’s (very similar to Dojo’s as I’ve shared on them before). The scenarios were inspired by Star Trek episodes (original Star Trek I might add). In it, they emphasized using the 7-questions from The Coaching Habit book by Michael Bungay Stanier.
As we debriefed each of the scenarios, I heard attendees really struggling to apply the 7-questions effectively as part of a “normal” conversation.
It made me think that:
7-questions (from the Coaching Habit)
Powerful questions (from Co-Active Coaching)
Other question-based coaching models
Can set you up for failure if you don’t use them sparingly within the ARC of an overarching conversation model/framework. And we shouldn’t use them sequentially or artificially as well. They are also only for the coaching stance/role. For example, what about teaching, mentoring, or modeling stances/roles?
I received a LinkedIn message from an agile consulting firm asking if I’d be interested in an opportunity. The had two levels of agile coaching opportunities available.
They were:
I sat back and I sighed. I’ve never charged rates this low for any coaching I’ve done…ever. I’ve got somewhere between 15-20 years of agile coaching experience from team level to project/program level to enterprise level including leadership coaching.
When I looked at the specification for these roles, the Sr. Agile Coach role had Enterprise level coaching requirements at my level. But from my perspective, the compensation was at a level that would not fairly compensate qualified agile coaches, nor even Scrum Masters.
In other words, they wanted Filet Mignon at Burger King prices. (with all due respect to BK)
Even Sadder
But what makes me even sadder is that there are people “agile coaches” in the world who will happily work for these rates.
Why?
Largely because they’re agile coaches in name only. They gain a bit of experience and then immediately call themselves an “Agile Coach”. For these folks, the compensation makes a whole lot of sense.
However, they’re leading with paper experience and bravado and not real experience. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors and the clients are the ones that lose in that game.
They are commoditizing agile coaching and driving down compensation rates for all of us. And the rate compression also minimizes the value of real-world experience and skill.
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.
I sometimes think that I’m the only agile coach who supports “management” and “leaders” in agile contexts. And I’ve written quite a few pieces with that perspective. For example –
http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2014/11/23/agile-coaches-trainers-have-you-walked-in-the-shoes-of-technical-management
So, I was surprised and delighted when I read this piece from Jason Little – Why Executives Don’t Go to Agile Conferences.
Based on the title, I thought Jason would join a long list of agile thought leaders who take a few swipes at executives. But when I got into it, I realized that he showed far more understanding and empathy than I could have imagined. Here are two quotes from the article…
It astonishes me to see so much information about bad leadership, and how executives don’t care because they can’t spare a day at an Agile conference to explore how to run more effective retrospectives. I don’t think many pundits have a clue how much stress these people have on them, and that executives are people too. Sure, some may behave in a more forward way, which is usually perceived as command-and-control, but from my experience, it’s not the case. They’re just busy.
The original post on this topic was one of my more popular posts. As of, August 14th, 2019, it’s received:
On LinkedIn, ~9,500 views, 86 reactions, and 40 comments
On my website, ~2,500 views and 18 comments
What’s particularly noteworthy for me is the number of comments and the overall depth, breadth, and thoughtfulness of them.
Here’s a link to the LinkedIn post - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6561537228772831232/
And here’s a link to my original blog post - http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2019/6/23/the-trap-of-being-an-embedded-agile-coach
As I review the comments and thought about the article and my original intentions, I realized that a follow-up would be helpful.
I want to react to some of the comments, but I also want to clarify some of my intentions in the article. As I think some folks might have misinterpreted them. And this is mostly due to my writing.
That being said, I’m not apologizing for the original article. I think it represented my thinking…and still does. I’d just like to clarify a few things.
I was having dinner the other evening with a few agile coaches after teaching a CAL class all day. I think we all wanted to “trap” each other into either:
Revealing our coaching secrets
Checking to see where out passions lie
Challenging each other on our “agility”
And simply, learning from one another
It was a small group and we engaged in some serious discussion and debate around our agile experiences and how to help our client engagements.
Riina Hellström is the CEO of a Finnish company focused on Agile HR. She often writes about topics related to that area and I really like here style.
She is a no nonsense, straight-shooter who you can tell has lots of experience collaborating with leadership teams.
Not that long ago, she wrote a piece in a LinkedIn comment about how she approaches agile transformations. I thought I’d share it with you…
Grill the CEO or Unit head before you start teaching them Agile. Tell her/him that she/he is 100% responsible for making agile work.
Train the Leadership team in Agile for 2 days - make them go through a mind-blowing transformation backlog building exercise together. It must hurt. Grill them all - tell them nothing’s going to happen if none of you actually take an item off that backlog and finish it. Very few of these people have been very action oriented lately. It is a stretch to them to actually see that shit gets done.
