I often hear of Communities of Practice as it relates to—
Product Ownership;
Scrum Mastery;
UX & Design;
DevOps;
Architecture;
Agile & Lean;
And Coaching
In agile contexts. But I rarely, if ever, hear of a Community of Practice as it relates to agile leadership. I wonder why?
I actually think the notion makes the most sense at the leadership level because there’s so much transformational work for leaders to take on around—
Finding the Vision and WHY behind their agile transformational efforts;
Establishing clarity around roles & responsibilities;
Creating more trust & empowerment across the organization;
Creating a more strategic focus;
Coaching their teams;
Actively culture-shaping in day-to-day behaviors;
Establishing effective metrics;
Learning, growing, and developing as effective agile servant leaders.
Shifting that must happen at the leadership level for an effective and successful agile transformation to unfold. And the best strategy for this is not each individual leader going it alone. The best approach is to form a team of leaders who are going to be receiving training and coaching together. In other words, forming a learning and collaborating cohort who helps each other in their journey. A group of accountability partners, if you will.
Let’s explore one idea around that next.
I was talking with a colleague of mine the other day about their experience beginning an agile transformation at a financial firm. Their executive team asked to be informed about agility and they gave him a 3-hour limit to their availability.
They considered this THE opportunity to get all of the leadership in’s and outs about agile so that they could lead the effort effectively.
To be honest, I’ve heard this all before. In fact, I’ve heard these sorts of things for ~20 years from senior leaders, stakeholder’s, and executives—
I need you to fill me in on everything there is to know about Lean, Agile, Scrum, etc. and I only have about an hour.
We’re locked and loaded on an Agile Transformation. Can you give me the executive overview? The executive team and I can only give you two hours.
The most we can give you for agile leadership training is 4-hours. And that’s a lot considering our priorities, so let’s just make the best of it.
If you follow my writing much, you’ve noticed that I often challenge traditional leaders to lean in to their own personal transformation when it comes to agile. At times, I think I’ve been quite hard on them.
I do this from a perspective of deep respect, and personal experience & empathy, and with the hope of inspiring emergent agile leaders.
CAL class discussion
In my last CAL class, we had a detailed discussion on trust. In that class, it was private, so composed entirely of leaders from a singular organization.
I was emphasizing the need for agile leaders to extend trust (freely give, stretch or reach out, give till it hurts) to their team members as they embarked on a new agile transformation. Another way I tried to express it was for them to—
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.
We were in my Agile Moose Herd coaching circle and the question came up about a coaching firm that had come into an organization and said something like…
We want to focus on the future and don’t really want to look backward. It’s all about what’s in front of us. So, everyone, please let’s talk about agile going forward and not about what did (or did not) work in the past.
And the question was—
Was that a fair way to enter an organization as a coach? Basically, to place history off-limits to the discussions?
This made me/us consider the idea of entering an organization (group, tribe, company, system) as a coach or change agent and explore the first few steps you should be taking upon entry?
Here I capture where the discussions landed on an—agile coaching entry strategy with a client embarking on an agile transformation—
I’ve been speaking at conferences and training technology folks for over 20 years. During that time, I’ve probably delivered over a thousand talks and hundreds of workshops.
Early on, I cared deeply about the scores I received from attendees. Of course, I was always looking for perfect 10s from everyone. But an average score in the 9s was usually ok with me.
I would review all of the feedback forms as well. And, if I saw an outlier, such as a 3 or 4, I’d become obsessed. It would influence how I felt about the whole class. A few times I tracked down the person giving me the low score and interrogated them as to why. I even tried to negotiate a higher score with them right there on the spot.
You get the idea. I was incredibly focused on the grades as a measure of the value delivered in the class.
Fast Forward
Over time, I’ve softened on grades. I’m not going to say I don’t care anymore, but I’ve come to realize that there is more to each of my classes then a numeric valuation. I also realize that no class, and I mean no class, can make everyone happy. That is, perfect 10s are virtually not achievable AND they’re not a good goal.
So, I began to reframe my focus on each class.
In 2017 I shared an article on Pair-Coaching. In it, I shared some ideas & experiences around pair-coaching.
Now in 2020, I’ve had a bit more experience doing it. Not as much as I’d like, but more experience.
This article is inspired by an Agile Moose Herd conversation we had around the idea of – what would an apprenticeship program look like for coaching? And the notion of pair-coaching came up as a part of that activity. As would doing Dojo-based coaching simulations.
Questions from the Herd…
Do you have to work in pairs all the time?
Of course not. I think that’s probably the equivalent of mandatory pair-programming for every line of code. It simply doesn’t make sense.
In fact, there are some days when I’m “pair-coaching” where I/we don’t pair at all from a client coaching perspective. That being said, we do pair to prepare for coaching, debrief coaching, and strategize for upcoming coaching.
What are some of the “dynamics” of pairing?
There are a couple of things that come to my mind…
First, who will take the “lead coaching role” needs to be established before the pair engages in each direct coaching situation. The lead then does exactly that…lead or drive. They are the coaching voice for the coaching session.
To say that I’m a Kim Scott fan is an understatement. I’m truly in love with her work around Radical Candor and her blogging in clarifying and providing stories of RC in action.
She recently published an article entitled—The Emotional Labor of Being the Boss. It was a story around her learnings of the importance of establishing relationships as a leader/boss. The topic was outside the bounds of what she typically shares, but it resonated with me just as strongly.
To give you a sense of it, here’s a snippet—
“Is my job to build a great company,” I asked, “or am I really just some sort of emotional babysitter?”
Leslie, a fiercely opinionated ex-Microsoft executive, could barely contain herself. “This is not babysitting,” she said. “It’s called management, and it is your job!”
Now, every time I feel I have something more “important” to do than listen to people, I remember Leslie’s words: “It is your job!” I’ve used her line on dozens of new managers who’ve come to me after a few weeks in their new role, moaning that they feel like “babysitters” or “shrinks.” We undervalue the emotional labor of being the boss. But this emotional labor is not just part of the job; it’s the key to being a good boss.
I’m writing this around the time when businesses are essentially locked down by Covid-19 and everyone is working virtually. It remains to be seen what types of working habits and new norms will emerge and stick after we recover from this viral attack.
Here I’d like to explore SAFe PI Planning as a planning construct or pattern. Talk about the origination of the idea. Then explore remote PI planning as something that we could do virtually.
But what I really want to focus on is an extension to PI Planning that could nearly negate the need to do it either face-to-face or virtually.
PI Planning – The Intent
The intent of PI Planning is to get a number of teams together for face-to-face planning once a quarter to commit to a body of collaborative work. It’s a scaling tactic that has its roots well before agile hit the mainstream. For example, a similar pattern was shared by Dwayne Phillips in his book The Software Project Managers Handbook, published in 1998. Dwayne called it Cards-on-a-Wall planning. I’ve used the technique to plan larger-scale waterfall projects with 100+ participants.
