I have a colleague, agile coach, change agent, and friend who recently shared a story with me. It got me thinking about his situation from multiple perspectives.
But before I get into that, let me share a little context first.
Paul, not his real name, was leading an agile transformation in a company. He didn’t have a lot of positional authority, but he felt he was integrated sufficiently with senior leadership in technology and product to make things work.
He was unexpectedly invited to a meeting with his boss last week and he was fired. It was a complete and utter surprise.
The party line was that his role was being made redundant because they were taking another approach to their agile transformation (another model, framework, philosophy). But the abruptness of the dismissal belied that claim.
Paul felt that, in hindsight, he hadn’t been meeting organizational expectations around the transformation, but at the same time, nobody had had the courage to give him any clear feedback to that effect. Nor any mentoring or coaching to help him better achieve the organization’s goals.
If you’ve followed my writing, you know that I’m enamored with the wisdom often shared by John Cutler. Well, it’s happened again…
I found the following post on LinkedIn where John shared his thoughts around reframing retrospectives to be more positive. And that resonated deeply with my thoughts of late around the place for
In agile contexts.
I thought it was an interesting exercise to color-code them according to the following:
A few years ago, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about (vent, rebut, defame, complain, rebuke, or otherwise whine about) SAFe any longer. It just frustrated me, made me an angry old curmudgeon, and significantly raised my blood pressure. And I realized that I needed to focus on more “positive” things in the agile community.
But dammit, it’s happened to me again. I’ve been SAFe’d…
Late last year I attended a meeting where a SAFe agilist and Fellow, presented a talk on finding purpose in SAFe. I’ll refer to them as Sam.
First Impressions
I don’t believe I’d met Sam before or at least not that I remembered. Sam seemed to be well-intentioned and principled. Sam was clearly a very smart and polished SAFe supporter and evangelist. And Sam also had a strong Kanban background and the lean side of that shined through the presentation.
I don’t want this to be interpreted as an opinion of Sam as a person. Instead, it’s an opinion (again) of SAFe and Sam representing SAFe as a Fellow.
Gustavo Razzetti put the following in a LinkedIn post recently—
Organizations have an accountability crisis.
Research shows that 82% of managers say they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable. 🤔
Rather than holding people accountable, promote a sense of ownership.
Create a culture where people feel they own their work.
Psychological ownership motivates people to go above and beyond – it increases job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, and performance.
Then he went on to attach the following lengthier article to the post.
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.
