Self-Care Is The Single Most Important Thing Agile Coaches Should Prioritize

Being an everyday changemaker takes a toll.

The mental and emotional energy required for guiding groups in the shift away from bad habits, toxic ways of thinking, or learned behaviors can be exhausting. I see it all the time in the agile coaching community.

It’s not uncommon for a coach to work with an organization that is particularly difficult, or worse yet, doesn’t want to change. You can orchestrate team exercises, lead emotional conversations, or practice impossible scenarios until the building shuts down, but if the group doesn’t want to take necessary steps, you’re not going to accomplish anything. And, unfortunately, the first person agile coaches typically blame for failure is themselves. 

From first-hand experience, I can tell you some coaches feel worthless and ashamed when they can’t help a team.

But you can’t carry around those negative feelings. You have to find a way to process, address, or diminish them. If not, all the negativity can develop into significant long-term physical and emotional issues. This is why, after 10 years as an agile coach, I’ve found self-care to be one of the most important items on my daily list.

Now, self-care may seem like a nebulous concept to apply to your professional life. What do meditations and yoga have to do with Agile and Scrum? But actually, self-care simply means making mental and emotional space to ready yourself for the day ahead—and to unwind after.

If you’re not sure what that could look like for you, here are a few things I’ve found work for me: 

Find what makes you feel cared for, then build a routine around it.

A couple of years ago, I discovered restorative yoga.

It’s a school of yoga where you hold certain positions for several minutes, I tried it for the first time on a whim, because bodywork has always been a successful form of self-care for me. After that session I was stunned. I could not believe how relaxed my body was, how good I felt, and how re-energized and ready I was the next day.

So now, I build restorative yoga into my regular routine, and I try to maintain it at least 90% of the time.

Of course, like with any good schedule, I really try to give myself what I need based on how relaxed or stressful the week is. During smooth weeks, I might not need to do as much restorative yoga to stay balanced. But during rough or busy weeks, I’ll increase the amount of bodywork I do. For example, not too long ago, I had several challenging sessions with a handful of clients, one right after the other. So instead of making time each day to do a few minutes of restorative yoga, I carved out my entire weekend for it. I went to a Japanese bathhouse and dedicated two hours to hot, then cold alternations. And to cap it off, I did 90 minutes worth of breathing exercises. All with the intention of bringing myself back to a place of equilibrium.

When you start to take care of yourself with the same devotion as you would a problem at work, or a big project for an important client, you’ll set yourself up for success over the long term. And especially after a particularly hectic week, a few restorative practices can help you come back first thing Monday morning, ready to go.

Don’t cave to the stigma surrounding self-care—taking time to breathe never hurt anyone.

A huge reason coaches shove aside self-care is because they “don’t have time.”

But the issue isn’t actually time. It’s fear. Coaches may be worried they’ll be criticized for taking ten minutes to do a short meditation or just breathe. People may think you’re a weakling for getting distracted from delivery. And that’s not a vulnerability many of us are comfortable with.

However, with a shifting workforce, comes a shifting attitude. Millennials and their younger counterparts, Generation Z, are much more accepting of self-care. In fact, they lean into it so hard they’re twice as likely to spend money on it than their Baby Boomer or Gen X colleagues.

And it’s not all yoga and Headspace apps. Your self-care moment can be going for a walk, making a fresh cup of coffee, sitting in the sun in silence, or going for a lunch-break jog through downtown. It’s worth noting self-care can be short and sweet too. Not everyone is going to dedicate an entire weekend to breathing and meditation—I get that. 

What matters is you find something that makes you feel cared for and helps you reset from the stress of your work environment—regardless of what anyone else may say about it. 

Self-care addresses a need before you reach a crisis point.

Look, a lot has been said in the media about burnout in the tech sphere: it’s an epidemic, we did it to ourselves, it’s unavoidable, etc.

But the truth is, burnout hurts you. Period. And that’s why you need to take steps to prevent it, nevermind productivity.

Sometimes, it can’t be avoided. Our schedules get full, our patience wears thin, and we simply don’t make the time for self-care that we should on a daily basis. For me, suffering from burnout can be soothed with a few simple actions:

• Look at the why: I ask myself why I’m feeling burnt out and get to the root of the problem. If it’s an action within my control, I aim to not repeat it again.

• Hit the basics: Your mind needs to recover just like your body does. I make sure to get plenty of sleep, eat healthy, and exercise regularly when recovering.

• Rest: Whether this means a long weekend at home or an actual vacation, you have to actually relax in order to come back to work with any energy.

Obviously, you don’t have to do every piece of self-care I’ve mentioned all the time, but choosing three or four off a list and building a routine for them will keep you happy and healthy. And coming to work as your best self every day can only serve both you and your teams in the long run.

Break Free Of The Maze: How To Believe The Impossible And Promote Greater Solutions Within Your Team

We’ve been taught a certain line of thinking since we were in grade school. 

Listen to the teacher. Follow the rules. Generally, behave yourself. And the kid who goes outside those boundaries, who tears up their textbook, for example, gets punished. 

But that disruptive kid is actually far more likely to learn to innovate. 

According to a recent Harvard Business Review article on how to think like the next Steve Jobs, “Innovators excel at connecting the unconnected.” Impossible scenario exercises prompt this line of thinking by looking at different, potentially unconsidered aspects of a problem. At its core, using impossible scenarios is a form of creative problem-solving not so different from lateral thinking or Hegelian Dialectic. You have to be willing to engage with the what-ifs, the out-there’s, the “that sounds insane” strategies in order to prevent getting stuck in the same iterative pattern. 

As an agile coach, I frequently lead sessions in which I help people talk through impossible scenarios as a way to break free of their societal constraints. Through a series of exercises borrowed from different creative fields, teams learn to stop self-censoring, embrace criticism, and learn that what they think is impossible, is really just what no one else has tried yet. 

When it comes to thinking through impossible scenarios, there’s a really famous example that agile coaches come back to again and again. 

There are two mice in a maze, each seeking out cheese at the end. All of society focuses on helping the first mouse find the cheese. They complement that mouse, cheer it on the entire way. But the second mouse is willing to let go of that praise and go their own route. 

They break free of the maze and move on to greater rewards than are contained in the maze—like the rest of the cheese wheel resting on the counter. 

Essentially, what this story illustrates is that you can choose one of two paths when solving a problem. You can follow the rules and restrictions placed upon you and go the traditional route for a small reward. Or you can take the considerably larger risk of refusing all expectations and going your own way. 

And you know what they say about “The bigger the risk.” 

But going against the norm has consequences. Leaving the maze might mean getting zapped when you bump up against the fence—and breaking free of societal constraints, metaphorically speaking, is no different. You’re going to get pushback. You’re going to run the risk of “missing out” on the short-term cheese. But it’s this fear that keeps so many people stuck within the maze in the first place. Which is why, as agile coaches, it’s our job to help people feel comfortable imagining these “impossible scenarios” to begin with. 

One thing I try to do in agile sessions is normalizing the line of thinking that leads to breaking free of the maze. 

For example, I’ll ask a team, “What is the biggest rule you’ve broken?” People worry about getting punished or reprimanded for answering honestly. But what I try to emphasize during this exercise is that, provided no one gets hurt, it’s okay to break the rules now and again. I ask my team to think of rules that may be antiquated or feel arbitrary—like ripping the tag off your mattress, for example. 

By tapping into our inner rule-breaker, we learn to stop self-censoring good ideas before they’ve even started.

But those walls take a while to break down. It goes little by little. 

One way I work on this with teams within companies big and small is I’ll start out with a “ritual dissent” exercise using myself as the example. So, I’ll provide a few minutes of coaching in which they just listen to me. Then, I’ll turn around and invite the team to give me feedback that is purposefully exaggerated. The importance of the exercise here is my back is turned—it depersonalizes the exercise and makes it so the team learns to get more comfortable delivering feedback to authority figures. Some examples, I’ve heard include, “Michael, you are the worst agile coach I’ve ever seen,” or “You did a terrible job facilitating this meeting.” In the end, people generally say they had a hard time completing the exercise. They worry about saying something mean, hurting my feelings, speaking up. 

And this is where we break through the maze.

I’ll tell the team, “It’s okay to say these things. This is the way we learn to speak up for ourselves.” You don’t always have to say something that feels “mean,” but you should be more comfortable removing your own self-censoring so you can contribute to critical feedback. And then once the team is comfortable with this small act of rebellion—criticizing the coach, essentially—then we keep doing it until it becomes second nature. 

Unlearning self-censorship is like training a muscle. You have to keep practicing in order to keep it up. So, as a group, we’ll continue to do exercises, invite feedback, maintain non-judgments. I remind them constantly that anything goes. And the more we switch between divergence and convergence, the more the team learns to just let go and say whatever comes to mind.

The goal is to gain fluidity of ideas—the crazier, the better.

Sometimes that means asking the team, “How would Thor solve this problem?” 

Once the brain’s machinery is primed for flexible thinking, then we can start shifting perspectives to look at issues with a new lens. 

My favorite, silly exercise is to ask the team to think of their favorite superhero. Then we ask, “How would that hero solve this problem?” To stick with Thor as the example, we could ask, “Would Thor smash things with his hammer as a solution?” If yes, what good does that do? If no, how else might he approach things? If the group doesn’t have a favorite superhero, then I might ask them to consider the issue from the perspective of their favorite celebrity or household pet or even ice cream flavor. 

It’s absurd, yes. But it gets people to think about solutions in an entirely different way than they’re used to. And that’s the point. It’s only when we’re free of the maze, that we’re free to solve any issue, anyway, we please. 

Considering the impossible as plausible helps people get un-stuck. They’re able to shift away from the conventional and find their own path. And that’s how teams innovate. By refusing to follow a set course, even if it’s a winding, twisting maze. It’s by realizing that, at the end of the day, really, nothing is impossible.

Beyond The Razzle Dazzle: Why Your Company Needs Agile Coaching, Not A Management Consultant

If you’ve encountered a business hurdle you can’t solve on your own, you’ve probably considered hiring a management consultant.

Common wisdom dictates they’ll help you move faster, work better, and find the perfect solution to streamline your process. But all their long hours and sleek PowerPoints won’t solve your problem long-term.

Because much of what management consultants do is for show.

In a very revealing article for Harvard Business Review, Professors Alaric Bourgoin and Jean-Francois Harvey point out all the ways consultants essentially “fake it ‘till they make it.” They rely on shared industry knowledge to sound like experts. They stay late and arrive early so you think they’re working harder than you. And those “million dollar PowerPoints” with clean lines and actionable solutions are most likely upcycled from previous clients.

Although Bourgoin and Harvey note this behavior as a hazard of the consulting profession, that still hasn’t changed the fact that it’s a $256 billion industry focused on treating the symptoms of a business issue opposed to addressing the source of the problem.

Agile coaching, on the other hand, seeks to increase the capability of an organization to solve its own problems. Where consultants enter a situation and immediately begin dishing out solutions, commands, and advice, an agile coach works with the company to identify the root of workflow problems and improve flexibility.

Most importantly, agile coaches want to put your people at the helm of change—not an outsider.

As an agile coach for more than 20 years, and only 1 of about 100 Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coaches in the world, I’ve seen first hand the dramatic difference our approach can make. By valuing your people as your greatest asset, you’ll create long-term, actionable change that promotes exponential growth for your business.  

But for this to work, businesses need to be willing to function in tandem with an agile coach and not expect the consultant experience. Otherwise, both sides will experience a catastrophe.

So, before you leap into a new agile coaching session, here are a few things you should consider:

1. Agile coaches work with pre-existing needs instead of creating new ones.

As a business leader, you don’t need to be told how important change is—you already know.

And yet, a management consultant often strives to stir up a sense of urgency around change.   

This old-school line of thought was led by John Kotter, a big name in business theory and management consulting. Kotter always said creating urgency was the first thing you should do when working with a company. But in reality, “creating urgency” is based on fear. For example, maybe your team would benefit from improved workplace dynamics, tightened workflows, or simply finding better ways to communicate.

No amount of standing over people’s shoulders and telling them to change (“with urgency”) is going to solve the root of any of those problems.

Instead, agile coaches tap into pre-existing desires. They don’t step in and say, “This is what’s urgent.” They listen and ask, “What do you want to improve?” And more important, “How do you want to improve it?”

Then, and only then, can you and your team find the most efficient way forward together.  

2. Agile coaching removes the middle man, helping you foster strong internal relationships.

Few people will volunteer themselves for conflict, so it’s tempting to have a consultant step in and do all the talking for you.  

I was recently working with a Senior Vice President (SVP) who was going through this exact scenario. He hired someone who would talk with his teams, report back what was said, and then make recommendations. I couldn’t believe he refused to speak with his team directly.

What happens in a communication funnel like this is it creates a parasitic relationship. An outside influence is all of sudden needed to communicate with your team—and without it things may fall apart. You lose your power as a leader. Instead, the management consultant runs the show. And that’s not the way to win big.

The best wins come from the people in the company.

Remember: your people are your experts. They already know best, you just have to get them to talk to you. An agile coach can help push the right buttons and open the right channels to start the necessary conversations without getting in the middle.

3. Agile coaching puts people over profits.

For the greatest success, your company needs to value people as humans.  

We’ve all seen how massively a company can fail if they don’t. Valeant Pharmaceuticals, for example, was under fire for gouging drug prices—they upped the cost of a vital prescription to 5500% of its original cost in a single night. They’ve since endured major rebranding as a way to shake off all the scandal.

They brought on McKinsey management consulting. The problem with agencies like McKinsey is they’re most interested in companies that make money at whatever cost. They aren’t in tune with the way the world is moving—valuing human agency over treating people as disposable.

Conversely, a human-centric approach inspires and values true innovation.

Agile coaches can help companies understand where their ethical boundaries are, and then operate in a way that honors them. By feeling valued and needed, teams will feel more capable to disrupt the world around them. Without that sense, they may feel like just another cog in a machine.

And cogs rarely lead to innovation.    

To put things simply: you hire an agile coach to keep your people happy. You hire a management consultant to keep Wall Street happy.  

By listening to your people, needs, goals and challenges, agile coaches help you to create the best solutions internally. We facilitate but don’t dictate, allowing you to innovate the way you’re meant to. This keeps companies growing and functioning, without the need for a consultant six months down the road. In fact, our goal as coaches is to never see you again—we have nothing to gain from your failure.

And that may be the biggest difference between a consultant and a coach—true investment in your success.  

3 Ways Agile Coaches Use Technology To Improve Teaching Techniques, Cater To Client Needs, And Reach A Global Audience

I am one of only 100 Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise coaches in the entire world.

That means, if every country in the world sought out one single certified enterprise agile coach, there still wouldn’t be enough of us to fill that need. Now consider how many companies are based in a single country, multiply that by the number of countries in the world (apparently there are 195), and you start to realize the dilemma agile coaches face: how do we effectively scale ourselves?

The answer is simple: technology.  

Advancements such as video conference calls, simple as they may be, have allowed us coaches the ability (and, quite frankly, the luxury) of scaling our services, streamlining client sessions, and expanding our reach across the globe. And personally, I strive to work with as many amazing clients as possible, regardless of their location (or sometimes, even their means), which is why I look to technology for different levels of accessibility.

For example, in addition to working with major corporations or heavily-funded startups in person, I also provide online training courses at a lower price point in order to serve a wider range of companies. This exposes people to agile who may want the education, but don’t work for a corporate entity that has a budget to spend on daily in-person sessions.

And in turn, by expanding my reach, I’m able to diversify my professional experience—which only improves the skills and industry awareness I bring to the table during each in-person session.

Here are a few examples of how technology’s progression has improved the way agile coaches are able to scale their expertise across a wide variety of clients:

1. Virtual Reality makes it possible to provide immersive experiences from anywhere in the world.  

VR may be the only tool that supplants actual practice.

The heightened learning experience that comes from an in-person workshop is very difficult to re-create through a website or even a video course. That’s because in-person workshopping provides feedback, and feedback is how human beings ultimately learn what’s working and what isn’t in real time. With Virtual Reality, however, those feedback loops can be constructed and scaled in a way that feels nearly identical to an in-person workshop, while simultaneously customizing the experience specifically for the individual user.

For example, I’ll sometimes coach agile sessions and film the crowd with a 360 camera. Afterward, I’ll go back and study the footage, zooming in on individual faces during key moments to gauge reactions and then provide even more personalized feedback to the speaker.

I can see immediately what worked and what didn’t.

To streamline my own internal workshopping, I also use Virtual Speech, a VR company that places you in a digital auditorium to practice your public speaking. These are tools and practices I’ve found to be tremendously productive, in the sense that you can run through only the part of a presentation that needs work—unlike in a real session where you’d need to run from start to finish to test the new section.

So, instead of spending 99% of your time rehearsing material you’ve already mastered, and 1% of the time re-working your weak points, VR provides the opportunity to spend 100% of your time on tweaking what needs refinement.   

2. On-site materials can be “scaled” by using technology platforms that can be accessed from anywhere.

Having Ready Materials On-Site Makes Coaching Sessions More Effective

The greatest tool in my arsenal is a technology platform called Mind Settlers.

This is an extensive library of crowdsourced, actionable ideas and exercises that offer agile coaches a way to improve (and scale) the way they work with teams. For example, instead of having to reconstruct exercises from scratch for each individual coaching client or team, I can pull from a curated selection through the Mind Settlers technology platform that caters to the specific needs within that particular company.

For example, I may be ready to talk about “goal alignment,” but the team wants to discuss “connection.” Part of the mindset in agile coaching is being able to adjust on the fly, while still maintaining a clear focus on the underlying issues that need to be resolved within each team.

So the benefit of technology here is that, as a coach, I can trust that plenty of exercises will be available to me regardless of the topic area, which allows me to spend more time and energy bringing my own expertise to the situation.

Especially when you’re working with so many different teams and companies, these little adjustments that save time really do add up.

3. Online resources are how you’re able to work with parts of the world you would otherwise never reach.

I constantly ask myself how many people I help every day.

But in the realm of agile coaching, one of the only ways to truly “scale” this desire to work with and help as many people as possible is to work with major corporations or large-scale teams in person. I’ll frequently go into companies of hundreds, if not thousands of employees, and work across departments to streamline processes, improve communication, and ultimately increase employee connection and fulfillment. But even still, the amount of time, money, and energy required to fly to a company’s headquarters and stay for months  (or more) isn’t very realistic for a large sector of the general population. Especially considering the overwhelming majority of businesses in the U.S., but also the world, are small businesses.

So, I look to other technology platforms to expand my reach and continue spreading my knowledge—even if the reader, listener, or customer doesn’t fall within that Fortune 500 group.

Specifically, I look to do this through digital publications and social media platforms. For example, this article here is essentially a “free resource” specific to the agile world—which people from all over the world could read for free. LinkedIn is another great example, and I’ll often use that platform as a way to digitally expand my own personal network through sharing helpful articles like this one, sharing thoughts or tips in the form of status updates, and sending connection requests to people I feel like would benefit from some of the lessons I’ve learned “in the trenches.”

Essentially, in all the ways technology makes agile coaching easier, it also makes it more accessible. And since reaching the greatest number of people possible is my goal as a coach in the first place, it would be impossible to live that mission while solely basing my success off in-person coaching.

Which is why I invest in sharing assets like this article here, with you.

6 Exercises To Improve Team Collaboration, Co-Founder Synergy, And Employee Happiness

One of the biggest misconceptions about agile coaching is that, as coaches, we’re “product delivery problem solvers."

But in my 10+ years as an enterprise agile coach, I’ve learned that the problem is very rarely the product delivery itself. It’s the team. And what keeps company product delivery from being smooth, well-managed, and effective has far more to do with the underlying interpersonal issues clogging workflow in the first place.

For example, one of the startups I work with as an agile coach is 100% remote. Everyone is distributed across the country far away from one another, which means they don’t get the opportunity to work “together” every day. Recently they did an internal survey to find out what employees felt were “major issues” for the company, and the number one answer was loneliness.  

That might seem entirely unrelated to “improving product delivery,” but you have to remember that team members are humans. They bring emotions into everything they do—including work. And when those tender things get blocked or restrained, it exhausts a significant amount of energy that could be used more efficiently during the workday.

Here are a few exercises I’ve found to help bring underlying issues to the surface while promoting inter-team connection:

1)  60 Seconds Of Eye Contact

For your team to work at its absolute best, you have to be willing to “stare” feelings in the face.

I like to have teams break up into pairs and then have each pair make direct, unbroken eye contact with their partner for 60 seconds.

If this sounds uncomfortable, that’s because it is.

It’s intense.

I frequently see people say, “Okay this is too much,” and they have to stop—which is okay. I give them 100% permission to do that if they need to. But I also remind them their discomfort is something to be curious about. Here they are, building a startup together, but they’re challenged by staring into one another’s eyes for 60 seconds. What else could be possible if they could see each other more holistically?

2) #NoSecrets

Everyone has an “on stage” person. This is the version of ourselves we expose to the world.

Very rarely do others see the “backstage” person—the real us.

But maintaining two separate personas like this is draining. It’s exhausting to think about which mask you have to wear at work today, or which parts of your personality are “okay” to show other people. And many times, the things we keep secret don’t need to be guarded in the first place.

The #NoSecrets exercise is about closing the gap between what we present to people, and who we really are. I ask team members to pair up with someone and disclose one secret they’ve never told anyone else that they’d be willing to share.

This accomplishes two things: it frees up energy in the workplace, and it initiates problem-solving.

For example, I might say, “Look. I've been sneaking out at lunch to do 30 minutes of gym time. I'm afraid of getting fired if I tell anyone about it.” But when I confess, it turns out the team is completely understanding of wanting to take a mid-day break, and there’s no reason for secrecy. And as a result, I free up energy toward other things (rather than hiding an activity), and my teammates get to know me a little better.

3) Sitting With Emotions To Discharge Them

Another waste of energy at work is suppressing emotions, which is what we usually do when we experience shame, anger or jealousy.

The question is, how do we actually experience those emotions in a way that's freeing? Where we can let go of them, metabolize them?

One way is simply sitting with them physically.

In this exercise, I ask team members to think about an enjoyable situation. I ask them what feelings that situation invokes and where those emotions show up in their body. Maybe they feel relaxation is in their legs, or joy in their chest.

Next, I ask team members to do the opposite and think about an unenjoyable situation. Maybe it’s when your boss is yelling at you, which triggers tension in your throat.

Most of us don’t realize how we naturally react this way to stressful moments throughout the day, and often want to distance ourselves from these types of feelings, and block them off to make it stop.

So during this exercise, what people are doing is sitting with that tension—just for a moment. They have to feel it, and pay attention to what other feelings come up along the way.

To complete the exercise, I say, “Now let’s go back to your enjoyable moment.” And together, we switch back and forth between relaxation and tension, which helps process the emotion actively and purposefully.

4) One Answer On A Sticky Note

One simple question I love to ask everyone is, “What are you optimizing for?”

Teams almost always give me some off-the-cuff answer with little thought. “I want this, I want that, these are my goals.”

But remember: you’re optimizing for one thing, not twenty. And in order to figure out our single most important metric, I lead groups in an exercise that narrows down those twenty needs to one.

We start in silence.

I ask the question, “What are we optimizing for?” In order to avoid a flurry of shouted answers (and potential disagreements), everyone writes their individual answer down on a sticky note. Depending on the scenario, we'll either process all of the sticky notes together, or we'll pair up and two people will talk to each other to create a single combined answer. And we’ll do this in bigger and bigger groups until finally there’s a single statement everyone actually agrees on.

5) Resolving Founder Conflict

The number one reason startups fail is they have founder conflict.

Founders tend to have different ideas of what “good” looks like—meaning what workflow is effective, how people are meshing, the rate at which tasks are accomplished. They frequently hold on to the “good” from when they were in the dorm room, coding together at the beginning of their company. But what’s good for a company in its beginning phases doesn’t remain “good” 10 years down the line—and founders sometimes fail to recognize how things have changed.

I bring them back to earth with Legos.

In this exercise, I’ll give teams five Lego pieces and ask them to build a car. They’ll do it instantly. After that, when they’re confident they know the most effective way to build a Lego car, I’ll give them 500 pieces to do it again. Once they get started, the teams will notice they can’t accomplish the same task in the same way with more parts—they need an entirely new plan.

And building a company works similarly.

If you have five people in the company, you know everyone's names, their needs, their wants. When you have 500 people in the company, things change. You need to establish infrastructure and processes that accommodate growth. The Lego comparison really drives home the fact that different situations require a shift in mindset and management. You can’t cling to what things “used to be,” or you’ll never move forward successfully.

6) Speak In Code

How we communicate can sometimes cause more problems than it solves.

You may be asking for help, but the way the other person hears it, you’re just giving an update. Or worse, you may need to make a decision quickly, but the decision maker doesn’t feel your sense of urgency.

Because of these common mixups, one of the most important exercises I do is around creating syntax standards.

I’ll work with teams to create a specific piece of text to use in certain situations—most frequently when asking for help or for a decision. Language signifiers help clarify the intent of the conversation, saving time and energy for all parties. People will be able to think, for example, “Whenever I need a decision from anyone in the company, it's going to have [DECISION] in the subject line of the email.”  

It simplifies a daily need to the point of lightning speed, making the team—and the company—considerably more agile.

This article originally appeared on Crunchbase.

4 Things Decision Makers Get Wrong When Hiring An Agile Coach For Their Organization

People often mistake agile coaches for mechanics that can “fix” businesses.

When a company is struggling with efficiency, or transparency between departments, or even just internal communication at large, a decision maker within the organization will reach out to someone like me to help them streamline efficiencies. For context, I am one of approximately one hundred Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coaches (CECs) in the world, and I specialize in working with enterprises often managing hundreds, if not thousands of employees.

The problem, however, is that I am not a mechanic. If you have a broken car, you bring it to a mechanic and they fix it before handing it back to you. However, when a company realizes they have a broken structure or process for their team, they think they can do the same thing: bring their broken process to an agile coach who will “fix” it and then hand it back.

And that’s just not how it works.

Working with an agile coach is about creating a partnership in which someone like me brings their expertise to the group to create a frictionless and self-evolving team environment. And that partnership is leagues away from the one you form with a consultant—or a mechanic.

Instead, here’s how the process is intended to go:

1) We make a plan together.

Where a consultant solves a problem for the client, an agile coach solves it with them.

My entire value is to create a solution where the client has three-quarters of the pieces and I have one. My job is to then bring new problem-solving and relationship-building techniques to the table so that it’s not just the immediate list of problems that get solved, but all future problems as well (otherwise I would be on retainer for a very, very long time).

In the agile community, we call this the coaching relationship agreement, and it’s a fundamental piece of what we do.

In this agreement, we’re careful to be very explicit about what the customer's outcomes are. For example, it may be, "I want to deliver this software product on time, I want my people to be happier, and I want to have a clearer understanding of the customer." Then we look at the activities we can do to help them achieve those goals. We also take the metrics into consideration: where are we today and where do we want to be six months from now?

This gives us a list of activities, a coaching transformation log, and measurable goals we can achieve together. Then, we check in periodically to see if we’re actually moving toward those goals. If not, we change things.

2) It’s not just about delivering a product—it’s about developing a culture.

A huge issue I see again and again in coaching is what I like to call “culture blindness.”

Someone will say, "Make sure my team releases on time. And you should do it by making sure that they're estimating correctly, the requirements are correct, et cetera." But what's actually happening is the Chief Architect and the Chief Product Owner hate each other.

In short: there’s usually a surface problem—and then the actual issue lying under it.

The typical focus is on solving the surface problem as quickly as possible without addressing the underlying issue. But that deeper conflict tends to be harder to solve—things like safety, trust, shared understanding, alignment.

In an effort to get teams to look beneath the surface, a very simple exercise I do is bringing together the executive group and saying, "So, what is the goal here?" Each person will write on a sticky note, silently, and we'll just look up and see if the goals match. If they don’t, then we’ll say, “Oh, okay, that's because different people in the organization want different things.” Point being, it doesn't really matter what we're doing at the technical level if the VPs aren't agreeing on what it is they actually want.

That means one of them will always be losing—and that’s a huge blind spot.

3) A team’s underlying emotional issues can have major impacts.

In order to be frictionless internally, a team needs to be aligned. We should be glowing when we’re doing the right thing. But that also means addressing personal blocks in addition to what’s slowing down the company.

For example, one personal block I had for a long time was that I thought my father was better than me, and, therefore, I shouldn't make more money than he did. I'd get close to making as much money as him, and then I would self-sabotage. This is a common issue for many people—we learn dysfunctional behaviors from our family and then bring them to the workplace.

The challenge is these things tend to be deeply buried, so we may not even know they’re there.

But finding ways to address personal blocks can lead to seamless work and a sense of congruence. And what I mean by that is a sense that what you’re doing is what you love. It may be so frictionless to do this work that it’s almost soothing.

A beautiful example of congruence is Tom Brady, the Patriots player (who just won another Super Bowl). His dad has said that what sets Tom apart from his peers is he loves everything about football—even the parts other players hate. He loves watching tape, doing the workouts, following the diet. Tom has said before he watches tape for three or four hours a day because it’s soothing for him.

This type of complete and total congruence is the goal of agile coaching. Then there’s no resistance with any person, customer, or project.

That’s purity. That’s oneness. And it comes from getting through your own emotional blockage.

4) Numbers are important—but not in the way you think.

A lot of clients will come to agile coaching because they think their quality of X (whether it’s a product, a service, a process, etc.) is terrible.

But when I ask them how terrible, they’re never able to answer. In my 10 years of coaching, I’ve never had a company answer that question.

What it actually comes down to is the team has “bad memories.” They launched a product and were miserable the entire time, or felt unappreciated at the end of a project. But in order to figure out what was making everyone so unhappy, we still need those numbers. And it can take months to sort through all the data simply to get a snapshot of how things are working.

So, I usually start people off with a set metrics dashboard that includes finding answers to the following questions:

• How much? As in, how many “widgets” are you producing each week?

• How fast? How long does it take to create that item from the second the conversation starts to when it’s finished?

• How good? What’s the quality?

• How predictable? If you tell a customer to expect an item within a certain number of days, how frequently do you meet that deadline?

• How happy? Is your team happy and is your culture healthy?

As an example of these questions in action, I worked at a large Fortune 500 company that literally spent three months doing annual planning across a 3000 person organization. And all the director level people and engineers were involved in it, but they absolutely hated it. They would produce 200-page PowerPoints from their meeting. So, I asked the planning group, "What is the relationship between the plan and those PowerPoints?" And the answer was, "There isn't one."

I’ve learned, in moments like these, you have to really question why teams are doing what they’re doing—and if certain activities don’t add enough value or move the needle, stop. And as a result, people become less irritated, have more free time, and ultimately feel like the work they are doing has purpose. And that’s the goal.

This Simple Mindset Shift Has Been Proven To Turn Unproductive Teams Into Highly Effective Organizations

My job is to make teams more effective.

I am one of approximately one hundred Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coaches (CECs) in the world. For the past 10 years, I have consulted and trained teams at dozens of companies, including PayPal, State Street, edX, Carbonite, and many other enterprises. These are not small teams. In many cases, I am working to solve systematic problems that can impact layers within organizations affecting hundreds of different team members.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade about how to make teams more effective, transparent, productive, and aware, it’s this:

You have to integrate a “coaching” mentality.

The key mindset shift that turns unproductive teams into highly effective organizations is for every leader within the organization to move away from being “the person who has the answers” to a person who helps other people solve their own problems, think through solutions, and believe in themselves (issues many companies fail to address altogether). Which means, as an agile coach, my job isn’t to come into an organization and “give people the answers.” It’s to hold them accountable and help them start approaching systematic challenges in a more scalable way.

Of course, different people will go through this process at different speeds, and will ultimately end up with different levels of self-awareness, humility, empathy, care of others, and so on. They will also come to their own understandings of the actual tools I and my team at Heart Healthy Scrum help people adopt. Which is why my typical perspective is to try to get everyone within an organization some exposure and practice to these shifts—because the more people on board, the higher the likelihood for long-term integration of these tools.

Now, there will always be people who say, “Just give me the answer,” or “I just need to tell other people what to do.” But the vast majority of teams that succeed over the long term are the ones that can “buy in” to the following mindset shifts:

1) Respect Your Team As Experts

We’re taught as children that if we don’t know something, we ask our parents.

Once we’re in adulthood, that deferral to power carries through into our work lives. If we don’t know how to solve a problem (or we don’t have permission to do it ourselves), we ask our boss. And then our boss asks their boss, and they ask their boss, and on up the chain.

This takes exactly as long as you think it does—forever.

However, by learning to respect your team as experts, you can streamline this workflow and empower people to find solutions on their own. It’s a huge shift, but it’s one of the most important ones in an agile environment.

For example, a software developer is an expert in the code he’s writing and constructing. Now, traditionally, if there’s a breakdown or an issue, he has to go to his manager, who then takes the issue to the senior manager. It’s the senior manager who makes a decision, which is relayed back through the manager and then again to the software developer.

But chances are, that developer already knew the answer and everyone could’ve skipped this exhaustive process by trusting him. Remember: you hired the guy because he had expert-level knowledge in his field.

2) Allow People Doing The Work To Make The Decisions

Another major tenet of agile coaching is the people who do the work greatly benefit from making decisions about the work itself.

For example, I worked with a software company where the chief architect decided on the infrastructure of a project. All of his developers were required to work within that—even though they had zero input. When I came to coach, the architect complained about the developers and the way they were working within what he’d given them. I asked if he could help them with it, and he replied, “Well, if I created the right architecture, they wouldn’t be able to develop it.”

I burst into laughter. How could the architecture possibly be right if none of his team could work within it?

Decoupling work from responsibility is dangerous for companies and their teams. Placing all the decision-making power in one set of hands has troubling effects. So, really, what is there to lose by allowing the people actually doing the work to have more input?

By trusting your team to make decisions, you’ll improve several key facets of your office. Your product will be stronger because the people spending forty hours a week with it will have more say in its development, and your teams will be happier and more confident.

Which should sound like a win-win to any leader with ears.

3) Encourage Their True Selves To Come Through

Finally, one of the biggest key values of agile coaching is respect for our fellow human beings.

Somehow, we live in a world where you can walk into an office filled with people who can vote for a president, raise children, and die for their country—but somehow they aren’t allowed to decide when their own workday starts. Now, I’m not saying you should unleash anarchy and allow everyone to start work whenever they want.

But you should be flexible and open to the individual needs of those voting taxpayers in your office.

Agile coaching encourages a shift away from a culture where whatever the boss says is law and toward an environment of self-governance. This means we want the individuals on your team to shine through—with all their talents and quirks—instead of being required to shrink or bend to a cookie-cutter form within the office. And that initial shift of thinking of people as human, and respecting them for it, leads to greater opportunities and empowerment within your teams.

Essentially, you’ll be inviting your team to stop wondering how they can fit in, and start wondering how brave they can be, what kind of risks they can take, how much further they can push themselves.

We in the agile community believe that respecting people is not only good for business, it's just good. Period. With respect, you invite people to grab authority and responsibility—and to feel comfortable doing so. You can only improve what they’ll be willing to bring to the table for your team and for your company.

The Satir Change Curve

How much change can your organization or group take on with ease and grace?

That’s one of the fundamental questions to ask on your agile journey. On the one hand, big changes can produce big results but they are risky. On the other hand, small changes are low risk but they are slow. In the 1960s, family therapist Virginia Satir introduced a mental model that helps navigate this issue. The “J Curve” or “Change Curve” as it is often called looks like the image below. The width of the curve is the ‘time to value’ and the depth of the curve is the ‘cost of value.’ The Y axis is a metric (such as time to market) and the X axis is time.

Source:http://stevenmsmith.com/

The curve suggests asking two questions:

• The Patience Question: How quickly does the change need to show benefits?

• The Money Question: How much is the organization willing to invest in the change?

Let’s do an example. You listen to your organization and learn that the next change needs to show a benefit within one month and cost no more than $100K. You are considering moving from manual builds to CI/CD. A quick survey of the literature shows that this change will take many months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hence, this exceeds the ability of the organization to change and will probably be unsuccessful if attempted. Not respecting the change curve can lead to trouble. If a change takes too much time or costs too much money, then the change will fail. Respecting the change curve will help you guide your organization on its agile journey by choosing appropriately sized changes.

Everyone is Agile

The list of companies touting agile is long. Some of the software companies might be familiar. Spotify, Salesforce, Google, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, Red Hat, Adobe, and Facebook are all agile. Smaller, lesser-known software-development companies such as Atlassian, Paycor, Pivotal Labs, BNA Software, Hotels.com, and DevSpark are agile.

Companies we don’t typically think of as agile are working to be agile. Microsoft claims to be agile. General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Bank of America are agile. The United States Department of Defense is agile.

Game developers are agile. Financial companies and media companies are agile. Banks and universities are agile.

InThe Agile Mind-Set, Gil Broza asks an intriguing question: What noun typically follows agile?

Broza writes:

“People talk about agile development, agile project management, agile processes, agile methods, and agile best practices. Some speak about the agile methodology or the agile framework. Others refer to pairings like Scrum/agile and lean/agile.”

The language of agile is everywhere.

Consultants talk about becoming agile to avoid disruption. Terms like extreme programming, Scrum, and kanban are tossed around as ways to become agile whether people know what they mean or not. “Sprint”, “iteration”, “backlog”, and “burn down” are all entering the lexicon.

Forbes describes what agile leaders look like:

“Agile leaders are not only fast and effective problem solvers when dealing with situations they’ve never dealt with before, but they are also laser-focused on results and excellent at reshaping plans and priorities when faced with unexpected changes in the environment. They are resourceful and competitive. And, they get it done fast.”

Crossing the chasm

As agile has spread, the backlash has been fierce.

A number of people have written about the ubiquity of agile and its subsequent loss of meaning. Dave Thomas, one of the original developers of the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” or Agile Manifesto, has declared, “Agile is dead.” Thomas suggests that agile “has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.” He suggests the word has been co-opted to boost sales in the same way that “green“ has been used.

A great rant from Tom Elders on Hacker News starts with “I can’t take this agile crap any longer. It’s lunacy. It has all the hallmarks of a religion.”

What is happening with agile?

According to the most recent “state of agile” survey from InfoQ, agile has gone mainstream and the majority of organizations use agile techniques for at least some software development projects.

We can use Geoffrey Moore’s chasm model for technology adoption to get a sense of what’s happened in the marketplace with agile. Moore’s model for disruptive technologies is useful because it looks at innovations that require people to do things differently — innovations that require behavior changes.

Looking at Moore’s model, innovators and early adopters are visionaries with a high willingness for change, high risk tolerance, and strong support from management. Early adopters understand the benefits and are willing to experiment in order to gain a competitive edge.

There is a large gap or chasm between these innovators and early adopters and the largest segments of the market: the early and late majorities.

Pragmatists and conservatives on the other side of the chasm are far more likely to approach agile from a completely different perspective. They are risk averse. They have heard of agile but likely think it is a process change that they can easily roll out to their IT organizations. Their risk tolerance is low, they want quick results, and they’re expecting relatively easy-to-implement process changes.

In other words, they are driven by practicality and want an out-of-the-box solution. The early majority wants technologies that are simple to implement.

As a result, many vendors and consultants have figured out that they can take advantage of the industry buzz and the early majority’s desire for practicality to sell agile tools and processes to convince these customers they are becoming more agile. As William Pietri wrote on the Agile Focus blog, “An idea that provides strong benefits to early adopters gets watered down to near uselessness by mainstream consumers and too-accommodating vendors.”

Much of this has happened in the agile marketplace as early adopters sought out-of-the-box tools and processes.

Coaches and consultants with experience in making the transition are spread thin and many new consulting organizations look to take advantage of the situation and sell their services.

The early majority also sees agile as a process to enhance productivity rather than a potentially disruptive culture change. Agile can (depending on existing culture) be a significant cultural change. Crossing the chasm is more difficult with agile than with other innovative technologies because organizations might not have a culture that is ready for agile and either don’t understand or underestimate the cultural change inherent in agile.

The Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto reads:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

The Agile Manifesto describes a change in beliefs, a cultural change.

Tobias Mayer described it this way in The People’s Scrum:

“Scrum is a framework for organizational change and personal freedom. It is not a methodology, it is not a process, and it is much more than a tool.”

Agile is a set of beliefs, a set of ideas. Are executives and leaders willing to adopt and champion these ideas? Or are they merely looking to “optimize” employees because employees are seen as the constraining element of the system?

Moore’s ideas about crossing the chasm help us understand that what is happening is normal for innovations that impact behavior.

We don’t believe agile is dying or jumping the shark, but rather is experiencing growing pains as it reaches new markets. In many cases, however, what this means to organizations on the other side of the chasm is that what they’re doing or attempting to do is not really agile.

Adoption vs. transformation

One of the more common mistakes made when implementing agile is not seeing it as a framework for organizational change. This typically looks like adopting sprints and the artifacts associated with sprints and ignoring other components of the change framework, most often agile values.

When asked why agile projects fail, the number two reason cited in VersionOne’s 2014 “State of Agile Survey” after “None of our projects failed” was “Company philosophy or culture at odds with core agile values.”

Henrik Kniberg tells the story of one of his most successful projects — a system built for the Swedish police that allowed them to use laptops in the field — and what happened afterwards [Kni13]. Because the project was extremely urgent, the group was allowed to use an agile approach and break out of the traditional organizational culture. Everything went well, the police organization viewed it as a success, and the project even won a “project of the year” award.

What came next, however, was even more interesting. A high-level decision was made to rebuild from scratch that same system police had used in the field, using Siebel. This was part of a standardization effort to reduce the complexity and number of systems. Not only was the decision made to use a technology that the development team didn’t agree with, but it was decided to use a more traditional, sequential project-management approach to development. Development took a couple years and when it finally rolled out, it was a disaster because the police found it to be slow and clumsy and basically unusable. Making the change even more difficult was that the police preferred their existing system, which worked. Kniberg estimates that this cost the Swedish police more than £1 billion.

Adopting agile practices is likely to lead to marginal improvements at best if current values and culture are out of alignment with agile beliefs and the organization doesn’t change.

As Mike Cottmeyer wrote in “Untangling Adoption and Transformation”: :

• Transformation is about changing the “agile being” side of the equation.

• Adoption is about changing the “agile doing” side of the equation.

Some symptoms that might indicate that transformation has not yet fully happened and agile culture and values have not yet been adopted are:

• Agile teams have defined dates and scopes.

• A manager assigns tasks to team members.

• Impediments to development are not addressed.

• Team members don’t point out problems when they see them.

• Testing is not allowed because it highlights shortcomings.

• Burn-down charts are altered to present a rosy picture.

• Management plans rather than teams.

• All features are seen as high priority.

• Communication is one way, from leaders to employees through broadcasts.

• Agile is seen as something “the technology people do”.

• Teams are not developing working software.

• Teams are reporting rather than discussing progress.

• Superstars are valued over team.

• No changes affect how things are done.

• There is a reluctance to hire qualified outside experts.

• Leadership demands results without providing direction.

• Knowledge is hoarded.

To realize the full benefits of agile requires the values or the “being” part of agile. Michael Sahota and others have discussed how agile processes and methods can be adapted to different cultures. We would like to take a different approach. We believe that if organizations adopt agile as a set of beliefs, they will develop an agile culture and that this agile culture is what leads to continuous adaptation and innovation. The focus of the change effort must be on the heart, not the head or the hands.

Processes and methods can become stale and rote, and can stifle innovation — even processes that were initially developed to be agile. An agile culture, however, will continuously improve and adapt without the need for periodic change initiatives.

Numerous books and best practices exist to help organizations with implementing agile practices, or the “doing” side of the equation. Our reason for writing this series is to examine the values and culture that make organizations agile.

Coming Up In This Series

This post is based on our book, Why Agile Works: The Values Behind the Results and is the first of a series of blog posts coming soon, all taken from the book . To be notified when the next blog post appears, subscribe to our newsletter & blog updates.

The Inner Work of a Scrum Coach