This week we are re-reading Chapter 2 of Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins (SPaMCAST Amazon affiliate line https://amzn.to/38G0ZD3 – buy a copy). The basic idea that permeates this chapter is in the title. As a coach, you need to have high expectations of yourself and those you are coaching.

Update on last week’s experiment. As a reminder, near the end of Chapter 1, the author identifies ten mindsets and abilities for those with native wiring for coaching. I was going to create a checklist and then assess my interactions to see how well I perform in each area. A few quick observations. The first is that it is hard to assess yourself, it requires time for introspection immediately following an event. Intervening events complicate looking back several hours later.  Second, not every event will need all ten attributes. For example, while disequilibrium is important to affect change, I did not run into a scenario that I could use to test whether my beliefs and actions are synchronous. I will bake this self-assessment into my weekly retrospectives to discern gaps. Now back to Chapter 2.

Teams that expect and that others expect to be high performing have a much higher chance of attaining those lofty heights. The journey to high performance requires that the team has a goal and gets solid feedback on progress as they move towards the goal. It is easy to recognize the truth in these statements, yet, there is often a gap between knowledge and performance. The concept of team, as we have discussed before, is overused. Many teams are assemblages or groups of people that only loosely share a common goal. As a coach, many times you have to pursue two very different paths, the first is helping the team develop a goal they can get behind. This is where the idea of a metaphor, discussed at length in the chapter, comes in very handy. The second path is that the coach needs to help expose organizational design issues. The second path brings us back to Chapter 1’s ten abilities and mindsets, number eight – “have a low tolerance for institutional reasons that hold people back from excellence.”

The metaphor concept Adkins discusses is a powerful motivational tool to set a tone for most teams. A metaphor is useful for helping a team identify with a goal or performance expectation by creating a linkage to another idea or concept that is stickier. For example, a team that builds CI/CD infrastructure for other teams recently created a metaphor for themselves, “we are the plumbers that keep stuff moving.” (Note, I paraphrased a bit for the sake of a G rating). The performance tree the author discusses in the chapter is an extended metaphor. I have used the technique several times, but I have found it harder for teams and organizations to accept the idea even in a team-building scenario in recent years. I attribute this diminution of the technique to several factors. The first is that there are more distributed teams. Lack of co-location makes it harder to construct an environment to focus on the exercise. A more significant issue is that many teams are less teams than work groups. Couple the team’s issue with agile being mandated and you have a perfect storm in which teams don’t gel easily. In all these cases, as a coach, I find that I need to build deeper rapport and trust before nudging a team toward high-performance expectations.

For over 17 years I have ended 99% of my podcasts with a reminder that change is a journey, Adkins issues a similar reminder near the end of the chapter. Whether you are a team member, leader, or coach, we should all commit to high performance expectations. With great expectations come responsibilities. Everyone involved with a team or organization must act as an accountability circle to hold each other accountable. I see many coaches and scrum masters that help set team expectations but fail to place the same obligation on their own shoulders.

Experiment for this week: this week I will not be working with a team so I will work on establishing a metaphor for myself. I will then determine whether the metaphor and the introspection needed to generate it changes how I act.

Remember to buy a copy of Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins and read along.

Previous Installments

Week 1: Logistics and Introduction – https://bit.ly/3A1aNTe 

Week 2: Will I Be A Good Coach – https://bit.ly/3nzDAHg