Coaching as a Skill

Coaching, as a role in agile, has gotten a bit watered down in my opinion. People are entering the workforce with the title of coach. Coaching is a full career path. This was never the intent!

I'm from the school of practical experience: in order to coach a thing, you must first be able to do that thing.  Effective coaches bring both knowledge and experience to their practice. They are equally confident in teaching and facilitation as they are jumping into a new team and working hands-on. 

People with experience – with success and failure stories, practical knowledge of building capability within past teams, and good pattern recognition to help them recognize what a team needs and when – have the best chance of success in a coaching engagement, dojo or otherwise.

Given these biases, I see coaching as a skillset over a role. Let’s talk dojo for a minute. Dojo coaches combine coaching chops, particularly within the constraints of the dojo, with other skills in product development, engineering, lean/agile workflow, DevOps, et al. Not only have they actually done what they're teaching and coaching, walking the walk, they know how to help others find success. Good dojo coaches are both experienced and socially capable. In this sense, a dojo coach is much like a team-oriented lead or senior staff member. They've had success in an area, and now they enjoy helping others to do the same. Spreading knowledge and capability to others is a common motivation for a dojo coach.

First: Define Coaching

I have a simple definition of coaching I use in Dojo Academy. A coach is anyone who helps a team or individual set, refine, and achieve their goals. They transmit their experience using storytelling to earn credibility and relate with the people they’re working with. They have skills and knowledge to transfer and use methods such as teaching, facilitation, and hands-on playing. Success for a coach means working your way out of a job; the team is proficient in the area you were coaching. They don’t need you anymore.

Problem: An Over-reliance on Professional Coaches from the Outside

I’ve been a part of numerous large-scale transformation initiatives, and there simply aren’t enough coaches to go around. You can’t hire 100-150 good coaches in a reasonable time period (or ever). Coaching won’t scale with a “hire all the coaches in the world” strategy. 

Most of the transformations I’ve been a part of have sourced coaches from third-party vendors, at least in part. While these individuals may (sometimes) be quick and adaptable, they usually lack knowledge around the firm’s culture, politics, systems, or other norms. A dojo helps level some of that by bringing teams to the coaches, but even the most venerable coach will be operating with a lot of ambiguity as they seek to adapt their knowledge to a team’s context.

I’m in no way arguing that coaching is a bad idea. I’ve seen coaching do a lot of good firsthand. People will lead transformation, always. That said, we can employ a few strategies when building coaching teams for our transformations and dojos.

Solution: Build Coaching Capability Internally

In their HBR article “The Leader as Coach”, Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular describe a trend toward building coaching skills within a company’s leadership and employees: 

“...we’ve noticed that more and more of the companies we work with are investing in training their leaders as coaches. Increasingly, coaching is becoming integral to the fabric of a learning culture—a skill that good managers at all levels need to develop and deploy.”

This is a strategy we’re employing with our more recent dojos. Rather than try and find a small army of engineering, product, and agility coaches from the outside, we find influential and talented people within the firm. We are literally growing coaches. The first step of this journey starts with our “Ready to Coach: Mentor-guided Cohort” in which we bring the coaching team together and, over the course of five weeks, cover dojo essentials and our proven playbook for guiding challenges. Candidate coaches then go into a months-long period of mentorship and support where we employ a “shadow-pair-do” model in getting coaches productive, comfortable, and running at a sustainable pace in their dojo.

Imagine a scenario where the career path of your senior engineers involved a rotation of coaching in the dojo – between 6 and 9 months. That’s a good chunk of time to develop a career-lasting set of social skills that complement an individual’s more technical or area-specific competencies.

So what about professional coaches? Do we not need them anymore? Not quite. Professional coaches – be they contractors or FTE roles in your organization – continue to have an important role in this strategy. I employ professional coach-consultants in our dojos as originators and mentors. These folks often operate as exemplar coaches and mentors for candidate coaches from within the firm, helping to define the coaching role for their area of expertise. Senior coaches also have a lot of input into the co-creation and evolution of the dojo program itself. I look at these folks as “force multipliers” – coaches who coach, well, coaches!

Coaching as aN ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITY

We set the expectation with our clients that dojos are 3-5 year investments. Dojos are all about building a learning culture within your organization. Unfortunately, those efforts won’t sustain when coaching isn’t an embedded skillset with leaders at all levels within an organization. If your transformation has a dependency on outside coaching, what happens when those coaches leave or costs stack up too high? Your dojo needs to guide teams in their challenge, sure, but it also needs to create a pervasive, expanding coaching skillset as the cornerstone of your burgeoning learning culture.

When I’m coaching a challenge, I seek to enroll members of the team in the coaching activity. “You know something about how continuous delivery works here. Can you show the rest of the team?” 

We can transfer the coaching skill in small ways like this, sure, but I’m arguing for a more systemic approach to building strong coaching skills in the product, technical, and workflow leads going through challenges. Mentor the promising individuals in your organization to coach challenges and teams themselves! Coaching skills embedded in these individuals travel with the team when they leave the dojo and increase the population capable of tending and growing a true learning culture.